Jim Dwyer

None of it was subject to DNA testing while he was alive, and it will not be anytime soon. On Monday, a Shelby County judge ruled that Alley did not have a right under current Tennessee law and court rules to seek the DNA tests.

The judge, Paula Skahan, said the state’s Supreme Court or Legislature would have to intervene to permit the testing. Lawyers for Alley filed an immediate notice of appeal and asked the judge to continue to preserve the evidence, which she agreed to do.

Alley, who was 9 when her father, Sedley Alley, was arrested, said that the decision was “a hard blow” but that she was not stopping. “We are determined to continue our fight for the truth and will see this entire process through until the end,” said Alley, 44.

The evidence includes red underpants worn by the attacker and a saliva-stained bra worn by the victim, as well as socks, shoes and possible semen samples. It was collected near the body of the victim, Lance Cpl. Suzanne Collins, 19, who was found in a park next to the Millington Naval Air Station, where she had just completed an avionics program, in July 1985.

Modern DNA techniques were not available at the time, and when Sedley Alley asked for them to be used to test the evidence two decades later, courts in Tennessee refused. In 2011, five years after his execution, the state Supreme Court said it had been a mistake to deny the tests.

In April, Alley was named executor of her father’s estate as part of her attempt to seek the DNA tests. Sedley Alley, who had been an alcoholic and drug addict, had told her that he did not recall committing the crime. “He said, ‘If I did do it, I deserve what I get,’” Alley said. “‘But I don’t remember doing it.’”

Skahan said state law governing DNA tests after conviction did not explicitly permit an estate to ask for them. No court in Tennessee had faced this issue before, she said, and the state Supreme Court might come to a different interpretation. The state Legislature could also act to permit the testing, she said.

After his arrest, Sedley Alley gave a statement implicating himself in the killing, although many of the details he provided were inaccurate; he also told psychiatrists soon after his arrest that he had no actual memory of it. No physical evidence directly linked him to the crime. His first lawyers mounted an insanity defense that the jury rejected.

Amy Weyrich, the Shelby County district attorney general, had opposed the new testing on multiple grounds, but Skahan said she was only ruling that Alley lacked standing.

Alley was represented by the Innocence Project in New York and the Tennessee Innocence Project. They argued that in addition to bringing clarity to the case, the tests could serve law enforcement by implicating a different person as the killer.

“We owe it to both Suzanne and Sedley to do the tests,” said Josie Scarlett Holland, one of the lawyers for Alley, referring to both the victim of the crime and her client’s father. “The science is there — why not get the truth?”

This article originally appeared in

Judge Denies DNA Testing in Case of a Man Executed 13 Years Ago

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — April Alley’s father was executed 13 years ago, but the evidence in his case remains sitting on shelves in a clerk’s office, one floor below where he was tried and convicted of murder in 1986.

She told him about her life as an adult: college, marriage, a home near Louisville.

Her father, Sedley Alley, talked about being a convicted murderer on death row and the haze of his ragged years as an alcoholic and drug addict.

Near the end of their meeting, she posed the question that had shadowed her since childhood. Was he really a killer who had raped and impaled a young Marine?

“I asked him, ‘Did you do that? If you did or not, you’re still my dad and I love you,’” Alley recalled.

His reply was the same opaque answer he gave psychiatrists after his arrest in 1985 and continued to give to anyone who asked, right until his execution in 2006. He did not know.

“He said, ‘If I did do it, I deserve what I get,’” April Alley said. “‘But I don’t remember doing it.’”

On Tuesday, Alley, 43, asked a judge in Memphis, Tennessee, to grant her what the courts had refused her father during his lifetime: DNA testing of evidence from the crime. She realizes the results might cement her father’s guilt, giving her an answer that he could not — or would not — provide.

“I don’t want it to be like that — that he actually did it,” Alley said. “But it would almost make it easier. Because the thought of all of that happening for no reason doesn’t sit well with me at all.”

Sedley Alley went to his death based on scant physical evidence and a confession that he claimed he had been forced to give.

Five years after he died, the Tennessee Supreme Court said that denying his request for DNA testing had been a mistake.

