Press Release
For Immediate Release
Justice and Unity in the Southern Tier (JUST)
August 31, 2022
Contacts: Jackson Hengsterman 518-779-5899, jhengsterman@gmail.com; William Martin 917 340 0468, wgmartin1@gmail.com
Sheriff Harder and Broome County Attack Supreme Court Ruling
JUST Demands a Return to Family Visitation
Broome County and Sheriff Harder have now appealed the ruling of State Supreme Court Judge Oliver Blaise III that Broome County must return to in-person visitation at the county jail. Judge Blaise’s ruling affirmed Broome County residents’ basic constitutional and human rights to visit their loved ones in the jail. Sheriff Harder’s and the County’s appeal is an affront to the community and basic human decency.
JUST and families of those held in the jail will contest the County’s actions, and we look forward to a rapid confirmation of the original ruling. Meanwhile many will suffer unnecessarily alone, in isolation, and at great personal and financial cost.
It is well past time to reopen the jail. As COVID has eased, in-person visitation with social distancing has long ago returned to all state prisons. County jails upstate and downstate have done the same. County nursing homes now permit visitors. People now attend Broome County courts without restriction: judges, security officers, defendants, lawyers, and attending family and friends all now attend and sit together without even masks required.
Yet the Broome County Sheriff tells the press he will not permit visitation now due to concerns with COVID. Given the jail’s faltering response to COVID—as testified by family and community activists’ protests over the last two years (see the JUST website, www.justiceST.com) —this is a shameful and misleading statement. Sheriff Harder has not required vaccinations of his staff, and has resisted reporting vaccination rates. He has supplied sanitation and basic preventative measures only under pressure. Is his new concern only because denying visitation generated extraordinary revenues from new video and telephone calling, with his profits now reaching well beyond $1 million?
It is, quite bluntly, shameful of county officials and legislators to provide the legal resources and funding to support Harder’s last stand.
Our demand is simple: JUST and the families and friends of the hundreds of persons in the jail call upon the state courts to reject the Sheriff’s delaying legal maneuver. We call upon county officials to withdraw support for the Sheriff’s costly brutalities.
JUST with the support of Legal Services of Central NY will be filing to overturn the appeal. Sheriff Harder’s and Broome County’s actions should be rejected for what they are: delaying tactics forestalling the inevitable, the reopening of in-person visitation as has taken place around the state.
We look forward to a definitive defeat of Harder and his allies.