Court rules in favor of NYPD in Muslim surveillance case
The New York Police Department can use a Cold War-era legal tactic to conceal whether it put two Muslim men under surveillance, the state's highest court ruled Thursday.
The Court of Appeals, in a split 4-3 decision, ruled that the NYPD was in its rights to decline acknowledging whether records existed pertaining to possible surveillance of a Talib Abdur-Rashid, a Manhattan imam, and Samir Hashmi, a former Rutgers University student.
In 2012, the two men filed separate Freedom of Information Law requests seeking any records the NYPD had relating to surveillance or an investigation. The NYPD responded by saying it could "neither confirm nor deny" the records even existed.
The men sued the NYPD separately in lawsuits prompted by a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning stories by The Associated Press on NYPD surveillance of Muslim groups in New York and New Jersey after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. After moving through lower courts, the two cases were combined for the Court of Appeals case.
