History > 2016 > USA > Prison (I)

A memorial for Kalief Browder

who spent two years in solitary confinement

and later hanged himself.

Photograph:

Lucas Jackson/Reuters

President Obama Speaks Out on Solitary        NYT        FEB. 2, 2016

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/02/
opinion/president-obama-speaks-out-on-solitary.html

One Robber’s 3 Life Sentences:

’90s Legacy Fills Prisons Today

JULY 4, 2016

The New York Times

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

BURKEVILLE, Va. — Lenny Singleton is the first to admit that he deserved an extended stay behind bars. To fuel his crack habit back in 1995, he walked into 13 stores over eight days and either distracted a clerk or pretended to have a concealed gun before stealing from the cash register. One time, he was armed with a knife with a six-inch blade that he had brought from his kitchen.

Mr. Singleton, 28 at the time, was charged with robbery and accepted a plea deal, fully expecting to receive a long jail sentence. But a confluence of factors worked against him, including the particularly hard-nosed judge who sentenced him and the zero-tolerance ethos of the time against users of crack cocaine. His sentence was very long: two life sentences. And another 100 years. And no possibility for parole.

There is a growing consensus that the criminal justice system has incarcerated too many Americans for too many years, with liberals and conservatives alike denouncing the economic and social costs of holding 2.2 million people in the nation’s prisons and jails. And Congress is currently debating a criminal justice bill that, among other provisions, would reduce mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent offenders.

But a divide has opened within the reform movement over how to address prisoners who have been convicted of violent crimes, including people like Mr. Singleton, who threatened shop owners but did not harm anyone. Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union favor a swift 50 percent reduction in prison populations, while conservative prison reform organizations like Right on Crime prioritize the release of nonviolent offenders and worry that releasing others could backfire and reduce public support.

Nonviolent drug offenders make up only about 17 percent of all state prison inmates around the nation, while violent offenders make up more than 50 percent, according to federal data.

As the prison population has increased sharply over the past 30 years, so too has the number of those sentenced to life. Mr. Singleton is among nearly 160,000 prisoners serving life sentences — roughly the population of Eugene, Ore. The number of such inmates has more than quadrupled since 1984, and now about one in nine prison inmates is serving a life term, federal data shows.

“People are celebrating the stabilization of the prison population in recent years, but the scale of mass incarceration is so substantial that meaningful reduction is not going to happen by tinkering around the edges,” said Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based nonprofit that advocates changes in sentencing policy.

The United States, which has about 4.4 percent of the world’s population, holds 22 percent of its prisoners, according to the International Centre for Prison Studies, a research organization based in England.

Mr. Singleton’s prison term, which makes it likely that he will die behind bars, attracted little attention in 1996. It was common then for judges in Virginia and the rest of the country to impose long prison terms for crack-related crimes. Still, even hard-line prosecutors who were active during that period say Mr. Singleton’s sentence seemed unduly harsh for crimes in which no one was hurt.

“Crack cocaine scared the hell out of a lot of people,” said William G. Broaddus, a former Virginia attorney general who is now in private practice and had no role in the case. “It’s disappointing there wasn’t more consideration as to why this man did this. Do we really want to keep him in jail for the rest of his life? Having said that, it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that this judge meted out the sentence that he did.”

William F. Rutherford, the judge who sentenced Mr. Singleton, has been retired for years. During a recent series of interviews, he said he had no recollection of the case, but after he reviewed Mr. Singleton’s court files, he said he had no regrets about how he handled it.

“Under the circumstances,” he said, “it would not be unusual for me to give out that kind of sentence.”

Mr. Rutherford, who turned 89 in June, was known in Norfolk, Va., legal circles for his tough sentences, and he acknowledged that he was an intimidating presence on the bench.

“I’m a no-nonsense guy and I wouldn’t take any crap off of defense lawyers or anybody,” he said. “The people in jail did not like coming into Courtroom No. 7.”

