newyorker.com
His father, a livery-cab driver, hired a lawyer named Candace Kurtz to represent him, and she urged him to start studying in the jail’s law library, so that he could better understand his predicament. Hamilton is now fifty, tall and heavyset, with a shaved head and a thin scar running down the right side of his scalp. “I took it seriously,” he recalled recently, “because here’s some stranger saying, ‘Hey, listen. Get out of wherever you’re at. Wake up, kid, this is real.’ ” He started spending t…
almost 8 years ago
newyorker.com
For four days, Al Homssi, who is twenty-four, had been stranded in the United Arab Emirates, trying to get back to his job as a medical resident at a hospital outside Chicago. As I reported yesterday, he had flown to the United Arab Emirates to get married, but he could not return to the U.S. because he carries a Syrian passport. While he was abroad, President Trump had signed an executive order barring the entry of citizens from Syria and six other Muslim-majority countries. Early Sunday mornin…
over 7 years ago
newyorker.com
The Brooklyn neighborhood persevered after 9/11. Can it survive in the age of Trump?
almost 7 years ago
newyorker.com
How the criminal-justice system works up close, in eighteen videos.
over 6 years ago
newyorker.com
In January, a New York State parole board will decide whether to believe Kelly’s
daughter, who says that she falsely accused her father of rape when she was
eight years old.
over 6 years ago
newyorker.com
Harcourt, now fifty-four, earned a law degree and a Ph.D. in political
science from Harvard, wrote six books, edited eight more, and became a
professor at Columbia Law School. He also, for the past twenty-seven
years, has been representing a prisoner on Alabama’s death row named
Doyle Lee Hamm. Soon after finishing law school, Harcourt moved to the
South and began working alongside the attorney Bryan Stevenson, who had
just started a project providing lawyers to death-row prisoners in
Alabama. I…
over 6 years ago
newyorker.com
Clarissa and Ben, who were both in their early thirties, had been together since they were teen-agers. For seven years, they had lived with their sons in the Wells, as the project was known. Ben had grown up there and was used to dealing with hostile, sometimes corrupt officers, but Clarissa, whose father had been a private detective, expected better treatment from the police. In the months after Ben’s confrontation with Watts, whenever she saw a police officer talking to Ben she intervened, mar…
almost 6 years ago
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Every year, several thousand people across the country die while imprisoned. Local officials report the number of deaths to the Department of Justice, but very little attention is paid to the question of how many of these deaths could have been prevented. Several years ago, Homer Venters, a physician and the former chief medical officer for New York City’s Correctional Health Services, sought to answer this question. Between 2010 and 2016, there were a hundred and twelve deaths in New York City…
about 5 years ago
newyorker.com
Sivin is Puerto Rican; Sundaram is Indian-American. The conversation paused, as they both skimmed their mental Rolodexes. After a few moments, Sivin came up with a name: “Tiff could run!”
Their friend Tiffany Cabán was thirty-one and born and raised in Queens, with grandparents from Puerto Rico. Sivin, who had worked with Cabán at New York County Defender Services, knew her as a “very effective” public defender who spent her days representing poor people in the criminal courthouses in Manhattan.…
almost 5 years ago
newyorker.com
Now Torres, who is thirty-one, is campaigning to represent the Bronx in the U.S. House of Representatives. Several candidates have entered the race, but the toughest one for him to beat may be the same city councilman he denounced. Díaz, a seventy-six-year-old Pentecostal minister whose trademark is a cowboy hat, is very well known in the Bronx, where he has held elected office for nearly eighteen years. He also has a long record of taking anti-gay stances. (In 2011, when he was in the state sen…
almost 5 years ago
newyorker.com
In 2017, Warren and Smokes filed a motion in State Supreme Court to vacate their convictions. The Manhattan D.A., Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., has fought to keep the men’s convictions intact, and this battle has played out in a Manhattan courtroom, in a hearing held over eleven months which included ten days of testimony. The judge in the case, Stephen Antignani, is expected to announce his decision on October 31st—but the D.A.’s office appears to have lost track of some of its own files from 1987, whic…
over 4 years ago
newyorker.com
Michelle Lewin, who is thirty-two years old and the executive director of Parole Prep, stood at the front of the room, wearing a loose-fitting brown dress and worn work boots. She explained that Parole Prep requires an eight-to-twelve-month commitment. Each volunteer is assigned to a team of two or three people, then matched up with someone who has been incarcerated for decades, whom the team helps prepare for an upcoming interview before the parole board. Lewin talked about Parole Prep’s “value…
over 4 years ago
newyorker.com
The New York City Police Department quickly set up a hotline and announced that it “desperately” needed “witnesses of the incident to come forward.” Officers were instructed to ask anyone arrested for robbery if he had information about the murder. On the afternoon of January 2nd, the police caught four young people mugging a man on West Forty-seventh Street. The group included James Walker, a sixteen-year-old from Brooklyn. While in police custody, Walker told a detective that earlier that day…
about 4 years ago
newyorker.com
A collection of articles about 02 from The New Yorker, including news, in-depth
reporting, commentary, and analysis.
