New York County Supreme Court Justice James Burke on Thursday denied a writ filed by New York's Legal Aid Society, refusing to release people detained for longer than 24 hours between arrest and arraignment — a group that has numbered above 100 for most of the week.

While the New York courts have held that people should generally be arraigned within 24 hours, Burke said he had to consider that the city is facing a pandemic and mass protests at the same time, and those issues have slowed down the system.

"There is a crisis within a crisis," Burke said, echoing the argument of the New York City Law Department earlier in the hearing.

Burke quoted from the 1991 New York State Court of Appeals decision in Roundtree v. New York, which found that "arrestees held in custody for more than 24 hours without arraignment are entitled to release unless an acceptable explanation for the delay is given." In this case, he ruled, the New York City Police Department had provided acceptable explanations for the delay.

During the hearing, which was conducted through Skype, NYPD officials asked Burke to consider his own experience presiding over virtual court parts to demonstrate that virtual arraignment parts cannot handle the same case volume as the pre-pandemic physical parts.

They also argued that amid protests against police brutality across the city, police officers have had to change their usual procedures for security reasons and in an attempt to manage a sudden increase in arrests.

Most people arrested at protests are released with a summons or a desk appearance ticket, the NYPD officials said. Expansions of arraignment parts, including the return of an overnight part, have helped manage case volume but have not solved it, they said.

As of 5:15 p.m. Thursday, 131 people had been held for longer than 24 hours in Manhattan, state court system spokesman Lucian Chalfen said.

Attorneys for the Legal Aid Society, including Russell Novack, argued that the NYPD has the resources to process people more quickly but refuses to use them.

"The police department has a history … of deliberately delaying people's arraignments because they don't like what they're doing on the street," Novack said.

Burke asked attorneys for both sides to focus on the subjects of the Legal Aid Society writ, which was filed Tuesday, after a back-and-forth on police procedures.

"A person should never be detained on a summons or DAT," Legal Aid's Marlen Bodden said.

Officers are no longer issuing summons on the street, Assistant Deputy Commissioner Janine Gilbert said, because they can't safely take their focus off their surroundings to write out the tickets. That means that more people must be transported to arrest processing, where social distancing is not always possible, Gilbert acknowledged.

"These protesters, while they are out on the street, are not social distancing either," she said.

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