D. J. Hansen, the prosecutor in Mr. Singleton’s case, said Mr. Rutherford “had a reputation for being one of the tougher judges” in the courthouse. Mr. Hansen, who is now a deputy commonwealth’s attorney in Chesapeake, Va., added that “Virginia is a hard state” when it comes to doling out punishments, and pointed out that he sought a life sentence for Mr. Singleton because of the serious nature of the robberies.

When compared with recent cases, Mr. Singleton’s sentence appears to be disproportionately harsh. The maximum penalty for second-degree murder in Virginia is 40 years, and people convicted in recent months of attempted murder and similar crimes have received sentences far shorter than Mr. Singleton’s. For example, Tamar Harris, 21, who shot and wounded a police officer, was sentenced in April to 23 years in prison, and Jermaine Rogers, 30, of Norfolk, who pleaded guilty to two counts of attempted murder, was sentenced in March to 10 years.

Mr. Singleton, 49, who is called “Pops” by other inmates here at the Nottoway Correctional Center in central Virginia, has largely forgotten the details of his weeklong crime spree. Unlike many of his fellow inmates, he does not claim he is innocent.

He recalled in an interview that before each robbery, he would smoke crack and drink a 12-pack of beer. In all, he got about $500.

“After I sobered up, I couldn’t believe what I had done,” he said. “I was like, ‘Damn, Lenny, what the hell?’”

Mr. Singleton played football at Langston University, the historically black college in Oklahoma from which he graduated, and later joined the Navy, but was kicked out for using drugs. In prison, he has attended substance abuse classes and become a devoted reader of self-help books from the prison library.

He works in a furniture plant at the prison and earns 80 cents an hour building furniture used in Virginia’s universities. But a percentage of his pay is subtracted for court costs and fines, and he still owes the state $1,800.

Last year, he married a high school classmate, Vandy, with whom he had lost touch. They recently compiled a book of their letters detailing his incarceration and her battles with cancer.

Mr. Singleton, who prison officials acknowledge has never committed an infraction behind bars, has filed for a conditional pardon with Gov. Terry McAuliffe, saying in part that his court-appointed lawyer failed to adequately represent him. Mr. Singleton said he had been unaware that he could be sentenced to life in prison until he had already pleaded guilty.

His lawyer at that time, Jon M. Babineau, said he was legally prohibited from discussing Mr. Singleton’s case because of Virginia’s attorney-client privilege laws, but said he had done his best to represent his client.

In a prison administrative office on a recent morning, Mr. Singleton said he had seen inmates convicted of murder and rape come and go, and was hopeful that he would not die in prison.

“I was out of my mind on drugs, but I wasn’t going to hurt anybody,” he said. “I was just after the money.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 5, 2016,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
A ’90s Legacy That Is Filling Prisons Today.

One Robber’s 3 Life Sentences: ’90s Legacy Fills Prisons Today,
NYT, July 4, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/05/us/
mass-incarceration-drug-offenses-zero-tolerance-prisons.html

Locked Away for 24 Years,

an Exonerated Man

Still Feels Imprisoned

MARCH 10, 2016

The New York Times

By KIRK SEMPLE

Han Tak Lee, 81, spends much of his time alone in a small room in Queens. It is a ground-floor studio apartment with a kitchenette and a bathroom, right beside train tracks used by the Long Island Rail Road. Commuter trains roar by every so often, though the double-glazing of his windows reduces the noise to a gentle whoosh.

His cramped living situation begs a comparison to the way he spent most of the past quarter-century. From 1990 to 2014, Mr. Lee was locked away in a series of prisons in Pennsylvania, serving a life sentence for murdering his daughter in a fire. Two years ago, however, a judge exonerated him and ordered him freed after determining that his conviction was based on theories about arson that had later been discredited. An appellate court upheld the ruling in August.

Yet Mr. Lee, a free man now, still seems bound by his imprisonment. The experience weighs on him as he reckons with his past and considers the final stretch of his life. He admits to feeling bitterness.