April Alley has become executor of his estate and “now stands in the shoes of her father, seeking the truth,” her petition for testing says. It is not yet clear when the court will rule on her request. If the testing goes forward and unambiguously points to someone other than Alley as the killer, it could become the first time DNA has exonerated a person put to death in the United States.

The kind of post-mortem inquiry she seeks is “incredibly rare,” said Brandon Garrett, a professor of law at Duke University.

“The prisoner is deceased, the case is closed, and the evidence is destroyed,” Garrett said.

Sometimes, though, evidence is preserved. Ever since the Alley trial in 1987, the Shelby County clerk has kept exhibits that include the victim’s underwear, a pair of red briefs apparently worn by the attacker and a 31-inch tree branch.

Sedley Alley’s DNA was harvested while he was alive and is still in storage, according to Kelley Henry, a federal public defender who represented him in his last years.

For nearly two decades after Alley’s arrest, no one disputed in court that he was the killer. His original lawyers argued that he was not guilty by reason of insanity. In 2003, new lawyers said a fresh investigation raised serious doubts about his guilt that only DNA tests could resolve.

Prosecutors said that the request was a stalling maneuver and that even if someone else’s DNA were found, it would not clear Alley. They prevailed.

The crime occurred one night in July 1985. Lance Cpl. Suzanne Collins, 19, left the barracks at Naval Air Station Millington, just outside Memphis, to take her daily 10-mile run. She had just finished nine months of avionics training.

Around 11 p.m., two fellow Marines running the other way crossed paths with her. Moments later, they dodged a station wagon swerving along the road, in the same direction that Collins had been running.

After it passed, they heard a woman hollering, “Don’t touch me! Leave me alone!” They ran toward the shouts and saw a car, which they believed was the same station wagon, stopped on the side of the road. It sped off. A second car came their way and they tried to wave it down, but the driver did not stop. They ran to the gatehouse. A guard sounded an alarm for a possible abduction.

About an hour later, just after midnight, Sedley Alley was stopped near the base driving a rattling 1972 station wagon. A Navy investigator noted that he had no visible injuries.

Alley, then 29, was not in the service — he had been discharged some years earlier for drug and alcohol abuse — but his wife was in the Navy. After she was questioned, the investigators concluded that the jogging Marines had heard the Alleys squabbling, not an abduction.

At that point, no one knew Collins was missing. The alert for the station wagon was canceled. The Alleys were sent home for the night. A patrol kept an eye on their house.

The next morning, Collins’ body was found in a park.

She had been struck 100 times and strangled. The attacker had stripped a tree branch of twigs, sharpened the tip, then drove it through her body.

Sedley Alley, who had no criminal record, was promptly arrested. Over a period of hours, he denied knowing anything about the woman and asked for a lawyer.

But then, investigators said, before consulting anyone, he proceeded to volunteer that he had sideswiped Collins while driving drunk, accidentally stabbed her in the head with a screwdriver — both details untrue, the medical examiner testified — and staged the crime scene.

Alley would later claim the investigators had turned on the tape recorder only when he said what they wanted to hear, not during the browbeating that led up to his statement. The authorities said they had merely asked him what had happened.

They also said he showed them where Collins’ body had been found, but a transcript of a recording of the car ride does not indicate that he gave any directions.

Alley’s lawyers were unable to get information from him about the crime, so he was turned over to psychiatrists. One wrote that he “did not seem overtly delusional, except in his assessment of the police tactics and his belief that they would have beaten him if he had not confessed to the crime, said they could have gotten away with it because they were the police.”

The physical evidence in the case, analyzed with the primitive tools available in 1985, was suggestive but far from conclusive. Authorities reported finding Type O blood, the same as the victim’s and Alley’s, on the driver’s door of the station wagon. Paper napkins from Danver’s, a regional restaurant chain, were on the floor of his car as well as near the body, the investigators said. Also in the car was proof that he had been in the vicinity of the crime: an air conditioner pump that had been installed earlier in the day at a house near where Collins had been running. Plainly, Alley had stolen it.

However, no traces of Collins — no fingerprints, hair or blood — were found inside his car or, for that matter, on Alley. No physical evidence showed he had been in a prolonged struggle with a 19-year-old Marine in excellent condition.

