The story of Jelani Henry, who says Facebook likes landed him in Rikers
theverge.com
theverge.com
'The violence changed him. "My experience on Rikers Island, that’s when I had to show, like not just be myself," he says. "I had to turn into a beast."'
'Henry said he struggled at times to avoid taking the guilty plea.'
'Four months later, with no move by the DA to proceed, his case was finally dismissed, almost two years to the day it began. The DA has refused to share the document that outlines the reason for dismissing Jelani’s case with him or his lawyer. To day, there has been no explanation and no apology for Jelani’s detention.''
'Unfortunately, Henry’s troubles from the arrest aren’t over. He is now facing assault charges stemming from a fight in prison. "He was innocent when he went in there, and now he might come out with a charge for defending himself," says Alethia.'
That, taken together, is one of the best (worst) indictments of our penal system. It is clearly designed not to rehabilitate, not even to penalize, but to oppress, and to self-perpetuate itself by creating 'criminals', either those who have been turned criminal by the penal system itself, or those who have been given plea deals with the deck stacked against them, regardless of their innocence. We need reform, very, very badly.
The amount of corruption in our institutions is truly staggering and playing stupid is such an obvious and common criminal tactic that three year olds can and do utilize it...So I wouldn't be so quick to apply Hanlon's razor.
1) Don't be born a poor urban youth
2) If #1 is unavoidable, don't have friends (and don't go anywhere because you might get jumped because you don't have friends)
3) Never be in any photos, even by accident
4) Never sign up for facebook/twitter/etc
5) Never talk to the police
6) Plea deals are mostly bullshit (these last two I knew already)
I'm not a lawyer, so maybe someone more well-versed can help me, but:
> But the district attorney convinced a judge that most of the time Jelani spent in jail shouldn’t count towards that release. She argued that days spent gathering more evidence, delays in testimony by a police officer who was on vacation, or instances where she was unprepared to make her case did not figure into the six-month period
Would this not be a slam-dunk lawsuit for the Henrys that his sixth amendment rights were violated? Obviously not going to bring back lost time, but still, that seems insane.
That's not how it works in New York...
> While he was incarcerated, the police matched his DNA to another gun recovered near the scene of a gang altercation.
As for his brother Jelani, it wasn't Facebook that landed him in Rikers, it was a witness identification. Now, that's a tragedy, but the old fashioned kind: over reliance on eye witness identification and overly aggressive prosecutor tactics. 20 years ago, these prosecutions would've been based on the testimony of random people in the neighborhood about who was hanging out with who.
That's not what I get from the article. It was a witness that got him accused it was facebook likes that lead to him being denied bail on the grounds of being "gang affiliated"/"part of a conspiracy".
His story wouldn't have been half as bad, if he'd just been falsely accused, and then had the case dismissed. That's how a working justice system should work: some innocents will be caught up in it -- but they shouldn't suffer any more for it than strictly necessary.
On another note, with such strong conspiracy laws in NY, maybe there's still hope to get some convictions down on Wall Street?
I might have been unclear. This was my point. It appears that he might have been charged with attempted murder either way, but might very probably have been granted bail if not for the facebook likes. So it's not a far stretch to say that the likes landed him in jail?
I do think it is pretty bad that you can be jailed for a year because of hanging out with childhood friends in pictures.
> Asheem was charged with conspiracy in the third degree. The evidence was the gun charge to which he had already pled guilty, and photos, which he says dated back to the time when he was 14 and 15, showing him and other boys under the banner of Goodfellas.
> Alethia says that in Asheem’s case, the judge told him he was looking at a possible sentence of 15 to 30 years. It was a frightening length of time that convinced Asheem to take a plea deal that could range from 16 months to 4 years instead.
The gun charge just upped his prison sentence to 6 years instead of 1-4.
edit - Also, we all read the same article. You cannot claim the same article we all read as an extra source of information revealing knowledge that the article itself would have you believe otherwise. Well, you can. But it is bullshit.
> "Nobody wants to see 14- and 15-year-old kids getting locked up," says Chris Watler, Project Director at the Harlem Community Justice Center. "But if a kid is picking up a gun, or shooting other kids, we need to stop them from doing that. If you have a kids posing online with a gun, what is the obligation of law enforcement? There is a legitimate public safety concern."
And that's a freaking community-justice type talking.
In a city guns are for murder. They serve no other purpose.
But until the US stops celebrating guns like some religious totem that supposedly defends the common folk from a nuclear armed superpower, guns will be in US cities.
edit - I don't think guns should be banned, but I think they should be licensed. And to put it in perspective, I think that a gun license should be harder to get than a car license but easier to get than an explosives license.
It's funny, right now there's a big debate on the use of torture in the united states and the priority in terms of the issues surrounding it tend to go like this:
1. whether it's effective in producing valuable intelligence
2. whether it's moral
somewhere way down the list:
n. whether it's legal (it's not)
We live in a crazy world right now.
1) Never sign up for any social networking service with your real name
2) Never talk to the cops
3) Never let photos of yourself appear on the Internet for any reason.
