NY prison staffing and morale are low 6 months after strike

Police have identified the man who was stabbed and killed near Times Square this week as they continue to look for the person responsible.

NYPD officials said 39-year-old Leonides Baez was killed in the late-night attack outside a building on West 43rd Street near Broadway, a busy area filled with theaters, restaurants and other attractions.

Officers found him around 11:30 p.m. Monday with stab wounds to his torso and back as well as a slash wound to his face, according to police.

First responders took him to Bellevue Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Police said Baez got into an argument with someone before the stabbing, but they’re still investigating what sparked the altercation.

Officials said they’re also still looking for at least one suspect who was wearing all-black clothing and fled the scene eastbound.

Baez’s last known address was in Worcester, Massachusetts, according to the NYPD.

Department data shows there were two other homicides so far this year through May 3 in the Midtown South Precinct, which includes the bustling hubs of Times Square, Grand Central Terminal, Penn Station, Madison Square Garden, Koreatown and Manhattan Mall Plaza. There were no homicides recorded in the precinct during the same timeframe last year.

All other major crime categories in Midtown South are down or at roughly the same level compared to the same period in 2025, the data shows.

Citywide, homicides are down more than 28% compared to this time last year, while felony assaults are down just over 1%, according to officials. Police said this week that the city had its fewest killings on record for the first four months of the year, breaking the previous record set in 2018.

This story is based on preliminary information from police and may be updated.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani is set to announce new funding on Thursday for substance use recovery organizations across the city to hire hundreds of people who have their own experience with drug or alcohol addiction and have been trained to help others.

The city is investing $12 million from legal settlements with opioid manufacturers to hire 500 people to bolster the city’s peer recovery workforce, officials said.

The peers, as they are called, are tied to organizations across the city that provide a mix of treatment and harm reduction services. The workers undergo a standardized training program and receive state certification.

“ We know how invaluable it is for someone who's struggling with substance use disorder to hear from a person who's been in their shoes who's walked the walk,” Jorge Petit, the city’s new executive deputy commissioner of mental hygiene, told Gothamist.

The peer workforce initiative is part of a broader effort that began under former Mayor Eric Adams, which aims to ramp up the city’s spending of its opioid settlement dollars to help drive down overdose deaths.

As of last June, the city had received $190 million from legal settlements with pharmaceutical companies that were accused of helping to fuel opioid addiction and overdoses. That amount is expected to grow to $550 million by 2041, the city said.

Deaths from accidental drug overdoses have declined citywide since peaking at more than 3,000 per year in 2022 and 2023, city data shows.

But even after a major drop in overdose deaths in 2024, New Yorkers in parts of the South Bronx and Harlem continued to die from overdoses at much higher rates than the rest of the city, as did older Black New Yorkers, the data shows.

The city has set a goal of reducing overdose deaths by 25% by 2030.

As part of their duties, the peers will be doing outreach and working to enroll more New Yorkers in recovery programs, according to City Hall.

Petit said the city is working to distribute opioid settlement dollars to organizations that work in high-need areas across the five boroughs.

Funding to hire peers will be distributed through city contracts with Community Health Action of Staten Island, Exponents, the Fortune Society, Odyssey House, Phoenix House, Let’s Talk Safety and Samaritan Daytop Village.

The city’s opioid settlement dollars initially went primarily to city-run services, but the city has more recently started diversifying the programs it funds and sending the money to more organizations working with drug users in the community.

In fiscal year 2025, the city spent $41 million of its opioid settlement funds on programs designed to prevent drug overdoses, connect people with addiction treatment and help the families of those who have died from accidental overdoses.

The funding ramped up to $48 million this fiscal year and is slated to grow to $50 million in the coming years, according to a recent report from the city.

When Nicole Hudson’s ex-boyfriend allegedly jumped on top of her, punched her and banged on the windows of her car, she feared for her life, according to a statement from her cited in state court records.

As Hudson tried to speed away to escape the violent confrontation at a Brooklyn block party in 2019, she ran over her sister’s girlfriend and dragged her body down the street, paralyzing her, court papers state.

Hudson was charged with attempted murder and assault, and faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted of the most serious charge. Brooklyn prosecutors offered her an alternative to a decadeslong sentence: She could plead guilty to reckless assault and face only five years in prison, followed by five years of post-release supervision.

But there was a catch. By taking the deal, Hudson would have to waive her right to a special hearing where a judge could consider a less severe sentence. Since 2019, a New York law has allowed domestic violence survivors who commit crimes related to their abuse to ask judges for more lenient punishment.

New York’s highest court ruled last month that Hudson’s plea agreement undermined that landmark state law, which intended to prevent domestic violence survivors from receiving excessive sentences. The Court of Appeals said forcing survivors to waive their right to one of these hearings as a condition of a plea deal would “eviscerate” a path to lower sentences for the “vast majority” of domestic violence survivors charged with crimes.

The decision ordered a lower court to reconsider Hudson’s case.

“I know that I caused great harm, and I take full accountability for that. I also know that my actions came from my years of abuse,” Hudson said in a statement. “I am very glad that other survivors will now have the chance to be heard in court about how their histories of abuse have affected their lives and their cases.”

