This story comes from
The New Yorker and
democracynow. It is characterized as an
incredible story I think the correct adjective is
terrifying.
Kalief Browder never pleaded guilty and was never convicted. Browder maintained his innocence and requested a trial, but was only offered plea deals while the trial was repeatedly delayed. Near the end of his time in jail, the judge offered to sentence him to time served if he entered a guilty plea, and warned him he could face 15 years in prison if he was convicted. But Browder still refused to accept the deal, and was only released when the case was dismissed. During this time, Browder spent nearly 800 days in solitary confinement, a juvenile imprisonment practice that the New York Department of Corrections has now banned.
Browder was walking home with friends from a party in the Bronx, on May 15, 2010. Police stopped him based on a "tip that he had robbed someone weeks earlier." He was searched, they found nothing on him.
Nothing.
KALIEF BROWDER: No weapon, no money, anything he said that I allegedly robbed him for. So the guy actually changed up his story and said that I actually tried to rob him. But then another police officer came, and they said that I robbed him two weeks prior. And then they said, "We’re going to take you to the precinct, and most likely we’re going to let you go home." But then, I never went home.
Instead of sitting in a holding cell for a couple of hours while this terrible misunderstanding got sorted out, Browder ended up being sent to the adolescent jail on Rikers Island–for 33 months.
Follow below the fold for more.
The complications began:
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.
If you aren't from New York City, you may only be familiar with
Rikers Island from one of the many Law & Order shows; or maybe you remember reading about Rikers Island from the
Department of Justice's scathing report from August of this year.
You can also read about it in one of my previous diaries.
Summary: Rikers Island makes Shawshank Redemption seem like a Law & Order episode—completely made up. I knew kids back in the early 1990s who spent some time in Rikers; this is an example of Rikers Island living:
Browder told me that, one night soon after he arrived, a group of guards lined him and several other inmates up against a wall, trying to figure out who had been responsible for an earlier fight. “They’re talking to us about why did we jump these guys,” he said. “And as they’re talking they’re punching us one by one.” Browder said that he had nothing to do with the fight, but still the officers beat him; the other inmates endured much worse. “Their noses were leaking, their faces were bloody, their eyes were swollen,” he said.
Browder pleaded "not guilty" to the charges. So Browder is kept in a corrupt prison while the courts push off his trial date. New York City has a rule that any felony case's (sans homicide) trial date must be set for no more than six months after indictment.
In practice, however, this time limit is subject to technicalities. The clock stops for many reasons—for example, when defense attorneys submit motions before trial—so that the amount of time that is officially held to have elapsed can be wildly different from the amount of time that really has. In 2011, seventy-four per cent of felony cases in the Bronx were older than six months.
When they finally got around to seeing Browder, he was a couple years older and just as innocent as when he went in. They offered him a deal where he would plead guilty and he would get off for "time served." The charges were ultimately dismissed. There's a real righteous lawsuit coming, according to Browder's attorney, Paul V. Prestia:
Prestia, in his lawsuit, alleges “malicious prosecution,” charging that Johnson’s prosecutors were “representing to the court that they would be ‘ready’ for trial, when in fact, they never were.” Prestia said, “The million-dollar question is: When did they really know they didn’t have a witness? Did they really not know until 2013?” He suspects that, as he wrote in his complaint, they were “seeking long, undue adjournments of these cases to procure a guilty plea from plaintiff.” The city has denied all allegations of wrongdoing, and Johnson, when I asked about these accusations, said, “Certainly if there is something uncovered that we did wrong, I will deal with that here. But I don’t expect that to be the case.”
Prestia has represented many clients who were wrongfully arrested, but Browder’s story troubles him most deeply. “Kalief was deprived of his right to a fair and speedy trial, his education, and, I would even argue, his entire adolescence,” he says. “If you took a sixteen-year-old kid and locked him in a room for twenty-three hours, your son or daughter, you’d be arrested for endangering the welfare of a child.” Browder doesn’t know exactly how many days he was in solitary—and Rikers officials, citing pending litigation, won’t divulge any details about his stay—but he remembers that it was “about seven hundred, eight hundred.”
Read all of the links above. There's so much more to the story itself, so much more to the corruption of the
New York City correctional system.