Political Crossfire Forums

Kalief Browder, a young man from New York City who had gained national renown in recent years as a symbol of America's broken criminal justice system, took his own life this weekend, according to a report from The New Yorker. He was 22.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/0 ... 35420.html


My heart breaks for the injustice served to this poor boy and his family.The ones who allowed this to happen did not even care. I was sure that here in the United States every person is guaranteed by law the right to a speedy trial. I was wrong. Quite informative: the US represents 5% of the world's population, yet they have an incarceration rate of 25% of the world's prison population.

i think just about all nonviolent crimes should have low or no bail, unless they were out on bail when they were charged again. the most disturbing part of that article says that of 10K in rikers, 1.5K were unconvicted and had been there for over a year

This has been something of a story for a while in NYC. Shame that it took him killing himself to bring more attention to the story. They held him for 3 years with insufficient evidence to press any charges.

If anyone wants an in depth read on his story here's a good piece from last fall www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/06/before-the-law

So question for everyone: How do get rid of the "oh well" attitude our system seems to have, ruining a persons life for no reason and then when the f**k up becomes too blatant to deny basically saying "well you get to go home now, congrats". I'm not sure how, but prosecutors definitely need to be held more accountable for this kind of shit.

Could you expand on consequences for prosecutors? People can already sue the state for a lot of things surrounding incarceration but what would you actually be comfortable imposing in terms of personal liability for prosecutors who do this stuff?