Canzoneri-Fitzpatrick proposes dismemberment bill

A group of teenagers was walking home from school on Feb. 29 when they found a human arm in Southards Park, in Babylon. A police investigation revealed that a man and a woman had been dismembered, their body parts hidden across Babylon. Police arrested four suspects in connection with the crime — and, days later, those suspects were released from jail.

“These people could be running around in the community because the bail laws prevent us from holding them,” State Sen. Patricia Canzoneri-Fizpatrick, from Malverne, said. “You don't know who they are. They could be behind you in line at CVS. They could be at the library.”

Canzoneri-Fitzpatrick, with State Sen. Anthony Palumbo and Assemblyman Mike Durso, has introduced legislation to make body dismemberment and concealment of a human corpse a bail-eligible class E felony. It would also create an exception to help prevent suspects in such cases from being released, even with GPS monitoring.

But this, Canzoneri-Fitzpatrick said, is just addressing the symptom of the problem — not the cause.

“I would prefer we look at bail reform in total and change a number of things,” she said. “Unfortunately, we’re forced to come up with these piecemeal legislation to remove some of the more egregious impacts of bail reform.”

Bail can only be set for a specified list of crimes. Murder is on the list. Hiding a human corpse is not. That’s what happens when you legislate for specific facts, Canzoneri-Fitzpatrick said — other things inevitably fall through the cracks. Further, New York is the only state where judges don’t have the discretion to consider the dangerousness of the suspect when determining bail.

“The DA said if the judge could have considered the dangerousness of the defendants, he would have been able to set bail,” Canzoneri-Fitzpatrick said, “But we took that away from them.”

Bail reform served to fix valid problems, she said, like people staying in jail for too long because they couldn’t afford to set bail — but the pendulum has swung too far, and the bail system now favors criminals over victims. 

“Anybody that could stand here and say that a person who's dismembering a corpse, throwing a human head into a park, a leg, an arm, that they are not dangerous,” Canzoneri-Fitzpatrick said, “You need to think really hard about your definition of dangerousness. Because in my opinion, those people clearly are a danger to our community if they can act in such a depraved manner.”

But will the bill make its way to the state Senate and Assembly floors before session ends in June? Whether it does, Canzoneri-Fitzpatrick said, is entirely up to the Democrat-controlled legislature.

The main question is whether or not Democrats will admit they made mistakes with bail reform, she added. But in the meantime, she and other state representatives are focused on solutions that mitigate what they believe are the most serious effects of bail reform.

“These pieces of legislation are tangible ways of making things better,” Canzoneri-Fitzpatrick said. “That's what our communities need. They need to feel safer. But (Democrats) first have to acknowledge that there's a problem.”