April Alley spoke to a reporter in March in Louisville, where she works in human resources for a hospital. As a teenager, she said, she was turned against her father by a hostile relative.

In her 20s, she reconnected with him at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. He was frank about his drug and alcohol use, she said, and told her that he had confessed under threat. She became inclined to believe him.

In 2003, an investigator, April Higuera, turned up an undisclosed handwritten note by the medical examiner estimating that Collins died after Sedley Alley had been sent home and kept under police watch.

Higuera also located a romantic partner of Collins who drove a station wagon and was about the same height, 5-foot-8, as a man seen near the abduction. Alley was 8 inches taller.

Citing these discoveries, Henry, the lawyer, said: “We tried every way possible to get back into court and to get DNA.”

Across the country, views on post-conviction DNA testing have changed as more wrongful convictions have come to light. All 50 states now give prisoners some access to DNA testing, although the hurdles vary.

If the evidence is tested, the results could be compared to a national registry of DNA collected from offenders and unsolved crimes, and to genetic genealogy databases, said Barry Scheck, a founder of the Innocence Project.

The case was reopened by the organization after Scheck received a tip that a man charged last year with murder and rapes in Missouri had also been stationed at Millington base for some of the time Collins was there. (Military records show that the man had been sent to a base in California before the slaying.)

As Alley’s execution approached, he tried to forbid April and his son, David, from attending. They insisted, and just after 1:30 a.m. on June 28, 2006, took seats at the front of the witness room.

Blinds were still shut on the viewing window, but audio was already being piped in. They heard him coming.

“Chains clanking,” April Alley said.

When the blinds opened, Sedley Alley lay on a steel gurney. An intravenous line ran from a wall into his right arm. He turned to his daughter and son. They stood and pressed their hands to the glass.

Someone yelled that they were blocking the view.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/dna-test-after-execution.html" id="ad836f51-be40-339b-a97a-edc4a2649240">The New York Times</a>.

Her Father Was Executed for Murder. She Still Wants to Know if He Did It.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — April Alley had last spoken with her father when she was a girl of 10, so there was plenty of catching up to do when they met about 15 years later in the noisy visiting area of a prison in Nashville, Tennessee.

April Alley has become executor of his estate and “now stands in the shoes of her father, seeking the truth,” her petition for testing says.

If the testing goes forward and unambiguously points to someone other than Sedley Alley as the killer, it could become the first time DNA has exonerated a person put to death in the United States.

It was poised to make a meal of a rare, powerful trove of the history of working-class New York: the archives of the Bowery Savings Bank, which was founded in 1834 for the benefit of its depositors.

The papers were among the materials being cleaned out of the basement of a Capital One branch in Brooklyn that is closing next month.

At what seemed to have been the last minute, the records were given a stay of destruction, apparently when archivists and others began appealing to Capital One.

“We are going through a normal review process and will make appropriate decisions,” said Sie Soheili, a spokesman for Capital One.

Disputing that archival bank material had been lost, he characterized the papers disposed of as “old newspapers and trash.”

But workers handling them said that, to their amazement, they saw documents dated from 1904 and into the 1940s — long before Capital One existed — headed into the shredder. By midmorning, workers said, they were told to divert pre-1930 records from the stream bound for the truck.

The fate of the historical materials is “to be determined,” Soheili said.

An organization of archivists in New York City is keen to make sure that the trove is not destroyed. “It would be priceless,” said Marion Casey, an associate professor at New York University’s Glucksman Ireland House.

The records of 19th-century savings banks have hardly ever been preserved, but those that survive — including a cache from the Emigrant Savings Bank, held at the New York Public Library — have opened new windows onto the long-vanished lives of ordinary people, Casey said.

The library’s curator of manuscripts and archives, Thomas Lannon, sent word to Capital One on Tuesday that he would like to inspect the Bowery materials.

Their pages show what kind of work men and women did, where they lived, how much money they saved or borrowed, the names of their parents, spouses and places of birth. Such archives make social archaeology possible.

