Woman gives birth on a Brooklyn courtroom bench while in custody awaiting arraignment

Late on the night of Friday, May 15, 2026, Samantha Randazzo, 33 and nine months pregnant, gave birth to a baby boy on a bench inside Kings County Criminal Court in Brooklyn while in police custody awaiting arraignment. According to the New York Police Department, Randazzo had been arrested the previous evening after officers reported seeing two people on the rooftop of a public-housing complex with a controlled substance in plain view; she was charged with criminal possession of a controlled substance and criminal trespass. Early Friday morning she told officers she was pregnant and experiencing drug withdrawal, and police took her to a city hospital operated by NYC Health + Hospitals, which discharged her. She gave birth in court roughly four hours later, and was afterward transported by emergency medical services to another hospital.

A joint statement from the Legal Aid Society, Brooklyn Defender Services, New York County Defender Services, the Bronx Defenders, and the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem — whose members witnessed the birth — said Randazzo delivered "on a courtroom bench without adequate medical care, privacy, or dignity" and called the episode "a profound moral failure." Public defenders alleged she was restrained during labor and that courtroom proceedings continued during the medical emergency. The state Office of Court Administration disputed that account, saying she was handcuffed but not to the bench and that restraints were removed once labor became apparent; Randazzo's attorney told the New York Times that court officers and the judge acted quickly to clear the room and assist her. The competing accounts of restraint and of how quickly medical help arrived remain unresolved in the public record and bear on the severity, not the existence, of the underlying neglect of a person in custody during a medical emergency.

The incident drew immediate calls for accountability. Legal advocates rallied outside the courthouse, and lawmakers and defenders demanded a full review of medical staffing, emergency-response protocols, and the treatment of pregnant people in custody, invoking New York's 2009 Anti-Shackling Law, which bars restraints on incarcerated women during labor and which the city has paid settlements over in past comparable cases. The Brooklyn District Attorney's office subsequently dismissed Randazzo's charges. The secondary mapping to denial-of-hearing reflects the allegation that the arraignment proceeded while Randazzo was incapacitated in active labor; it is the less-canonical of the two mappings and is retained as a secondary signal alongside the central corrections-abuse classification.