City Hall Rally Will Honor New Yorkers Who Died in Custody as Advocates Demand Action on NYC Jails
City Hall Rally Will Honor New Yorkers Who Died In Custody as Advocates Demand Action on NYC Jails
By Michele Evans
New York City, New York
5/23/2026
Category: Courts / Criminal Justice / Advocacy
New York City, New York - On Tuesday, May 26, 2026, the Jails Action Coalition and the HALT Solitary Campaign will rally outside City Hall to honor New Yorkers who have died in custody and to demand that city and state officials take stronger action to protect people inside New York City jails.
The rally, scheduled for 1:30 p.m. at City Hall near Broadway and Murray Street, comes after another deadly stretch inside the city’s jail system. Rajpattie Ramkellawan, 41, died after what the Department of Correction described as a medical emergency at the Rose M. Singer Center. Less than 24 hours later, Umais Khan, 40, died after being found unresponsive at the Eric M. Singer Center. Their deaths brought the number of people who have died in Department of Correction custody this year to at least four.
The rally announcement calls on community members to gather in mourning and protest. “Come honor the lives recently lost and hear from survivors,” the flyer states. “We demand that our loved ones stop being sent to these deadly jails.”
Family and friends of Ramkellawan are expected to attend, along with an attorney from New York County Defenders. The organizers say the gathering will call on New York City and state officials to implement a “Blueprint to Release People, Stop Sending People to Deadly Jails & Protect the Human Rights of All New Yorkers.”
That demand reflects a larger and ongoing fight over the future of Rikers Island, jail population reduction, medical care, solitary confinement, and whether the city is truly moving toward a safer and more humane system — or simply allowing people to keep dying while reform deadlines, oversight fights, and political arguments drag on.
The HALT Solitary Campaign has long pushed to end solitary confinement in New York prisons and jails, and the Jails Action Coalition has been part of the campaign around Local Law 42, the New York City law intended to sharply restrict solitary confinement and increase out-of-cell time and programming in city jails.
For people who have lived inside these institutions, the language of “medical emergency” is not enough. A person does not simply become a statistic because the jail system uses sterile wording after death. Every person in custody is someone’s daughter, son, parent, sibling, friend, or loved one. Every death inside a city jail raises the same questions: What medical care was available? Who responded? How long did it take? Were warning signs ignored? Was the person adequately monitored? And why does the system keep producing grief before producing accountability?
The rally is also a reminder that deaths in custody do not happen in silence unless the public allows them to. Advocacy groups, survivors, families, and formerly incarcerated people have repeatedly forced these deaths back into public view. They have stood outside City Hall, testified before lawmakers, challenged solitary confinement, demanded decarceration, and insisted that people in jail retain their humanity.
Ramkellawan’s death, like the deaths before hers, deserves more than a press statement and a promise of investigation. It deserves public scrutiny. It deserves answers. It deserves the presence of people willing to stand in grief and say that custody should not become a death sentence.
The May 26 rally will be both a memorial and a demand: remember the people who died, listen to the people who survived, and stop sending New Yorkers into conditions that families and advocates continue to describe as deadly.
This is exactly the kind of public pressure that keeps jail deaths from being reduced to internal paperwork and forgotten case numbers.
*Michele Evans is an independent journalist, author, and former ESPN technical producer whose work has appeared in The New York Times.
Michele got her start in 2001 covering the NBA and NFL.
She now covers New York City courts, criminal-justice procedure, NYPD, FDNY, domestic-violence systems, media accountability, public safety, advocacy efforts, and New York civic life through courthouse observation, public records, legal analysis, and lived-experience reporting.
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