Tyrone Ragland knew her as “Ms. Ethel,” the older woman with wire-rim glasses and wavy red hair worn in a bun. Ethel Parish helped him out from time to time, giving him food and paying him for odd jobs around her apartment in the public housing complex in the Bronx where they both lived.
On the evening of Jan. 5, 2011, Mr. Ragland was helping Ms. Parish, 70, take her air-conditioners out for the winter. But after they argued about how much Ms. Parish owed him for his work, Mr. Ragland, high on crack and in debt to a drug dealer, grabbed a knife from the kitchen counter. “I picked it up and cut her,” he told the police. Her body was discovered on the floor, stabbed 17 times.
Today, a painful question haunts Ms. Parish’s daughters: Why was Mr. Ragland not in prison in the first place?
On the day Ms. Parish died, he had two felony cases pending against him in the Bronx courts. One was a grand larceny charge, arising out of a car theft, that had been open for 15 months, more than twice the court’s standard for excessive delays. The other, a robbery charge involving a street holdup, was now more than a year old. And the Bronx judges who allowed Mr. Ragland, 52, to remain free on bail after each arrest had another reason to suspect he could be dangerous: He had already served 15 years in prison for manslaughter for stabbing an elderly man 41 times.
In another court in another place, 15 months would have been plenty of time to resolve charges that might have put Mr. Ragland away before he killed again. But not in the Bronx, home to one of the country’s most implacable backlog of felony cases. His case is just one example of a disturbing phenomenon in which those charged with even low-level felonies sometimes wait so long to go to trial that they commit more and more serious offenses while they wait to face justice for the previous charges.
Some suspects are released repeatedly even as they graduate from burglary to violent robbery to attempted murder, crimes that the suspects would not have been free to commit were it not for the delays plaguing the Bronx courts.
“If he was prosecuted earlier, or if he was in prison, my mother’s life would’ve been spared,” said Sonya Klein, 49, one of Ms. Parish’s daughters.
Such cases are partially a consequence of the mounting judicial delays that have accompanied shrinking court budgets across the country.
A Justice Department analysis in 2007 found that the longer defendants were free waiting for their cases to be resolved, the more likely they were to be rearrested on new charges. Of those waiting a full year, 17 percent were arrested on new charges, including 11 percent for felonies.
A Revolving Door
But in the Bronx, one of the nation’s poorest counties, the numbers are even worse. A review by The New York Times of felony cases opened in 2008, for example, found 150 that were still open at the end of 2012. Of those, nearly 20 percent of the defendants had been arrested on new felony charges while on release.
In one such case, in January 2008, Carlos Perez, 25, was charged with robbery and assault and then released on $2,500 cash bail. Over four years later, with that case still open, he has been arrested on felony charges three more times in three counties. Yet as the court files stacked up, his original bail was never revoked.
Eventually, after more than 50 appearances in the robbery case, Mr. Perez finally stopped showing up last December.
A warrant is now out for his arrest.
The problem in the Bronx is aggravated by other factors. New York is among only four states that prohibit judges from considering public safety in determining bail. Instead, the main criterion is how likely the suspect is to return to court.
Even then, Bronx judges are far more likely than judges anywhere else in the city to release felony suspects without bail, including in cases where defendants have been identified as being a high flight risk.
In 2011, for example, Bronx judges released 43 percent of felony suspects who had been deemed a high risk for flight, nearly half New York City’s total.
“You see guys come in with two, three, four open cases and the judge say, ‘I’m going to give you one more opportunity,’ and sets them free,” said a New York police officer who works in the Bronx courts, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter.
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