A woman waiting to be arraigned on low-level charges in Brooklyn just before midnight Friday gave birth in court with her hands cuffed behind her back as the judge, court staff, and attorneys looked on.
The event was soon written up in the New York Times, the New York Post, and other publications, which identified the woman and quoted Wynton Sharpe, her assigned defense panel attorney, describing the event as partly joyful, and culminating in the birth of a "bouncing baby boy."
But Jen Kovacs, a public defender with the Legal Aid Society who was in the courtroom of Judge Devin Robinson throughout the birth, described a different and even more disturbing version of events to Hell Gate in a conversation Monday morning. The woman being arraigned was handcuffed behind her back throughout the birth, she said. And Sharpe, the woman's attorney, wasn't even in the courtroom through any of the birth, according to Kovacs—she told Hell Gate she found him out in the hallway afterward and alerted him that his client had just given birth. Sharpe's account of the birth as the arrival of a "bouncing baby boy" is materially false, she said, and serves to obscure the violence of the scene. (Sharpe did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Neither did the NYPD or the Office of Court Administration. We'll update this post if they do.)
Here's Hell Gate's conversation with Kovacs, lightly edited for length and clarity.
Hell Gate: Thanks for speaking with me about this.
Jen Kovacs: Of course. I want to be clear at the outset that I'm not interested in talking about anything that further violates this woman's privacy. I want to talk about the systemic factors that contributed to this, and I want to talk about what I saw to correct the record.