Domestic violence survivor Tracy McCarter filed a lawsuit against the NYPD last Thursday, Nov. 2 over how police investigated her estranged husband’s 2020 death in which she was accused of murder and manslaughter. Those charges were completely tossed out last December and she’s now alleging that a false confession led to her immediate arrest and subsequent 205-day detainment on Rikers Island during “the terrifying early phase” of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The complaint alleges McCarter’s confession to stabbing James Murray was a “malicious lie” by an NYPD officer sent to the scene which led to her prosecution. She maintains the death was an accident. Murray, who struggled with addiction, consumed alcohol according to investigators and arrived at her Upper West Side apartment demanding money. McCarter says he stumbled onto the knife she held in self-defense and never told police otherwise.
“I heard a police officer say that I said [Murray] tried to take my purse so I stabbed him in the chest,” she said. “And I remember turning to someone and saying, ‘Why do you keep saying that? I never said that.’”
The conversation was documented by police body camera footage according to the filing, including the open denial of a confession. McCarter hopes the lawsuit will serve as a lever of accountability for police, especially for the officer she alleges claimed the false confession.
“What we also are trying to do is hold them accountable for those lies but also make it very clear how much those lies matter even when ultimately the right outcome happens,” said McCarter’s lawyer Tess Cohen. “How destructive those lies are even if the criminal justice system comes to the correct conclusion: the process is traumatic. The ending is not the end of this. And so we’re trying to hold them accountable for the process as well.”
After her arrest, McCarter could not return to her job as a nurse or her advanced clinical management and leadership curriculum studies at Columbia University. While both her employment and her enrollment remained on hold, she stayed in administrative limbo due to electronic monitoring and a student conduct suspension. McCarter missed the birth of her grandchildren and the funeral of an aunt and a grandparent.
Cohen, who was also on McCarter’s defense team, points to Daniel Penny, who was not immediately arrested and charged after the death of unhoused Black New Yorker Jordan Neely. Instead, he was later charged with manslaughter and was released on bail.
“He was not arrested [at] that moment, no one put cuffs on him [at] that moment and they could have made that same choice for Tracy,” she said. “Because they chose to cuff her that night and put forward a narrative that she said ‘he tried to take my purse and I stabbed him in the chest’. . . they shaped the narrative in that moment.
“That meant she was remanded when she was cuffed. She was charged with murder. Those first decisions decide the whole of a case in a lot of situations.”
McCarter received a groundswell of support following her arrest, with more than 20,000 supporters demanding her charges be dropped. The issue impacted the Manhattan District Attorney’s race, with the eventual winner Alvin Bragg’s campaign tweeting support for McCarter.
Detailed in the lawsuit’s complaint are alleged instances of Murray abusing McCarter after relapsing into alcohol addiction in late 2016, the same year the couple moved together in New Jersey. It recounts pushing, choking, punching, kicking and hair-pulling. The two remained together as McCarter was “hopeful that [Murray] would eventually overcome his alcoholism.”
While McCarter is far from the only criminalized domestic violence survivor, her case coincided with both the public support of pandemic-time medical workers and the racial reckoning of the George Floyd protests. Public support naturally followed for the Black nurse and four blue-chip private law firms soon signed on to help. Despite her ordeal, McCarter considers herself lucky in regards to navigating the legal criminal justice system.
“The difference is the caseload and the choice of these lawyers to take my case—how many defendants get four law firms that are fairly well funded to represent them?” said McCarter. “Only the richest among us and I don’t have those kinds of funds. I would never have gotten the robust defense that I did, if it weren’t for lawyers coming forward and doing this work pro bono and so it just points to how unsustainable the system is as a whole.
“Because if it takes this much resource[s], if it takes a million dollar defense in order to get one so clearly innocent Black woman out of the jaws of the system, and it takes three years to do that even with all of those resources, the system is always going to be stacked against us and therefore it can’t continue to stand the way it is. It’s not fair.
“It absolutely cannot happen that every person who did not commit a crime is going to garner this much press, this much attention, this much community support [and] this much legal support. It just doesn’t happen. So that’s why so many people take pleas, because the system just isn’t designed to actually fight for our innocence.”
Tandy Lau is a Report for America corps member and writes about public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.