Three Years on Rikers Without Trial

I've lost track of the number of examples showing how fundamentally broken the US justice system is. Corruption, abuse, and just plain bureaucratic incompetence abound, and at any time any one of us could get swept up in it with little to no recourse.

And the worst of it is that there's no sign of it stopping. No efforts to fix the system, only the occasional story of one or two particular cases getting the chance they should have got years ago, and only because of a massive publicity campaign.

It's little wonder Aaron Swartz took his life. Staring down the massive barrel of the United States judicial system, which makes up rules it never holds itself to. It is a system designed to instill hopelessness and despair upon anyone it turns its gaze to.

Follow up article: http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/kalief-browder-and-a...

Efforts are being made to quicken this, but little can be done to reverse the damage done to this young.