Man Arrested, Held Without Warrant For Months Sues Rockland County

ROCKLAND COUNTY, NY — An Orange County man has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Rockland County Sheriff Louis Falco and District Attorney Tom Walsh saying he was arrested and jailed for five months without a hearing and despite a court refusing to issue a warrant.

"In defiance of the Court, law enforcement officials refused to take no for an answer, instead opting to take the law into their own hands," said civil rights attorneys Robert C. Barchiesi, II and Martín Souto Díaz, who filed the suit on behalf of Philip S. Aurecchione of Newburgh.

Patch reached out to the Rockland County District Attorney's Office for comment but had not heard back before this article was posted.

Aurecchione had been sentenced in federal court Sept. 26, 2019 to two concurrent 18-month terms of imprisonment. On Feb. 5, 2020, while he was still incarcerated on his federal sentence, the Rockland County Court sentenced him to two to four years for a state conviction for criminal possession of a weapon. The County Court imposed this sentence to run concurrently with the federal sentences he was then serving, according to a ruling from Dutchess County Supreme Court.

He was released from federal custody on Feb. 25, 2020. He was not, however, taken into state custody at that time to serve the remaining portion of his state sentence — due to the failure of the District Attorney's Office or Rockland County Sheriff to place a detainer or hold, wrote Dutchess County Judge Maria Rosa in a decision in 2021.

He believed he had satisfied the terms of his state sentence and found employment and a place to live, his lawyers said.

The Rockland District Attorney's Office applied for an arrest warrant for him in the late summer of 2020, but their request was denied by the Rockland County Supreme Court, his lawyers said.

Ten months after the warrant was denied, officials from the Rockland County Sheriff’s Office went to Orange County, placed Aurecchione under surveillance, followed and stopped his vehicle, forcefully placed him under arrest and took him to the Rockland County Jail, where he was held — without any lawful authority and without a re-commitment order, his lawyers argued.

They then took him to Downstate Correctional Facility. He spent the next several months confined.

The whole time, Aurecchione was never taken before a court, nor advised as to why he was being held, his lawyers said.

"He was denied his most fundamental rights to due process, and as a tragic consequence of these officers' actions lost everything he was working hard to rebuild," they said.

He won his release after filing habeas petitions in state and federal court.

In her decision, Judge Rosa noted that Aurecchione had been freed after filing the habeas petition, and awarded him credit for all the time he had spent at liberty beforehand. "The court agrees with Petitioner that he is entitled for credit against his sentence for the period of time he was at large due to the state's failure to lodge a detainer or obtain a warrant for his arrest," the judge wrote on Nov. 10.

However, state corrections officials refused to apply the credits to his parole, his lawyers said. So they filed a federal habeas petition against New York State, and that was instrumental in his discharge from parole as of May 11, his lawyers said.

Now Aurecchione is seeking compensatory, punitive, and special damages.

The federal lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of
New York, where it is captioned and docketed under Aurecchione v. Falco et. al. (7:22-cv-04538)
and assigned to the Hon. Nelson Román.

Attorneys also brought suit in the Rockland County Supreme Court to decide an ancillary issue to allow the late notice of claim as to the state law claims that are currently pending in the Southern District. That suit is currently captioned Aurecchione v. County of Rockland and assigned to the Hon. Thomas P. Zugibe.