Very sad story. Single parent household/lack of father figure, neighbourhoods that exist in their own separate reality, communities where the wrong things (acting hard, etc) are valued over education, broken social services, over-zealous prosecutors, systemic prejudice, and tech corporations and their advertiser patrons pushing a consumerist agenda above all else.
This injustice is absolutely not a result of a single parent household, and insinuating that in some sense the mother is to blame here is gross. Your other suggestion, that the community itself is at fault (because they culturally value the wrong things) is mistaken. It's the other way around, the larger american culture is at fault because it is biased against black communities.
I think it's a very complicated issue and does not have an easy answer but consider recent African immigrants to the US and US-born and raised people of African descent. I'd love to see a study to see if their experiences are any different. I suspect, but am not sure, that 'culture' has some influence.
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?
That question makes no sense. Something can move the average while leaving a wide distribution. Let's say I go around your neighborhood leaving caltrops all over the roads, causing a rash of flat tires. Your question is akin to asking, if the cause of all this is mikeash's caltrops, how come so many cars didn't get flat tires?
The problem is that the odds are stacked against people of color. Some people beat the odds and succeed regardless, and that's great. Not everybody can be exceptional, though. So if some demographics are relatively disadvantaged then those people will on average have a worse quality of life through no fault of their own.
Rather than misplaced appeals to authority (Coates is an opinion writer that has his own agenda, and definitely benefits from the narrative he and his publication loves to push), it would behoove us to approach this with a holistic understanding of the causes. There have been ample studies[0] done that show the lack of a father (therefore a single parent household) leads to increased delinquency in youths.
"We are coming to find you and monitor every step you take," Joanne Jaffe, the department’s Housing Bureau chief, told The New York Times in 2013. "And we are going to learn about every bad friend you have."
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.
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.
Nor can DNA evidence reveal intent. What if one handles a gun merely to get a feel for it (no different from ogling someone's phone or slipping into the driver's seat of a friend's new car)? That said, the fact that a defendant touched a gun, plus an eyewitness account putting that defendant at a crime scene, plus recovery of the gun from the crime scene, etc. all work together to make the case that a defendant committed a crime with a particular weapon. Just because evidence is circumstantial doesn't make it any less powerful in legal proceedings.
Did I really need to know they were born on the same day? This was way too long for me to actually get to the part where he went to jail for Facebook likes. Once I got to the part where he really did have a gun, I figured there's more to it than the headline implies.
Hey - writer of the story here. The goal was to show two brothers, very much two sides of the same coin - born one year apart, raised in the same environment. What choices did they make, how did that lead to different outcomes (or not).
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.
My reading was different. There are two brothers. The older was arrested for possessing a gun, pled out and got probation, and then years later was arrested for conspiracy charges based on appearing in pictures with "known gang members". He pled out again, got jail time, and got more jail time for being linked to a gun while in jail.
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.
Do any DAs in any case seem to care at all about what they're doing to the future of anyone in the name of being "tough on crime?" Regardless of the situation.
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.
DA is a political stepping stone, so you convict everything in sight and hope your cases get press so you can shamelessly self promote your tough on crime image.
How do we get excellent stories like this into the broader narrative in America? This is a story that needs to be read carefully. If somebody were to edit this down into a 10 second segment fit for insertion into the nightly news I don't think it would pack as much punch.
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 started the story after a friend, who is a social worker and civil rights activist, told me that he knew several kids from a large Crew Cut raid in Brooklyn, and that they were good kids who had left the city for college, but been dragged back by a conspiracy indictment relating to a crew they left years earlier. Very similar to Asheem's situation.
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.
Did the DA offer just one plea deal or was a series of offers made over the time Jelani was in jail? This seems to me like the DA was using pre-trial detention as a pressure tactic.
Apropos of the "your DNA was found on a gun" thing, what are the standards of evidence for charges that don't go to trial and plea deals? Can the DA/police essentially make something up, offer you a plea deal, and then -- if you confess and take the plea -- never follow it up with any real proof?
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.
The DA needs to present enough evidence at a grand jury to get an indictment. After that, at least in NY, much of the evidence does not have to be shared until trial. Plea deals in these big crew conspiracy cases often occur without the defendant seeing much of the evidence against them.
Keep in mind when you live in states who have incredibly harsh laws for gun control, this is pretty common.
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:
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.
Wait, so you're telling me that gun control laws are used to oppress the under class? Even though they were passed to protect them? Because that's the socioeconomic group that suffers most from gun violence? Well I'll be monkey's uncle...
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 seriously insane. Hypothetically (realizing there are numerous practical obstacles), could this be challenged in a federal court? It seems like an egregious violation of the sixth amendment.
The state's attorney and mayor's office have both called for major changes at Riker's and threatened to sue if conditions are not improved there. But sadly that won't solve the problem of a clogged court system that allows prosecutors to delay trials for months or even years.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
Wow. On top of everything, this should definitely violate speedy trial requirements:
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.
I would suspect asking for a speedy trial is a huge bet on which side can get better prepared in time for the trial date. Possibly most defense attorneys don't want to take that bet because prosecutors already have their evidence in hand.
Jelani did not waive the right to a speedy trial, and in fact his lawyer filed the motion demanding one on three separate occasions before it was granted. This was more than one year into his incarceration.
This is just the case outside the rule, the DA was delaying likely because the case was so shaky to begin with because of lack of evidence. The DA was waiting for him to crack and take a plea bargain so that in the end the DA still looks tough on crime.
Personally, I fault the entire system for the man's treatment; the DA, the judge, all the way up to the governor.
it is clear that the guys would have benefited from having a lawyer or at least from some advice. As they obviously can't afford a full legal representation it seems that this is where technology may potentially come to play, something like ... wait for it ... Uber for lawyers/legal help.
Seems to me that being in jail for 2 years and then having charges dismissed without ever going to trial should constitute a priori evidence of false imprisonment.
'The district attorney offered him 20 years if he pled guilty, but Jelani refused.'
'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.
There’s a difference between being designed to oppress and being designed to rehabilitate but extremely poorly so and oppressing as an unintended side effect. I suspect the latter is more likely.
Even more likely, is that it isn't 'designed' at all, but rather cobbled together by disparate interests that are variously trying to appear tough on crime, scam the system of as much money as possible, advance their careers, etc. None of these interests probably give a shit if the system ends up rehabilitating anyone, nor if it creates criminals, because neither outcome affects them in any material way (that is readily apparent to them, anyway).
Yes yes, Hanlon's razor. My choice of words there was perhaps poor; the point is clear, the system does not (X), but instead (Y)s, and my attribution to malice in doing so was incorrect phrasing.
The point is clear, but Hanlon's razor is just a bullshit adage that people invoke when they want to stop thinking about something. It's a proverb, not a hard scientific fact and it certainly doesn't apply to all situations. Malice indeed exists everywhere and on a spectrum just like ignorance. People are generally self-centered and they act on their self-centeredness all the time.
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.
66 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadCoates wrote a very good piece about this: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/03/black-pa...
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?
[0] http://melbourneinstitute.com/downloads/working_paper_series...
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.
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.
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’”
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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...
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/06/law-3
> 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.
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 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.