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.
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.
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.
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.
Hey Tomp - I wrote that post. I cited the author, linked extensively, and gave credit in multiple places. If there had been a contact on his HN bio, I would have reached out that way as well.
You're preaching to the choir - I wish all IP law was either abolished or changed significantly so that it actually promoted innovation.
However, that's completely besides the point. That's not how copyright works, what you did is most likely illegal, and the organization you represent would most likely not condone such behavior if the tables were turned.
The article documents recruiting Lyft drivers by riding with them, which is neither unethical nor illegal. It doesn't document cancelling rides, which would definitely be unethical, and should be illegal.
Uber ought to be liable to a lawsuit, at least in general for violating Lyft's terms of service with fake accounts on a mass scale.
Along the same lines as the AirBnB spamming controversy, when it was reveled they violated Craigslist's ToS on a large scale to grow their business in the early days.
Can anyone find meaningful detail in here about how Google hopes to solve the problem of death? Beyond the name of the company and the guy running it, this seems like a stock profile of Google X.
CyanogenMod, the company’s free open-source replacement firmware, has more than 8 million users, CEO Kirt McMaster says. But that counts only users who have elected to share data with Cyanogen, he says, estimating that the true number is two to three times that amount. "There’s always been lot of talk around who’s going to be the third dominant mobile computing platform," says McMaster, who previously co-founded Boost Mobile. "Windows Phone would probably be number three now. If you look at what our actual user base is, we might be equal to or greater than that."
I don't know. Seems to me like artificial intelligence hasn't lived up to the hype. We've had great progress in increasing processor speeds, but not as much luck at the Turing test.