“I still think it’s totally unfair that I had to serve 24 years in prison,” he said in an interview. “I’m innocent.”

He has been surviving on Social Security payments and, more so, on the largess of people who have sympathized with his plight. A support group that formed while he was in prison raised tens of thousands of dollars to help with his legal fees and, after his release, to help pay for his rent and living expenses. But that fund has nearly dried up, and Mr. Lee recently contacted Ron Kim, a Democratic state assemblyman, seeking assistance in finding subsidized housing.

“He wants to live with dignity for the rest of his life,” Assemblyman Kim said.

Though in his ninth decade, Mr. Lee, a Korean immigrant who became a naturalized American citizen, is not confronting the challenges of his current circumstances with anything resembling meekness.

He is angry at the justice system for locking him up and taking so many years of his life. He is resentful toward his ex-wife, who divorced him while he was in prison. He is estranged from his surviving daughter and her family, he said. He has accused the leadership of his former church of not sufficiently coming to his defense when he was being investigated, even as the church raised about $80,000 over the years to help pay for his legal representation. And he has alienated some of his most ardent supporters.

Chris Chang, the spokesman for the support group, said the prison experience had left Mr. Lee suspicious of everyone and their motives, leaving him prone to sudden changes of heart. This unpredictability has led some of his supporters to keep their distance, friends said.

“Like a volcano,” Mr. Chang said.

Mr. Lee is unapologetic. “I recognize my personality, but that’s because of the many experiences I’ve had,” he said. “I am resolute. I am different.”

He added: “I was fully exonerated. It gave me the confidence to be more vocal.”

In two interviews with Mr. Lee at his apartment, he seemed mostly cheery and good-natured, patiently answering questions about his life in Korean and rudimentary English and laughing frequently. His mood darkened somewhat only when the conversation turned to the subject of his ex-wife and daughter.

“I don’t want to talk about my family,” he said sharply. (A member of the support committee provided a phone number for Mr. Lee’s daughter, but calls went unanswered.)

Kyung Tahk Sohn, who attended high school in Seoul with Mr. Lee and is a co-president of the support committee, said: “To be frank with you, Mr. Lee has a very special character. He has a very quick temper. That’s why his words hurt them here and there.”

“In my case, I’ve known him a long time, I feel like he’s my older brother. That’s why I just help him and whatever he says I try to understand him and read his mind. That’s why I’m the only one who can talk to him freely.”

The fire that killed Mr. Lee’s daughter occurred in July 1989 at a religious retreat in the Poconos run by the church he attended at the time.

Mr. Lee, who ran a clothing store and lived with his then-wife and two daughters in Sunnyside, Queens, had taken his oldest daughter, Ji Yun, to the retreat at the urging of the church’s pastor. Ms. Lee, who was 20 and an art student at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, had severe mental illness. He hoped the trip would help her.

Early one morning, a fire broke out in their cabin. The authorities found Mr. Lee sitting stoically outside the burning cabin with two packed bags, The ABA Journal, a publication of the American Bar Association, reported in an article about the case. His behavior, deemed strangely passive by investigators, became part of the prosecution’s case against him. Ji Yun’s burned body was found inside the cabin.

At the trial, prosecutors, citing the testimony of fire experts, argued that the specific charring patterns and glass fracturing indicated a deliberately set fire, and that the arsonist had started the fire in at least eight spots in the cabin using a mixture of home fuel oil and another accelerant, according to news reports. One expert witness said a chemical analysis of Mr. Lee’s clothes suggested a link to a plastic glove and a jug said to have been used to pour the fuel.

In defending Mr. Lee, his lawyer argued that Ji Yun had set the fire herself. Mr. Lee said he had been asleep when the flames broke out and had unsuccessfully tried to rescue his daughter.

The jury sided with prosecutors, and he was convicted of murder and arson and sentenced to life in prison.

His case became a cause célèbre among Koreans in the United States, and his trial was closely followed in South Korea. After his arrest, members of the Korean population in New York formed the support group, called the Free Han Tak Lee Committee, and in the ensuing years raised money to help pay his legal fees.