The Bowery, which did not pay its officers or trustees for decades and grew to be among the largest savings banks in the United States, no longer exists. Since the mid-1980s, it has been bought, sold, merged and acquired in a dizzying line of transactions.

The historical records moved from the Bowery’s landmark headquarters at 130 Bowery — now the home of Capitale, an event space — to an office park in Lake Success on Long Island. Around 2004, when that space was being emptied out and the archive was at risk of abandonment, it was moved to the basement on Fulton Street at the urging of the branch manager, Joseph Kopitz. “I had so much space there,” Kopitz said.

Kopitz, who lives in the neighborhood, said he recently became concerned about the archive again when he saw a notice that the Capital One branch was closing.

Few people know the heft of history in those boxes better than Barbara Haws, who served as the bank’s first archivist before its 150th anniversary in 1984.

“It was amazingly continuous — every single depositor from the time when it opened its doors,” Haws said. “Big ledgers. It appealed to immigrants and people without a lot of money.”

The ledgers were the hard drives of the 19th century — terabyte-sized. “At this stage, I couldn’t be their archivist because I couldn’t lift them,” Haws said. “They’re about 3 to 4 feet tall, 2 feet wide. The bindings were about 4 inches thick and covered in a canvas material.”

Inside them, she said, is a roll call of Bowery depositors who arrived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan throughout the 19th century: Irish, Italians, Chinese, Eastern Europeans, among others. “Every single immigrant group was represented in that bank,” Haws said. She did not recall if the records included the race of the depositors.

Casey said archivists in the city were willing to help the bank in its initial rough-sorting of the boxes in its basement.

After that, a number of the city’s major research institutions have agreed to move and temporarily store the material until a repository is found.

“A bunch of us will cobble the costs together of moving it to an interim place, and then we will triage it — ‘yes to this, no to that,’ ” Casey said.

Haws said the records would be a robust resource for people doing genealogical research. Perhaps, she said, a commercial ancestry company would pay for them to be digitized.

“Everyone is strapped for space,” she said. “They would dovetail with the census and any city records. It would build out another layer of information about New Yorkers.”

Casey said her students studying the archives of the Emigrant bank, for example, have found a group of farmers who held accounts there. “Of course, people in cities have to eat,” she said.

Kopitz said the bank could perform a profound public service by allowing others to keep them safe. “They could be heroes,” he said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/02/nyregion/bowery-savings-bank-records.html" id="5f18611e-05b9-3b71-a350-f207e424ef97">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — A roaring omnivore of a shredding truck was parked Monday morning on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, chewing through centuries’ worth of paper.

Spared From the Shredder (for Now): 'Priceless' Bank Records of 19th-Century New York

James did not open the FedEx, the mail or the taxi door.

No matter the entreaties, James said, he was not going to testify at the disciplinary trial of New York Police Department officer Daniel Pantaleo, who is accused of recklessly using a chokehold that led to the death of Eric Garner. One of the most important witnesses to Garner’s death, James, who had twice given his account under oath in earlier proceedings, said this latest one trivialized the killing of a man. In fear of police retaliation, he said, he does not want his last name published.

The unanswered calls, the unopened letters, might well stand for the dwindling urgency of coming to grips with a police encounter and a death that not long ago had galvanized the country.

Garner’s final moments, calling out, “I can’t breathe” 11 times, were captured on videotape nearly five years ago and helped propel the Black Lives Matter movement. Garner, who was being arrested on suspicion of selling loosies, or single untaxed cigarettes, had objected to being handcuffed.

What seemed to be a landmark case, a moment of reckoning for how the police treat people in poor and minority neighborhoods, appears to be petering out with an administrative hearing that carries neither criminal penalties nor the burden of understanding how a man who posed no obvious physical threat to anyone could end up dead over the sale of cigarettes.

Still, some clues to what happened in July 2014 have emerged at the hearing. In addition to Garner’s unforgettable words anticipating his death, another statement was made that day, and it became public for the first time Thursday.

Moments after learning that Garner had no pulse and was likely to die, a police lieutenant sent a text message, writing, “Not a big deal. We were effecting a lawful arrest.”

The lieutenant’s union representative said he was not being callous about the death, but was trying to reassure subordinate officers who were upset. They were doing the jobs that their department and society wanted.

