Sunday Reading: Jennifer Gonnerman
Few who read Jennifer Gonnerman’s “Before the Law” can forget the story of Kalief Browder, a Bronx high-school sophomore who was arrested for stealing a backpack. Browder spent three years on Rikers Island, where he was beaten by guards and inmates and spent months at a time in solitary confinement. When his case was dismissed and he was finally released, in May, 2013, Browder, who was twenty and had never finished high school, suffered from flashbacks and paranoia, and he struggled to resume an ordinary life. Two years later, he committed suicide.
When Gonnerman first asked to meet Browder, he was reluctant to talk about Rikers, but once he started speaking, she wrote, “he seemed almost unable to stop.” In April, 2015, six months after Gonnerman’s article was published, Bill de Blasio, the Mayor of New York, announced a plan to speed up the courts system, saying that no one should suffer as Browder had. At the time, Browder told Gonnerman that he felt some relief. Then a student at Bronx Community College, he said, “I feel good that I spoke up and got my story out there, so the public could know what goes on in Rikers Island and the court system.”
Browder’s suffering and resilience deeply affected readers. These are not uncommon traits among the crusaders and victims, parents and children, whose stories Gonnerman has told. More than a decade before the recent surge of interest in criminal-justice reform, she was pioneering investigative reporting on Rikers. In recent years, she has introduced us to Derrick Hamilton, the self-taught “jailhouse lawyer” who helped uncover multiple wrongful convictions, and Taylonn Murphy, the father of a star high-school athlete killed by gang members, who eventually channelled his grief into a crusade to end a feud in Harlem housing projects. Gonnerman is keenly aware that such efforts don’t end when she finishes reporting, and she returns to subjects again and again for follow-up stories. Her persistence, like theirs, invigorates us, even as it reveals injustice.
—Carla Blumenkranz, senior editor
Stories circulate on Rikers about inmates who plead guilty to crimes they didn’t commit just to put an end to their ordeal, but Kalief Browder was determined to get his day in court. He had no idea how rare trials actually are.
“The Man Who Wrote the Book on Trump”
There may be no journalist in the nation who knows more about Donald Trump than Wayne Barrett. He started writing about him at the Village Voice in the late seventies, and published “Trump: The Deals and the Downfalls,” in 1991.
Taylonn Murphy went to a press conference and found Shianne Norman, the murdered boy’s mother. “Hey, Sis. I know what you’re going through,” he called to her. “I lost my daughter.”
There is no job description for a jailhouse lawyer. It’s an occupation born of desperation: most prisoners cannot afford lawyers, and are eligible for a free attorney only for their first appeal. After that, they have to either learn the law themselves or find a jailhouse lawyer to help them.
Even in casual conversation, the Bronx council member Ritchie Torres often sounds as if he’s giving a speech. “New York is a tale of two cities,” he said. “You have the gilded city and the other city, and the core of the other city is the New York City Housing Authority.”
Mohammad Razvi tried to hide his fears about immigration raids, he said, “because if I show the worry it’s going to be a ripple effect.” False rumors were spreading through Little Pakistan.