Advocates for domestic violence survivors said the ruling will remove a barrier that has prevented victims across the state from sharing their experiences of abuse with a judge. But prosecutors expressed concern that the ruling would prolong an already painful process for the victims of the crimes the domestic violence survivors commit. They also point out that, like in Hudson’s case, the person a domestic violence survivor harms is not always the person abusing them.

“Basically, it boils down to us having to go back to a victim and letting them know that the sentence that was imposed, that they have come to terms with, is at risk of being reduced,” said Mary Pat Donnelly, President of the District Attorneys Association of the State of New York. “It can be very traumatizing to victims.”

Oren Yaniv, a spokesperson for the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, echoed that sentiment.

“We respect the court’s decision but are concerned it will make it harder to resolve appropriate cases early, even where prosecutors have thoughtfully considered the survivor-defendant’s circumstances,” he said.

Shifting power from prosecutors to judges

The Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act was first proposed in 2011 and took eight years to pass, following a groundswell of support from women’s advocacy groups, domestic violence organizations, attorneys, judges and houses of worship, according to a brief filed by lawmakers. New York was the first state to pass such a law, prompting similar proposals in several other states.

State lawmakers said in their brief to the court that allowing prosecutors to use these hearings as a “plea-bargaining chip” would go against the Legislature’s intent and take away power that they intended to put in the hands of judges.

“ This case is so important, because it gets back to what the New York Legislature was trying to do,” said Ross Kramer, director of the Incarcerated Gender Violence Survivors Initiative at Sanctuary for Families.

State Sen. Roxanne Persaud, who sponsored the legislation, declined to comment while the decision is under review.

The district attorneys association recognizes the need for the law and supports it, Donnelly said. But the new Court of Appeals ruling will complicate how prosecutors navigate what concessions to offer in a plea deal.

“For case law to come down that’s going to basically give a second chance to roll things back after we’ve already done so is frustrating,” she said.

Donnelly, who is the district attorney in upstate New York's Rensselaer County, said prosecutors already take many factors into consideration when offering a plea, including the age of the defendant, their criminal history, their mental health background and any victimization they may have endured. She said prosecutors also consider whether the victim acted as an aggressor in the situation or whether the defendant could argue that their own actions were justified.

“We feel that we are doing everything we can to examine these mitigating circumstances,” she said.

Prosecutors have more “intimate knowledge” of cases than judges, Donnelly said.

“I do think that it makes sense that we have some input when we’re approaching this. But, she said, “we will do what we always do and follow the directives of the law.”

The 'whirlwind' of plea negotiations

Hudson had a young daughter when she was arrested and was desperate to reunite with her while she was still a child, said her attorney, Paris DeYoung. She didn’t want to turn down the prosecution’s offer and risk spending decades behind bars.

“In her mind, that’s not really a choice,” said DeYoung, a supervising attorney in the Legal Aid Society’s criminal appeals bureau.

The Survivors Justice Project has received letters from people like Hudson in jails and prisons across the state, who said they were similarly pressured to give up a Domestic Violence Justice Act hearing in exchange for a plea deal, according to the group's legal and policy director, Kate Mogulescu.

“ It's almost an impossible situation,” said Mogulescu, who is also a professor at Brooklyn Law School.

She said domestic violence survivors often struggle to navigate these plea negotiations in the “chaos” of a criminal prosecution.

“They have just committed harm to a loved one,” she said. “It may have been a loved one that also was abusing them and causing them harm. But still, there's grief, there's guilt, there's loss in that moment.”

Mogulescu said many survivors have never discussed the domestic violence they experienced before that moment. The plea bargaining process can mimic the powerlessness they felt in their relationship, she said.

“ They understand viscerally the overwhelming control and power that prosecutors have,” she said. “In many instances, that is similar to the coercive control they've experienced in their domestic violence relationships.”

Donnelly said she would “hate to think that anyone’s being coerced into taking a plea.” She said prosecutors don’t interact directly with criminal defendants and that she hopes defense attorneys protect their clients from feeling pressured. District attorneys, she said, offer pleas based on the facts, the proof, and the experiences of both the victim and the defendant.

“The goal is, obviously, public safety and rehabilitation,” she said.

But Michele Evans said she felt like she had no other choice when she accepted a plea deal after she hit her then-husband with her car while she tried to flee an argument in the East Village in 2017. He survived, and she was charged with assault.

Unlike Hudson, Evans had a Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act hearing. In her case, she said, she felt pressure from the judge to plead guilty if she wanted to have a hearing.

“I hated making the decision,” she said. “But my lawyer, everything she was telling me [was], ‘You gotta take it, you gotta take it. You could end up with 25 years in prison.’”

After the hearing, a judge sentenced Evans to three years, according to incarceration records. She said she met many women on Rikers Island and in prison who felt pressured to take plea deals because they lacked evidence to prove they had experienced domestic abuse.

“It’s the path of least damage,” she said.

Evans said it was “unconscionable” that prosecutors were trying to prevent people from having the opportunity to argue in court that they were trying to defend themselves when they committed a crime.

“What kind of system would not want an accurate picture?” she said. “What kind of system would want to punish people for surviving?”