Kalief Browder, arrested for stealing a backpack and jailed at the infamously violent Rikers Island jail in New York City for three years without cost, has dedicated suicide. His case helped spark reform of the town’s legal justice system.
Browder, 22, ended his life at his household’s dwelling within the Bronx, in response to a report by The New Yorker, which wrote about Browder’s case final yr.
Kalief Browder was initially arrested on his means dwelling on May 14, 2010, after an unknown particular person recognized {the teenager}, then 16 years previous, as the one who robbed him a number of weeks prior. Browder was charged with second-degree theft and, unable to submit the $10,000 bail at the time of his arrest, was transferred to Rikers Island.
The case by no means went to trial, nonetheless, and Browder languished at Rikers Island till the charges had been dropped without clarification in June 2013. His keep at the jail included round two years of solitary confinement.
“No apology, no nothing,” Browder informed WABC in November 2013. “They just said, ‘Oh, case dismissed. Don’t worry about nothing.’ What do you mean, ‘Don’t worry about nothing?’ You just took over three years of my life.”
More than two and a half years into his detainment, Browder was provided a plea deal that may have possible launched him underneath a time served sentence. He didn’t take the deal as a result of he didn’t wish to admit guilt for the crime.
Browder struggled with melancholy and tried suicide a number of occasions each throughout and after his incarceration, in response to The New Yorker. He hung out within the psychiatric wards of each St. Barnabas Hospital within the Bronx and Harlem Hospital after his launch.
Browder has mentioned he was topic to quite a few assaults and beating from jail guards and different inmates. Rikers Island surveillance footage of two cases through which he was assaulted — one by an officer and one by a big group of inmates — had been supplied to The New Yorker.
Upon his suicide, The New Yorker’s Jennifer Gonnerman — additionally creator of the function article on Browder revealed final October — wrote that he was all in favour of public launch of the footage if solely to stop others from struggling the identical destiny.
“He was driven by the same motive that led him to talk to me for the first time, a year earlier,” Gonnerman wrote. “He wanted the public to know what he had gone through, so that nobody else would have to endure the same ordeals.”