NEW YORK — New York City has quietly mounted a campaign to lobby for the appointment of Correction Commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie to oversee Rikers Island and the jail system if a federal judge chooses to appoint a receiver, the Daily News has learned.

Such a move, observers say, would undermine the very point of freeing control of the system from politics and city bureaucracy.

“Receivers are meant to bring in new leadership who are absolved from political pressures and can cut through the red tape,” said said Yonah Zeitz, Advocacy Director of the Katal Center for Equity, Health, and Justice.

“Appointing the current commissioner will result in more of the same, more deaths and more violence.”

Within DOC leadership, the effort has been dubbed “Operation Lynelle,” multiple sources within and outside the department say.

While Maginley-Liddie is perceived as more adept at navigating the political landscape than her predecessor Louis Molina, she has been in leadership positions at DOC for 10 years — the period of mismanagement highlighted by numerous reports by the federal monitoring team tracking violence and use of force in the jails.

On Nov. 27, U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain, who is overseeing the Nunez class action which led to the creation of the monitor in 2015, found the city in contempt of numerous court orders and wrote she is “inclined” to appoint a receiver to run the system.

“The use of force rate and other rates of violence, self-harm, and deaths in custody are demonstrably worse than when the Consent Judgment went into effect in 2015,” Swain wrote.

“Worse still, the unsafe and dangerous conditions in the jails, which are characterized by unprecedented rates of use of force and violence, have become normalized despite the fact that they are clearly abnormal and unacceptable.”

Observers said selecting a sitting commissioner would threaten the necessary independence of a receiver. One of the key issues cited by the monitor has been longstanding DOC and union practices in the jails that have diluted or blocked attempts at reform.

“This is clearly a last ditch effort by Mayor Eric Adams and it would completely undermine the entire purpose of a receivership,” Zeitz said.

Added lawyer David Rankin, who has handled a range of lawsuits involving jail breakdowns leading to deaths and serious injuries, “Only the City of New York could have the audacity to suggest that an appropriate receiver comes from the same group of people who have for decades run one of the worst jails in the country.

“It’s not a serious proposal and again shows how this mayor has no interest in bringing any humanity to Rikers Island.”

Rankin represented Nicholas Feliciano, a detainee who suffered brain damage in 2019 when he tried to hang himself in view of staff. Feliciano’s injuries will affect him for the rest of his life.

DOC officers waited for nearly eight minutes before they intervened. A captain and three officers were charged with official misconduct and the lawsuit settled for $28.7 million.

Maginley-Liddie joined DOC as an agency attorney on Sept. 21, 2015, almost exactly three months after the Rikers monitor was appointed on June 22 of that year, records show.

She rose to deputy general counsel in 2018, then senior deputy commissioner in 2020. In 2021, she was appointed first deputy commissioner, before she was named commissioner in December 2023 by Mayor Adams.

DOC Press Secretary Annais Morales declined to comment.

“The conversations between the parties and the Monitor pursuant to the Court’s previous orders are confidential,” she said in a statement. “Formal proposals in response to Judge Swain’s decision are due to the court in January.”

Nicholas Paolucci, a Law Department spokesman, also declined comment. “We will be responding to the court on January 14,” he said.

A receiver in theory could be a lawyer, former elected official or advocate, but the selection would most likely be someone with at least some experience managing a jail system, said a person familiar with the thinking in the case.

The talk of who could be the receiver could also be more than a year premature as much is to be done before Swain would actually appoint a person to the post. There is also the specter of litigation from the unions that could further delay such a move.

Maginley-Liddie has gotten a relative pass in the media compared to Molina’s stormy tenure and even some support from the monitoring team. In its Nov. 22 report, the monitor noted Maginley’s “solid and steady leadership,” and said she “has appointed a well-qualified leadership team.”

But some critics in the department have raised questions about of certain of her moves, including re-hiring Ned McCormick as associate commissioner after a detainee was paralyzed at a jail he was overseeing.

McCormick was commuting from Connecticut in a city-owned electric-powered Mustang, and has a complaint pending against him for allegedly ogling a female assistant deputy warden in a jail locker room.

On Oct. 18, in a decisions that rankled some mid-level managers in DOC, Maginley-Liddie promoted three Black deputy wardens to warden, passing over three veteran officers of other ethnicities. The upset managers were already irked over the fact the agency moved to employ more civilians in top-level positions limiting promotional tracks for uniformed supervisors, department sources said.

One of her promotees, Ronald Miller, got the bump even though he previously sued the DOC and was running North Infirmary Command in April 2023 when a detainee set a fire and subsequent investigations found the emergency response was slow and contributed to injuries to detainees.

A second, Courtney Rothwell, was running the Robert N. Davoren Center during a sharp increases in slashings and assaults. In 2017, Rothwell was found to have struck a detainee in the head while the inmate was prone.

Rothwell then made false statements, an administrative decision said. In 2018, then-Commissioner Cynthia Brann found the force was “unjustified” and confiscated 49 vacations from Rothwell as a penalty, records show.

Among the deputy wardens who were passed over was Joseph Caputo who manages court production for the entire system, Elayne Rivera, who has worked in investigations, punitive segregation and other commands, and Steven Ramkisson, the department’s first Guyanese deputy warden.

The jail population has been steadily increasing from an average of 5,559 in 2022 to 6,530 last month. The number of seriously mentally ill has risen from 853 in January 2022 to more than 1,200 to date.

The number of officers out sick has steadily declined but so has the total number of officers amid a challenging recruiting landscape.

The number of fights has risen each month from 280 in February 2023 to 649 in September.

Deaths have declined from 19 in 2022 to five so far in 2024. But length of stay has hovered near 100 days, among the longest in the nation.

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