That assurance by the police commander on July 17, 2014, has, so far, turned out to be as prophetic as Garner’s last words that same afternoon.

The disciplinary hearing is the first public airing, and could be the last, of the circumstances of Garner’s death beyond the viral video.

While the police trial is weighing whether the actions of Pantaleo and a sergeant violated departmental rules and warrant punishment, the issues are so narrowly tailored that none of the other dynamics that drove the fatal encounter — such as leadership, expectations placed on officers, police culture, race and community complaints — are under serious consideration.

The disciplinary hearing will not include testimony from James, believed to be one of the last people to speak with Garner other than the police. He has already testified in two secret grand jury proceedings, he said, and was exasperated that nothing had come of what appeared to him to be a misuse of power that anyone could see on the video.

When he was first approached about appearing at the disciplinary trial, James said he asked the investigators what consequences it might hold for the officer.

“They said, ‘He can lose vacation time or he can lose his job,’” James said. “Get out of here. Lose vacation time? Give me a break. He killed someone.”

James spends most of his days on the streets around Tompkinsville Park on Staten Island, the same neighborhood where Garner died, making him vulnerable, he believes, to harassment by the police. “I’m a brother. I walk a thin line,” he said. “I try to stay on the right side.”

The hearing has revealed that a police supervisor recommended in 2015 that internal charges be filed over Garner’s death, but the department’s own disciplinary unit did not pursue them. The current proceeding was initiated by the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which operates independently of the police department. So the judge’s findings are not binding on Police Commissioner James O’Neill.

If the video of Garner’s death seemed unequivocal in meaning to many viewers, a halting uncertainty within law enforcement over the proper response to it has extended from the New York City to the top of the U.S. Department of Justice, from the Obama to the Trump administrations.

In 2018, civil rights prosecutors in Washington asked permission to seek indictments for use of excessive force, but they were opposed by other federal prosecutors, including a contingent from the Brooklyn, New York, office.

The dispute was presented for resolution to then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, but no decision has been announced. The statute of limitations on any federal crimes expires in July, the fifth anniversary of the police encounter with Garner.

James, 58, said he spoke at length with FBI agents about the events, and then before a federal grand jury in Brooklyn.

“I was down,” he said. “For a while. Down for whatever it takes. I wanted to get justice.”

He also testified in front of a state grand jury on Staten Island that declined to indict any police officers in Garner’s death.

Garner was well over 6 feet tall, weighed 395 pounds and suffered from asthma and hypertension. Pantaleo’s lawyers said it was Garner’s poor health that led to his death after he refused to comply with a lawful order. In fact, he died from an asthma attack, a city medical examiner testified at last week’s hearing — the last in a chain of medical calamities that the examiner said had been set in motion by a chokehold.

Autopsy photographs show hemorrhaging to four layers of muscle and tissue in Garner’s neck. These injuries, the medical examiner said, had been caused by the chokehold and compression, and led to the fatal siege of asthma.

Although chokeholds are not against the law, the police are forbidden by policy from using them in almost all circumstances. Even so, they continued to be occasionally employed by officers, and departmental punishment is rare and light, a review of records by The New York Times found.

Pantaleo’s lawyers argued that he did not put Garner into a chokehold, and had instead used a technique called a “seat belt” hold, a view they claim was buttressed by a doctor employed by the police department who said that there were no injuries to Garner’s trachea.

Not so, replied the disciplinary prosecutors; the police doctor, they say, did not review the actual autopsy. And that doctor was contradicted by a police supervisor and other internal affairs officers who testified that the video showed Pantaleo using the chokehold.

The streets where Garner died are, today, an often raucous bazaar, featuring a regular parade of drug users who stroll past high school students waiting for Victory Boulevard buses, clients of a social services office and customers of fast-food restaurants, a laundromat, a coffee shop run by a commune, and check-cashing services.

Some younger people in the neighborhood did not know about the death of Garner.

But Joseph Evans, 48, who said he was “10 feet away” from Garner as he died, believes the police have dialed back enforcement tactics.