Mr. Lee said he was very isolated in prison, keeping largely to himself and living for years in his own cell. He never encountered another Korean during his time behind bars, he said.

In 2014, a magistrate judge in Harrisburg, Pa., found that long-held beliefs about the science of fire, which were at the core of the prosecution’s case, had been discredited. A federal judge adopted the magistrate judge’s recommendation that Mr. Lee’s conviction and sentence be vacated, and Mr. Lee was released. Prosecutors unsuccessfully appealed the decision.

After he left prison, Mr. Lee moved into his current home, just off Northern Boulevard, in Murray Hill, a middle-class neighborhood with a large Korean immigrant population. He said he chose to live there because it was near his sister, who lives on Long Island.

Four days a week, he goes to a senior center where, he said, he takes exercise and dance classes and eats meals.

Sometimes, in the evening, he meets with members of his current church. But otherwise he is mostly by himself in his apartment, which is dominated by a large bed with a saffron-colored bedspread. The room is cluttered with the flotsam and jetsam of a curious man — or a man who for years was deprived of possessions: stacks of printed material neatly piled on tables and a small desk, including books, magazines, fliers and store brochures; a quiver of small American and South Korean flags; an empty Starbucks cup; pill bottles; a paper Burger King crown. A framed naturalization certificate is one of the few adornments on the walls. His television is often on.

Pennsylvania does not provide compensation to people wrongly convicted of a crime, and Mr. Lee has not filed a lawsuit over his wrongful imprisonment. But his lawyers “are looking at whether he has a remedy available,” said Peter Goldberger, a lawyer who has represented him for about 15 years.

The support committee has been paying his rent — $1,000 per month — and giving him a monthly allowance of $700, Mr. Chang said. But with the money running out, the members are trying to find alternative, cheaper housing for Mr. Lee.

Mr. Kim, whose Assembly district includes Murray Hill, said city officials had done a full assessment of Mr. Lee’s living situation and health and were considering his case. In addition, the assemblyman is working with community groups to figure out ways to help him.

“I’m putting myself in his shoes and trying to understand about how he was able to cope with being locked away for so many years and to be back and finally have his freedom, yet is struggling to live with some sort of integrity,” Mr. Kim said. “There’s such a feeling of injustice.”

But Mr. Lee is far from giving up. “Mental focus,” he declared. “Endurance.”

Yeong-Ung Yang contributed reporting.

Locked Away for 24 Years, an Exonerated Man Still Feels Imprisoned,
NYT, MARCH 10, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/11/nyregion/
locked-away-for-24-years-han-tak-lee-still-feels-imprisoned.html

Prisoners Exonerated,

Prosecutors Exposed

FEB. 12, 2016

The New York Times

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The Opinion Pages | Editorial
 

In 2015, 149 people convicted of crimes large and small — from capital murder to burglary — were exonerated. It is the highest yearly total since this grim form of record-keeping began, in 1989.

In that time, there have been at least 1,733 exonerations across the country, and the pace keeps picking up. On average, about three convicted people are now exonerated of their crimes every week, according to the annual report of the National Registry of Exonerations. The registry defines an exoneration as a case in which someone convicted of a crime is cleared of all charges based on new evidence of innocence.

The individual cost to those wrongly convicted is steep: Last year’s group spent an average of more than 14 years behind bars. Five had been sentenced to death. Amazingly, half of the exonerations involved cases in which no crime occurred at all — for example, a conviction of murder by arson that later turned out to be based on faulty fire science.

Equally eye-opening is the list of reasons behind these miscarriages of justice. For instance, 27 of last year’s exonerations were for convictions based on a false confession. This happened most often in homicide cases in which the defendant was a juvenile, intellectually disabled, mentally ill or some combination of the three. In nearly half of all 2015 exonerations, the defendant pleaded guilty before trial.

