Posted on 10/31/2014 10:44:37 PM PDT by heartwood
Jennifer Gonnerman: "One night in the spring of 2010, Kalief [Browder] and a friend walking home late from a party in the Bronx, walking down the street and a police car pulled them over. A cop got out and said that a man in the back of his police car had accused Kalief and his friend of robbing him. And Kalief protested that he was innocent. There was nothing found in his pockets or his friends pockets, but they took them into the precinct, into to the station house anyway. Kalief thought it was a misunderstanding that might take an hour or two to clear up, but that's not what happened. He ended up spending three years in jail [without trial]
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
In NY a defendant has the right to a speedy trial within six months. However court delays do not count towards that time. So if the prosecution asks for a one week delay, or one day, and the court takes six to twelve weeks to schedule a new hearing, only the one week, or day, counts towards the six months. And the prosecution appears to have asked for a dozen delays without reprimand.
The interviewee writes a better version of the story in the New Yorker but we can't post from there.
Browder is suing for $20M, and if I were a NYC juror and taxpayer, I'd give him a decent fraction of that, but it really ought to come out of prosecutorial hide.
I’d give him every dime he asked for. The public won’t care till it hurts. We’re the ultimate employers for public workers.
I don’t care what his prior record was. He was innocent till proven guilty. Not stick him in prison and forget about him.
Fire the prosecutor and raise taxes. Eventually, the people will demand better.
Ping!
Something over 90%, perhaps more than 95%, of criminal cases are handled via plea bargains. Which don’t require prosecutors to do anything difficult or stressful.
So obviously they have an incentive to make an example of those who refuse to go along. Guilt, innocence and the Constitution be damned.
“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed”
Nothing I can see in there about using anything other than the calendar everybody else uses. If a state, with all its resources, cannot be ready for trial in six months from the date of arrest, drop the charges.
It also seems pretty obvious to me that in practice the 90% or 95% or more of cases that end in plea bargains have de facto repealed 6A.
I think he deserved a decent payout for his unfortunate experience. He may have been a petty criminal involved in relatively minor hijinks, but he, as far as anybody knows, was not a murderer and he didn’t assault anybody.
It’s terrible that the prosecutor was able to keep him in prison well beyond the penalty of the original crime and could have potentially kept him in prison for life by always “losing” the paperwork.
I agree that there should no tolerance of prosecutors who do these things.
question, where were his lawyers? who were the prosecutors in charge of his case? They deserve to be fired.
Why do all these incidents always seem to happen in states where the Rats are in power?
The Bronx courts handled about 4160 felony cases in one of the years Browder was jailed. Just about 4000 were plea-bargained.
One judge hired for the purpose managed to close 1000 cases. “At the start of 2013, there were nine hundred and fifty-two felony cases in the Bronx, including Browder’s, that were more than two years old. In the next twelve months, DiMango disposed of a thousand cases, some as old as five years.” (New Yorker, Oct. 6, 2014)
the money should come from the pockets and retirement accounts of NY public servants
His defense lawyers were public defenders who do not have the equivalent power the prosecutors do to bring a case to a close.
By the story, the prosecutor was able to keep the case on going by telling a judge that the paperwork wasn’t complete at that point and requested a delay.
The defenders have no power in forcing prosecutors to complete the paperwork.
Kind of makes my point.
This judge closed 20 cases a week, or, presumably 4 per day on average. One every two hours. That’s not unreasonable for traffic court. For felony cases, not so much.
Without most if not all of those being plea bargained, the system would collapse. But such a system quite obviously cares little about guilt or innocence. It is, by necessity, desperately focused on productivity.
If the dog ate their homework, sorry. Get rid of the dog.
It is widely protested that the incarceration rate of the States is far higher than the rest of the world’s. This kind of sausage justice can’t make the picture look any prettier.
For these rates to look reasonable, one would have to assume the cops and prosecutors just don’t make mistakes.
The US Department of Justice reported a 97% conviction rate in federal courts for 2012.
To a reasonable person that makes their title an oxymoron. I’d be much happier with a 75% conviction rate.
Come to think of it, why bother hiring an attorney if you’re to be tried in federal court?
A case dropped in mid trial, would it count in calculating that percentage?
I have no idea. As is traditional, I grabbed a statistic off Wiki.
The traditional approach by federal prosecutors, I believe, is to greatly overcharge and then grudgingly agree to a more reasonable plea bargain, accepted by the accused who is still in shock from the initial charges.
Pushing something to mid trial and backing out at that point wouldn’t count, I’d think. I.e. if the prosecution can actually see that it is in trouble. It’s trials that reach verdicts that would count.
16 posts and no torches and pitchforks yet
I’m surprised.
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