African American
Related: About this forumA boy was accused of taking a backpack. The courts took the next three years of his life.
In the early hours of Saturday, May 15, 2010, ten days before his seventeenth birthday, Kalief Browder and a friend were returning home from a party in the Belmont section of the Bronx. They walked along Arthur Avenue, the main street of Little Italy, past bakeries and cafés with their metal shutters pulled down for the night. As they passed East 186th Street, Browder saw a police car driving toward them. More squad cars arrived, and soon Browder and his friend found themselves squinting in the glare of a police spotlight. An officer said that a man had just reported that they had robbed him. I didnt rob anybody, Browder replied. You can check my pockets.
The officers searched him and his friend but found nothing. As Browder recalls, one of the officers walked back to his car, where the alleged victim was, and returned with a new story: the man said that they had robbed him not that night but two weeks earlier. The police handcuffed the teens and pressed them into the back of a squad car. What am I being charged for? Browder asked. I didnt do anything! He remembers an officer telling them, Were just going to take you to the precinct. Most likely you can go home. Browder whispered to his friend, Are you sure you didnt do anything? His friend insisted that he hadnt.
At the Forty-eighth Precinct, the pair were fingerprinted and locked in a holding cell. A few hours later, when an officer opened the door, Browder jumped up: I can leave now? Instead, the teens were taken to Central Booking at the Bronx County Criminal Court.
Browder had already had a few run-ins with the police, including an incident eight months earlier, when an officer reported seeing him take a delivery truck for a joyride and crash into a parked car. Browder was charged with grand larceny. He told me that his friends drove the truck and that he had only watched, but he figured that he had no defense, and so he pleaded guilty. The judge gave him probation and youthful offender status, which insured that he wouldnt have a criminal record.
Late on Saturday, seventeen hours after the police picked Browder up, an officer and a prosecutor interrogated him, and he again maintained his innocence. The next day, he was led into a courtroom, where he learned that he had been charged with robbery, grand larceny, and assault. The judge released his friend, permitting him to remain free while the case moved through the courts. But, because Browder was still on probation, the judge ordered him to be held and set bail at three thousand dollars. The amount was out of reach for his family, and soon Browder found himself aboard a Department of Correction bus. He fought back panic, he told me later. Staring through the grating on the bus window, he watched the Bronx disappear. Soon, there was water on either side as the bus made its way across a long, narrow bridge to Rikers Island.
Of the eight million people living in New York City, some eleven thousand are confined in the citys jails on any given day, most of them on Rikers, a four-hundred-acre island in the East River, between Queens and the Bronx. New Yorkers who have never visited often think of Rikers as a single, terrifying building, but the island has ten jailseight for men, one for women, and one so decrepit that it hasnt housed anyone since 2000.
Male adolescents are confined in the Robert N. Davoren Centerknown as R.N.D.C. When Browder arrived, the jail held some six hundred boys, aged sixteen to eighteen. Conditions there are notoriously grim. In August of this year, a report by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York described R.N.D.C. as a place with a deep-seated culture of violence, where attacks by officers and among inmates are rampant. The report featured a list of inmate injuries: broken jaws, broken orbital bones, broken noses, long bone fractures, and lacerations requiring stitches.
Browders family could not afford to hire an attorney, so the judge appointed a lawyer named Brendan OMeara to represent him. Browder told OMeara that he was innocent and assumed that his case would conclude quickly. Even the assistant district attorney handling the prosecution later acknowledged in court papers that it was a relatively straightforward case. There werent hours of wiretaps or piles of complicated evidence to sift through; there was just the memory of one alleged victim. But Browder had entered the legal system through the Bronx criminal courts, which are chronically overwhelmed. Last year, the Times, in an extended exposé, described them as crippled and among the most backlogged in the country. One reason is budgetary. There are not nearly enough judges and court staff to handle the workload; in 2010, Browders case was one of five thousand six hundred and ninety-five felonies that the Bronx District Attorneys office prosecuted. The problem is compounded by defense attorneys who drag out cases to improve their odds of winning, judges who permit endless adjournments, prosecutors who are perpetually unprepared. Although the Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to a speedy and public trial, in the Bronx the concept of speedy justice barely exists.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/06/law-3
JustAnotherGen
(31,823 posts)Accused because we all 'look alike'.
And then the miserable son of a gun who falsely accused him gets to rest on his laurels in Mexico?
He never has to answer for what he's done?
And the D.A. doesn't have to answer either?
Yeah - yet - they will try to beat us over the head about drug sentencing and why black folks need to make the legalization of mary jane our number one priority.
What part of - the black kid didn't even get to go to trial - just sat in jail for three years - do these folks not get?
newfie11
(8,159 posts)Beyond appalling!
Control-Z
(15,682 posts)It is much easier to destroy a person's life than to repair it. Every lawyer, judge, and prison guard involved needs to have a taste of their own incompetence and cruelty.
JustAnotherGen
(31,823 posts)The cops who took the bogus police report in the first place.
That guy was a liar and they fell for it hook, line, and sinker.
Control-Z
(15,682 posts)I started to list everyone involved but decided the list would never be fully comprehensive. I really should have included the lying accuser and the cops, though, of course.
Damn. Poor kid.