“Someone is holding the reins in, because they did slow down,” said Evans, who is homeless and spends his days around Tompkinsville Park. “There’s people selling loosies and making a fortune, and no one is sweating them.”

Moments later, that lighter police touch described by Evans was on display just a few feet away, at the corner of Victory Boulevard and Bay Street.

A fight broke out — complete with slaps, punches and profanities bellowed above the din of wheezing buses — between a woman and a man she had accused of stealing her phone. Within minutes, four police vehicles arrived and eight officers emerged. They separated the combatants, leading one safely off the block.

No arrests were made. No force was used. “This is the worst corner on Staten Island to have a fight,” the woman who lost her phone said. “The police are all over here.”

After that ruckus, James, who was standing nearby, picked up a discussion about the recent hearing. For him, three words of the lieutenant’s text message nail the stakes of the disciplinary trial: no big deal.

“All he was going to lose is vacation time?” James said, repeating one possible outcome of the hearing. “I don’t give a hoot.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="d503e54f-d1cc-4776-9b52-a3bc0791b4c0" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/19/nyregion/eric-garner-case.html">The New York Times</a>.

Why a Witness to Eric Garner's Death Is Giving Up on 'Justice'

(About New York): NEW YORK — During the past two weeks, a Staten Island man named James received an unexpected FedEx delivery. Then a certified letter. His phone rang constantly with calls from people on the 13th floor of New York City Police Headquarters in lower Manhattan. A taxi was parked outside his home, waiting for him.

Why a witness to Eric Garner's death is giving up on 'Justice'

This article originally appeared in <a id="ad836f51-be40-339b-a97a-edc4a2649240" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/dna-test-after-execution.html">The New York Times</a>.

Her father was executed for murder, she still wants to know if he did it

This article originally appeared in <a id="c707b681-2b0a-45db-bf28-28ca14cd047c" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/02/nyregion/bowery-savings-bank-records.html">The New York Times</a>.

Spared from the shredder (for now): 'Priceless' bank records of 19th-century New York

<h1>It turned out that 17 separate mistakes were made before anyone realized that the wrong woman was on the table. </h1>

Thankfully, Mrs. Morris was not harmed. The doctors said it was an “organizational accident,” meaning that one person could not have done it alone. Sticking tubes into the wrong person’s heart required mess-ups by many people.

One day, Mrs. Morris may be joined in the great case studies of near blunders by New York’s L train fiasco. This one took a team of people, too.

Right after the New Year, Gov. Andrew Cuomo made the startling announcement that New York City’s L subway line, whose East River tunnel was damaged by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, could remain in service while fixes were carried out.

Talk about whipsaw changes. In April, the line was to stop serving Manhattan for 15 months so the repairs could be made in the river tunnel. Its users had spent two years planning alternative routes and, in some cases, finding new places to live. They are just a fraction of the city’s subway riders, up to 300,000 people a day. But that’s more than the ridership of most mass transit systems in the country.

Losing L service for more than a year was a big, disruptive deal. But there was no way around it — or so the public had been told, over and over.

Now, it seems almost certain, that was a mistake. A team of academic engineers brought in by the governor last month devised a suite of repairs that they say would return the tunnel to a long-term safe condition with minimal closings. The academics collaborated with the government and consulting engineers who had come up with the original plan.

Their approach has been criticized in general terms by two former officials of the agency who had roles in the first plan, saying that the new one would be neither as safe nor as built to last as the original. They have identified no specific risks, and when you drill into the details, it is hard to see where the latest plan falls short.

Jerry Jannetti is a senior vice president at WSP, the consulting firm that has worked on the project since 2013 for New York City Transit, which operates the city’s subways as part of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. If Jannetti personally owned and operated the tunnel, would he prefer his firm’s original plan, or the one that emerged last month?

“I would choose the way we are moving forward now,” Jannetti said.

Which leads us to the next question: If the planned new repairs would be as safe and durable without requiring closing the line, why didn’t anyone think of them before? Shouldn’t someone downstream of the governor have thought to bring in outside experts for a fresh look, given the disruptive stakes?

