Brooklyn judge calls Sunset Park federal jail ‘an abomination’ after staff ignore order to send ailing inmate to medical facility

A furious federal judge described staff of Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center as “contemptuous of human life and dignity” after jailers defied her order to send an inmate with a severe contagious infection to a medical facility.

Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Dora Irizarry ripped into federal prosecutors and lawyers representing the troubled jail’s management in a tense Wednesday morning hearing after she learned how the MDC handled the treatment of detainee James Young, who’s battling a MRSA infection. MRSA is a type of staph infection.

Irizarry on Friday had threatened to hold the MDC and Bureau of Prisons staff attorney, Neha Khan, in contempt if Young, 43 — who was housed in general population and clad in a yellow jumpsuit to single him out as sick — wasn’t sent to a medical facility by noon Monday.

That deadline passed, and on Tuesday, Young’s public defender, Federal Defenders lawyer Allegra Glashausser, revealed in a letter to the judge that her client was merely taken to a hospital emergency room.

Young was then returned to general population at the Brooklyn jail, “back in his yellow jumpsuit,” Glashausser wrote.

“The idea was not that he’d be taken to the hospital,” Irizarry said of her order. “No one was talking about hospitalization. Nonetheless … he should have from there been taken to a medical facility.”

Shortly after receiving Glashausser’s letter, Irizarry ordered Wednesday’s hearing.

“I promised Ms. Khan [the Bureau of Prisons lawyer] that if you did not obey … that you would be back here so fast you get whiplash. I keep my word,” the judge said.

She called the conduct of the MDC staff “an abomination, utterly contemptuous of the court. It’s utterly contemptuous of human life and dignity. It’s appalling.”

MDC staff finally sent Young to a nursing home for long-term care Wednesday, and Irizarry ultimately didn’t hold Khan or the MDC in contempt.

But the judge tore into Khan and her supervisor, Sophia Papapetru, as well as the assistant U.S. attorney overseeing Young’s case, Stephanie Pak.

“I was considering getting a special prosecutor on this case,” Irizarry told Pak’s supervisor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Haggans, telling him Pak shirked an obligation to “proactively” find out about Young’s status on Monday. She also raised the specter of filing grievances and moving to get the MDC lawyers’ licenses pulled.

“The government fell short of the court’s expectations. … That included me,” Haggans told Irizarry, saying that he should have realized that the hospital might not admit Young after his ER visit.

Khan and Papapetru offered their own apologies.

“When a judge issues an order, your obligation is to obey it,” the judge said, adding that she didn’t know if the choice to send him to the hospital was Khan’s doing.

“But I don’t know how you can be so flip and think that somehow eventually I would not find out,” she said. “That you would somehow think that you wouId get over and get out from under your obligation to a court order. That you would think that you’re slick.”

She added, “Your apologies are so empty. They are empty. It is disgusting.”

Young, who’s accused in a string of gunpoint store robberies, is suffering from a fractured hand and broken leg from a motorcycle crash, as well as open wounds infected by methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA – a contagious, severe form of staph infection.

Magistrate Judge Robert Levy ordered him sent to a medical facility on Nov. 22, but the MDC ignored that order — and at one point even placed him in solitary confinement, which led to his medical supplies being taken away.

“Mr. Young’s case is an extreme example of MDC’s neglect, but there are still hundreds of people at the jail today who are not going to medical appointments, are not getting medical treatment, and who are preparing to rot locked in their cells for over a week for the holidays,” Glashausser told the Daily News.

“I’m thankful that Mr. Young is finally going to a medical facility, but it shouldn’t take two judicial orders and a judge hauling MDC lawyers into court twice for MDC to give necessary medical care,” Glashausser said.

Judges and defense lawyers for years have railed about the conditions at the Sunset Park federal jail, which has housed high-profile prisoners including R. Kelly and Ghislaine Maxwell.

In 2019, the jail lost power for eight days in the dead of winter, and in 2021, defense attorneys highlighted complaints of no water or hot food, and staff levels so low that one inmate was told to figure out the correct dose for his psychiatric medication on his own.

The jail — which took on hundreds of inmates when its sister facility in Manhattan, the Metropolitan Correction Center, closed in 2021 — has filled only 200 of its 301 correction officer positions as of Nov. 28, according to a recent court filing. Of those 200, 28 are on extended leave.

The medical unit is similarly short-staffed, with only 20 of 29 positions filled.