These numbers are a bracing reminder that admissions of guilt are unreliable far more often than is generally believed. Some defendants, especially the young or mentally impaired, can be pushed to admit guilt when they are innocent. Some with prior criminal records may not be able to afford bail but don’t want to spend months in pretrial detention or risk a much longer sentence if they choose to go to trial.

Official misconduct — including perjury, withholding of exculpatory evidence and coercive interrogation practices — occurred in three of every four exonerations involving homicide, and it was an important factor in many other cases as well.

As high as these exoneration numbers are, they still understate the scope of the problem, since not all cases involving misconduct come to light.

The good news is that Americans are starting to grasp the depth of the problem. The Innocence Project, now more than 20 years old, has shown again and again how many ways a conviction can be obtained wrongfully. And in-depth investigations of questionable murder convictions by popular shows like “Serial” and “Making a Murderer” have led to calls for greater prosecutorial accountability.

As technologies like DNA testing have become more widely used, some prosecutors’ offices have begun to take responsibility for correcting their own errors. In the last seven years, almost two dozen offices in 11 states and the District of Columbia have opened conviction-integrity units to re-examine old cases. But the units vary widely in effectiveness. Half have never exonerated anyone, while two, in Brooklyn and in Harris County, Tex., were responsible for one-third of last year’s exonerations.

It is good to see any degree of self-reflection and accountability from prosecutors, who wield enormous and often unreviewed power in the criminal justice system. It would be even better for them to put in place safeguards that would prevent wrongful convictions in the first place.

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A version of this editorial appears in print on February 13, 2016, on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Prisoners Exonerated, Prosecutors Exposed.

Prisoners Exonerated, Prosecutors Exposed,
NYT, Feb. 12, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/13/
opinion/prisoners-exonerated-prosecutors-exposed.html

President Obama

Speaks Out on Solitary

FEB. 2, 2016

The New York Times

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

President Obama sent a powerful message last week when he barred federal prisons from holding juveniles in solitary confinement and ordered the Bureau of Prisons to undertake sweeping changes in how solitary is used throughout the federal system.

By taking a new course at the federal level, Mr. Obama hopes to accelerate changes that are already underway in many state and local corrections systems.

Solitary confinement, which is often used arbitrarily and to punish minor rule infractions, is a form of torture. It is psychologically damaging even to healthy people and increases the likelihood of suicide among the young and the mentally ill.

Announcing the new policy in an op-ed essay in The Washington Post, Mr. Obama wrote: “The United States is a nation of second chances, but the experience of solitary confinement too often undercuts that second chance. Those who do make it out often have trouble holding down jobs, reuniting with family and becoming productive members of society. Imagine having served your time and then being unable to hand change over to a customer or look your wife in the eye or hug your children.”

He cited the shameful case of Kalief Browder, who was arrested in New York City at the age of 16 in 2010 and jailed for three years without trial for allegedly stealing a backpack. Mr. Browder spent two of those years in solitary confinement, endured “unspeakable violence at the hands of inmates and guards” and tried to kill himself several times. He was released in 2013, but never fully recovered, and he hanged himself last year.

Despite horror stories like this, as many as 100,000 people — including juveniles and people with mental illnesses — are held in solitary confinement and other forms of restrictive housing in American prisons, according to a new report by the Justice Department. Inmates often spend months or even years in small, cramped cells with virtually no human contact.

According to the report, the Bureau of Prisons in recent years has cut the number of inmates in solitary confinement and other restrictive housing. Federal officials believe that the new policies recommended in the report will lead to additionall reductions in restrictive housing populations. One recomendation is to divert inmates with serious mental illness to mental health units; another is to ban the use of “punitive segregation” for low-level infractions.

The new federal policy sets an excellent example for states and local governments that have yet to undertake reform.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this editorial appears in print on February 2, 2016, on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: President Obama Speaks Out on Solitary.

President Obama Speaks Out on Solitary,
NYT, FEB. 2, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/02/
opinion/president-obama-speaks-out-on-solitary.html