Some people are skeptical about this new plan, in fact, precisely because it was driven by Cuomo. That’s good. Without skepticism, society collapses. But this entire episode illustrates a failure to be skeptical. And it shows us the risks of ignoring what it means to fail, at scale, in a booming city that grows every month. It didn’t have to be the governor asking for a better way. But no one else did.

Until then, the new array of repairs had not been considered by the in-house engineers at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the WSP consultants or others involved in the project. Andy Byford, president of New York City Transit, said he was conducting an independent review of the plan and would not sign on unless he was convinced of its safety and durability. That said, he is enthusiastic about its prospects. “I own the risk,” Byford said. “I am the president, the accountable person. This is my job.”

Anyone on the MTA board could have demanded alternatives. Cuomo appoints six of the 14 voting members, and by force of personality, he has driven a number of projects, including this one — at the last minute — and pushing construction of the Second Avenue line.

You can find representatives of eight other public officials on the authority’s board, including the mayor of New York. Even more power is held by a virtually unknown committee of four, any one of whom can veto the entire capital budget. On this committee are the speaker of the state Assembly, the state Senate majority leader, the mayor and the governor.

Typically, that awesome power has not been used for actual oversight — asking questions! — but for horse trading. So one legislator hinted at a veto if political cronies were not given state judgeships. And in an infamous episode, an Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, demanded that a pet project be funded to a satisfactorily boondoggle-ish level, pointedly mentioning that he would soon be looking at the capital budget.

“I will expect to see the Fulton Street Transit Center fully funded, complete and at a scale that at least resembles what was repeatedly promised,” Silver wrote in 2008. He got his way. The price for fixing that one station hit $1.4 billion, more than the entire annual budget of the Chicago transit system at the time.

There are legislative oversight committees for mass transit in the City Council, the state Senate and the state Assembly. No one asked the fundamental question about finding another way.

The price of all these people being in charge is that no one owns the work.

In all walks of life — engineering, politics, transportation — there is a fine line between the earned wisdom of experience and the toxic self-regard of a credentialed rut. (That goes for journalism, too. For most of the time the L train shutdown was in the air, I was writing a column in the New York section of The Times. No one stopped me from asking questions. I just didn’t.)

The L train’s East River tunnel — “still pretty darned good at 100 years old,” Jannetti said — was built under the supervision of the master engineer Clifford Holland starting in 1916. It was part of the surge of transit construction during the first decades of the 20th century that shaped modern New York into the nation’s largest city.

New York’s mass transit system stopped expanding in 1940, and it has even shrunk since then. The city’s population has grown by about 1.5 million since 1990 and may only be choked off by frail transportation. The MTA has proved itself one of the world’s most effective garrotes.

The agency was created a half-century ago to build, among other things, the Second Avenue subway (still unfinished) and a new tunnel for the Long Island Rail Road into Grand Central (the tunnel was finished in 1989 but the connection into Grand Central is years away). In 2002, the chairman of the agency announced a series of streamlining reforms. Today, there are about 10,000 more employees and less actual service. The Regional Plan Association proposed dismantling pieces of the agency. Maybe it should go into the portfolio of the governor or the mayor. To some one, and not everyone.

Mrs. Morris landed on an operating table for a procedure that she didn’t want or need, and that no one had ordered for her. New York City wound up being prepped for a different kind of surgery that it surely did not want or need. This organizational accident took a lot more than 17 errors.

It takes a village to really mess things up

NEW YORK — In a famous medical study, two doctors traced a chain of errors that brought the wrong patient, a “Mrs. Morris,” to an operating room for an invasive heart procedure that she did not want, did not need and that no one had actually ordered for her.

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Jim Dwyer

Articles written by the author

Judge Denies DNA Testing in Case of a Man Executed 13 Years Ago

Her Father Was Executed for Murder. She Still Wants to Know if He Did It.

Her Father Was Executed for Murder. She Still Wants to Know if He Did It.

Spared From the Shredder (for Now): 'Priceless' Bank Records of 19th-Century New York

Why a witness to Eric Garner's death is giving up on 'Justice'

Her father was executed for murder, she still wants to know if he did it

Spared from the shredder (for now): 'Priceless' bank records of 19th-century New York

It takes a village to really mess things up