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Cases in the Magistrates Court (115)
Eighty-one of those men and women were arraigned in the Harlem Magistrates court, having been arrested in the 28th Police Precinct below 130th Street. Thirty-two other men and women were arraigned in the Washington Heights court. Two additional men were arraigned in the Night Court during the disorder (a third was held to appear in the Harlem court and was counted among those arraigned there).
Magistrates in the Harlem and Washington Heights courts adjudicated the prosecutions of fifty-three of the 115 people (47%) arrested during the disorder; in the cases of the remaining sixty-five people they determined that the offense with which twenty were charged was a misdemeanor and sent them for trial in the Court of Special Sessions and determined that the offense with which the other forty-five were charged was a more serious felony offense and sent them to the Grand Jury for a hearing to decide if they should be tried in the Court of General Sessions. (In twenty-two of those cases, the grand jury saw the alleged offense differently, and voted misdemeanor charges that sent those individuals to the Court of Special Sessions not the Court of General Sessions).
Just over half of those convicted, thirty-nine of seventy-seven, were sentenced by Magistrates in the Harlem and Washington Heights courts. They had been convicted of disorderly conduct, which carried a maximum sentence of six months imprisonment or two years of probation. That was half the maximum sentence for a misdemeanor, so it is to be expected that those sentenced in the Magistrates Court were typically imprisoned for shorter periods that those sentenced in the Court of Special Sessions and in the Court of General Sessions