Honestly, those are rules everyone should use.
The boot on the face usually ends up being local.
EDIT:
"While he was incarcerated, the police matched his DNA to another gun recovered near the scene of a gang altercation."
How the does that even work? I'm calling bullshit.
EDIT2:
Alethia finally convinced her lawyer to file a speedy trial motion and in November of 2013 Jelani was given bail. Four months later, with no move by the DA to proceed, his case was finally dismissed, almost two years to the day it began. The DA has refused to share the document that outlines the reason for dismissing Jelani’s case with him or his lawyer. To day, there has been no explanation and no apology for Jelani’s detention.
And more of this nonsense. It's not just the beat cops that we should be watching closely. This is absurd.
Reminds me of a quotation I saw earlier today; “When the axe came into the woods, the trees said ‘at least the handle’s one of us’”
I think it works like this: As you touch things, some of your skin cells fall off and adhere to the thing you touched. Those cells can give up DNA to an investigator. So it would mean that he touched the gun in question.
When did he touch it? The DNA doesn't say anything about that.
It seems like stories on 60 Minutes are the closest I've seen to hitting the mark.
This is one story that is part of a larger story cutting across the country. I don't know anybody republican or democrat in America that would think being jailed for two years without a charge is acceptable. This is the right time for America to deal with these _moral_ issues.
I hope your story takes off.
As I worked on the story for two years I became pretty depressed at times. I mostly write about technology - new gadgets and startups - which keep me feeling generally excited and optimistic about the future. With this story i really came to grips with the way the deck is stacked against poor people, doubly do for poor people of color growing up in high crime areas.
I didn't come away from this thinking anyone was 100% guilty or innocent. But I certainly know, based on what I was like in high school, that I would have made the same or worse choices as these two boys if my teenage reality had been like theirs.
I'm curious because -- knowing nothing about forensic science -- that statement sounds really weird, and regardless of whether it's a sensible statement or whether it's true in this individual case, I'm curious if there's a loophole that lets the police badger suspects with non-existent evidence.
It seem that a fair number of them consider their jobs as simply to prosecute the person in front of them, not get to any kind of truth or justice.
Remember Plaxico Burress? The NFL Wide Receiver? He spent two years in federal prison for shooting HIMSELF in the leg with a firearm that wasn't licensed in NY or NJ:
http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=4493887
Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau insisted that the former New York Giants wide receiver serve at least two years in prison for violating the city's strict gun laws. Mayor Michael Bloomberg had also publicly called for Burress to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
On July 29, Burress took the rare and risky step of testifying before the grand jury, hoping to convince the panel that the gun was not used in the commission of a crime and that he was the lone victim. But days later, Burress was indicted on two counts of criminal possession of a weapon and one count of reckless endangerment. He faced a minimum sentence of 3½ years if convicted at trial.
I'm pretty sure in a state like Texas, they wouldn't even bother him once they knew his connection to the gang was minimal.
[1]http://reason.com/archives/2005/02/15/the-klans-favorite-law
Coates wrote a very good piece about this: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/03/black-pa...
[0] http://melbourneinstitute.com/downloads/working_paper_series...
I think Americans (black Americans in this case) have all kinds of baked in things which can be either positive or negative in their daily life interaction with others. So someone straight from Africa, let's say, has no preconceived notions of how one is expected to act in a given community in order to fit in. An immigrant is for some purposes a blank slate (they bring their own tendencies from home, of course) but not having baked in American tendencies to interact with (part of society) might afford them a different experience, for the most part.
If there were differences in experiences, it'd be interesting if there was something to learn from that. For example, we have relatively recent Somali and Eritrean communities --normalizing their experience (ie take out the difficulties being a refugee, etc. might impose) what has their experience been in relation to the larger community?
But the district attorney convinced a judge that most of the time Jelani spent in jail shouldn’t count towards that release. She argued that days spent gathering more evidence, delays in testimony by a police officer who was on vacation, or instances where she was unprepared to make her case did not figure into the six-month period. The judge agreed. In a bit of Kafka-esque arithmetic, 19 months became 83 days. Instead of finishing trade school, Jelani celebrated his 20th and 21st birthdays in a cell.
That right is not as obvious as it seems. Also, though I cannot find a citation, I believe that everyone typically waives those rights (in a very murky manner) upon arraignment.
Personally, I fault the entire system for the man's treatment; the DA, the judge, all the way up to the governor.
The younger brother was arrested on suspicion based on his Facebook activity, held for a couple of years at Rikers Island, and never charged.
IMO the outrages are (1) the older brother received a harsh sentence for appearing in pictures (his gun charge for owning an illegal, non-functional gun resulting in probation) and (2) the younger brother was held for two years with no trial.
It's a very long story and I don't honestly expect everyone on the internet to read it closely or all the way through. But to be clear, it was the older brother who owned a gun. Law enforcement never produced evidence that Jelani, the younger brother accused of double attempted murder, owned or used a firearm.