about 4 years ago
newyorker.com
By Thursday, Bedard, who is thirty-seven, had a low-grade fever and stayed home from work; she has not yet been tested for COVID-19. When we spoke on the phone that afternoon, she sometimes had to pause because, she said, “I’m a little short of breath.” That day, de Blasio announced plans to release forty people from the jail system in light of the coronavirus outbreak, a number that Bedard and advocates say is not sufficient. When we spoke, I asked Bedard about her job, the pressures she faces…
about 4 years ago
newyorker.com
The San Francisco District Attorney, whose father is an elderly member of the prison population, is urging politicians and criminal-justice leaders to protect incarcerated individuals who are vulnerable to the disease.
about 4 years ago
newyorker.com
At the moment, he was rereading John Grisham’s “The Testament.” “Have you ever read that?” he asked. “It’s a really good book.”
As it happens, Springs is a writer, too. In the nineteen-eighties and early nineties, during a stint in the New Jersey prison system, where he was incarcerated for armed robbery, he published five novels. His publisher was Holloway House, which put out the legendary black pulp-fiction writers Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim. Springs, who grew up in the Stella Wright Home…
about 4 years ago
newyorker.com
The stresses of COVID-19 have revealed fissures and weaknesses in all kinds of systems, including New York’s parole practices, training a spotlight on the question of why New York imprisons so many people for violating parole in the first place. Individuals on parole must follow a long list of rules—report to their parole officer, obey a curfew, avoid police contact—or they risk being incarcerated again. But, nearly twenty years ago, the former executive director of the state’s Division of Parol…
about 4 years ago
newyorker.com
Torres has two offices—one near City Hall, one in his district—but these days he works from a desk in his living room. His workday begins at about 8 A.M. and usually lasts until midnight. When he peers outside his living-room window, Torres sees empty sidewalks. “I feel like I’m living in a ghost town,” he said. He hardly ever leaves his apartment except to visit a bodega nearby. Meals seem to be an afterthought. On April 15th, two empty pizza boxes sat atop a trash can in his kitchen; the refri…
about 4 years ago
newyorker.com
The phone call came early that morning from a friend from her home town—Springfield, Oregon. He stammered something about having bad news and hung up. Soon afterward, another friend called and told her that there had been a shooting at Thurston High School, where Kristin had gone and where her brother, Kip, was in ninth grade. “Is Kip hurt?” she asked. She didn’t get an answer. Then a third friend phoned and blurted out what nobody else wanted to say: Kip was the one who had opened fire at Thurs…
6 months ago
newyorker.com
She thought that this fact might prevent her from being picked, but it did not, and on July 6, 1987, she was seated in the jury box for the opening of the trial, the People of the State of New York v. Eric Smokes and David Warren. That year, nearly seventeen hundred people were killed in New York City. The murder at the center of this trial had occurred on January 1st, just after the New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square had ended, when a group of young men approached a French tourist who w…
3 months ago
