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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Do you really not see the yawning chasm between your 1-4 and what's described in the article? There's obviously a lot more going on here than this guy being in pictures with gang bangers.

> 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.

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> As for his brother Jelani, it wasn't Facebook that landed him in Rikers, it was a witness identification.

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?

He was in Rikers, a jail used to hold people pending trial, because he was charged with attempted murder on the basis of the eye-witness identification. The article doesn't even say he was charged with a conspiracy or that the Facebook posts were used as evidence to charge him with a conspiracy. It appears the prosecutor uses the Facebook posts to show gang affiliation, which is a factor in deciding whether someone is a dangerous criminal who shouldn't be granted bail (i.e. being set free pending trial).

> It appears the prosecutor uses the Facebook posts to show gang affiliation, which is a factor in deciding whether someone is a dangerous criminal who shouldn't be granted bail (i.e. being set free pending trial).

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 see your point, but that's a pretty "cute" way to phrase what happened. It makes it seem like he was arrested and charged for what he did on facebook.

It's important to remember that jail is for innocent people, prison is for those that have been found guilty. We don't know why the case was dismissed, but I think it is rather safe to assume that it wasn't a very strong case. So bail might "ordinarily" have been rather likely.

I do think it is pretty bad that you can be jailed for a year because of hanging out with childhood friends in pictures.

Unless I misread this, the reason he was incarcerated to begin with:

> 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.

My point is that the second gun possession clearly indicates that his involvement ran deeper than the article leads you to believe.

Is it a good gun or a bad gun?

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.

To New Yorkers, all guns are bad guns:

> "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.

To be fair to New Yorkers, they probably don't get to see the good sides of guns, like the time someone's Aunt Daphne got saved from a bear, or something.

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.

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