NEW YORK – A U.S. appeals court has refused to dismiss a lawsuit filed by daughter of an Indian diplomat against New York City and members of the New York Police Department on suspicion of sending obscene emails to her teacher.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Second Circuit Court ruled that the case filed by Krittika Biswas, who was jailed in 2011 for a day, will not be dismissed since the arguments made by the defendants New York City and members of the police department are “without merit”.
The defendants sought to dismiss the lawsuit filed by Biswas on the grounds of “qualified immunity.”
Biswas’s lawyer Ravi Batra told PTI that the appeals court agreed with his position that not a single defendant enjoyed “qualified immunity” and so were not entitled to get the case dismissed and “leave her without a remedy for the wrongs inflicted upon her by the defendants as claimed in the suit.”
Biswas had filed the lawsuit seeking 1.5 million dollars in damages for her wrongful imprisonment and suspension from school. She was detained and arrested in February 2011 on the grounds that she had sent “offensive and sexually threatening” emails to her teachers in Queens’s John Browne High School. Biswas is now in India.
The defendants had moved to “dismiss” the lawsuit “in its entirety for failure to state a claim” under federal rules.
A U.S. federal judge had in September last year also refused to dismiss in its entirety the lawsuit, as sought by the city, NYPD and New York City Department of Education. The city had then appealed against the decision.
The lawsuit details the circumstances that led to Biswas being handcuffed and her forced imprisonment for approximately 28 hours “for nothing.”
Biswas was “forced to be processed through the criminal justice system, and spent over 24 hours in jail without being allowed to meet her parents or visited by senior Indian diplomats. All of this occurred, despite her actual innocence as this was a case of mistaken identity,” it said.
It states that Biswas was discriminated against and falsely accused of sending offensive e-mails because of her ethnicity.
The school and police authorities “selected Krittika for false arrest and detention, malicious prosecution, suspension and disciplinary treatment due to her race and ethnicity as an Indian of South east Asian decent,” it said.
Batra said a jury trial in the case would serve to expose systemic flaws in the country’s public school system’s disciplinary process that put 1.1 million kids at “risk of being falsely charged, falsely arrested and accepting undeserved punishment as they can’t afford the fight we are fighting” on Biswas’s behalf.
“Until Krittika receives a full measure of justice, including, paying for her exploded legal fees due to the defendants actions, this case will not go away. Krittika’s respect will be redeemed in full measure,” he said.
