This past week in History was a little bit depressing. My teacher spent a class period talking about the case of Kalief Browder, which took place in 2014. The original article appeared on The New Yorker, but we read an excerpt for the sake of time. I became really emotional about this case, and it has resonated with me. Homework on that same subject was difficult, and I found myself angered in my writing. Here’s the case of Kalief Browder.
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10 days before Kalief Browder’s seventeenth birthday in 2010, Browder and his friend were returning home late one night, having partied. They were traveling through the Belmont section of Bronx, New York City. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, a police car stopped Browder and his friend in their tracks. The police said that there was a man in the car who accused Browder and his friend of stealing a backpack. Knowing he was not associated with a robbery, Browder and his friend allowed the police officer to check them. The police officer found nothing. The officer returned to his car to inform the man that accused the boys that they had no stolen property on them. He then returned to Browder and his friend and said that they were now accused of having stolen the backpack two days earlier. Browder and his friend were handcuffed, and assured that they would most likely be okay and be released quickly. Quickly turned into a few years in jail… all because someone had allegedly accused Browder and his of stealing a backpack.
Browder’s record was not completely devoid of crime. Earlier that same year, he had an encounterance with the police when he took a joyride truck for a ride and crashed into a parking lot.
Seventeen hours after being arrested and thrown into jail, Browder went to court, where he learned that he was accused of robbery, grand larceny and assault. At around this time, Browder’s friend was freed from the court and found innocent. Browder meanwhile, had to stay in court. To continue the case, the judge ordered that a bail of $3000 be paid. Browder’s family couldn’t afford to pay this bill so he was sent to Riker’s Island, a jail.
His parents couldn’t afford to hire a lawyer, so the court hired one for Browder. O’Meara was his name. O’Meara promised that Browder’s trial would probably be very quick and he’d be out in no time. Unfortunately, that’s not even close to how it played out. Browder was being tried in a Bronx court system, which had a reputation for having too many cases each year, that most were never even heard. His case kept being adjourned by the judge for one week. Soon, Browder learned that a “one week” adjournment really equaled six weeks or more of adjournment at this particular court. That part is really shocking to me. A one week adjournment stretching out to six weeks or more.
Browder spent this time at Ricker’s, where he was treated poorly. He was constantly beaten, and most of the time, for no apparent reason. He witnessed his friends be beaten, blood gushing out their noses and eyes swollen. Prior to this case, it wasn’t known how gruesomely Ricker’s treated the inmates. In fact, Browder remembers being threatened if he reported the poor treatment at Ricker’s to the government.
Day after day, Browder stayed in his jail cell and each day, he only hoped that his trial day was approaching since he knew at heart that he was innocent. New York has a “ready rule” which states that a case must be ready for court within six months of arraignment. Clearly, this rule did not follow through, as in 2011 alone, over 74% of cases were over six months old. Browder’s day in court never came.
After months of waiting, a compromise occurred. No trial ever took place [considering how clogged the court system was, very few trials ever took place], but Browder could choose to spend the next 3.5 years in prison, admitting he was “guilty”. Browder refused this at first, saying he wanted to go to court. He was so confident in his innocence that he was willing to spend 15 years in prison if he lost the case. But the trial never took place and 3 ½ years later, Browder was released from Ricker’s as a totally different man.
People say he came out different. The horrors of being in Ricker’s haunted him and he desperately tried multiple times to kill himself. Finally, at age 22, having no complete high school degree and missing multiple years of college which he tried to make up after coming out of jail, he succeeded in hanging himself.
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We’ve been studying the Constitution this past quarter. I believe just about all of Browder’s Constitutional rights were violated, especially the ones in the Bill of Rights. The police had no idea whether Browder had actually stolen anything. In Bronx at least, and in many places around the world, simply being sent to court to be tried almost guarantees years in prison due to the sloppy court system. Regardless, the most saddening part of this story, is that a man who had potential, was allegedly forced into a position where he became so hopeless that his only resort was to kill himself. It is this that resonates with me and at the same time, haunts me.
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