In the early hours of Saturday, May 15, 2010,ten days before his seventeenth birthday,

Kalief Browder and a friend were returninghome from a party in the Belmont section ofthe Bronx. They walked along Arthur Avenue,the main street of Little Italy, past bakeries andcafés with their metal shutters pulled down forthe night. As they passed East 186th Street,Browder saw a police car driving toward them.More squad cars arrived, and soon Browderand his friend found themselves squinting inthe glare of a police spotlight. An officer saidthat a man had just reported that they hadrobbed him. “I didn’t rob anybody,” Browderreplied. “You can check my pockets.”

The officers searched him and his friend butfound nothing. As Browder recalls, one of theofficers walked back to his car, where thealleged victim was, and returned with a newstory: the man said that they had robbed himnot that night but two weeks earlier. Thepolice handcuffed the teens and pressed theminto the back of a squad car. “What am I beingcharged for?” Browder asked. “I didn’t doanything!” He remembers an officer tellingthem, “We’re just going to take you to theprecinct. Most likely you can go home.”Browder whispered to his friend, “Are you sureyou didn’t do anything?” His friend insistedthat he hadn’t.

At the Forty-eighth Precinct, the pair werefingerprinted and locked in a holding cell. Afew hours later, when an officer opened thedoor, Browder jumped up: “I can leave now?”Instead, the teens were taken to CentralBooking at the Bronx County Criminal Court.

Browder had already had a few run-ins withthe police, including an incident eight monthsearlier, when an officer reported seeing himtake a delivery truck for a joyride and crashinto a parked car. Browder was charged with

grand larceny. He told me that his friendsdrove the truck and that he had only watched,but he figured that he had no defense, and sohe pleaded guilty. The judge gave himprobation and “youthful offender” status,which insured that he wouldn’t have a criminalrecord.

Late on Saturday, seventeen hours after thepolice picked Browder up, an officer and aprosecutor interrogated him, and he againmaintained his innocence. The next day, hewas led into a courtroom, where he learnedthat he had been charged with robbery, grandlarceny, and assault. The judge released hisfriend, permitting him to remain free while thecase moved through the courts. But, becauseBrowder was still on probation, the judgeordered him to be held and set bail at threethousand dollars. The amount was out of reachfor his family, and soon Browder foundhimself aboard a Department of Correctionbus. He fought back panic, he told me later.Staring through the grating on the buswindow, he watched the Bronx disappear.Soon, there was water on either side as the busmade its way across a long, narrow bridge toRikers Island.

Of the eight million people living in NewYork City, some eleven thousand are confinedin the city’s jails on any given day, most ofthem on Rikers, a four-hundred-acre island inthe East River, between Queens and theBronx. New Yorkers who have never visitedoften think of Rikers as a single, terrifyingbuilding, but the island has ten jails—eight formen, one for women, and one so decrepit thatit hasn’t housed anyone since 2000.

Male adolescents are confined in the RobertN. Davoren Center—known as R.N.D.C.When Browder arrived, the jail held some sixhundred boys, aged sixteen to eighteen.

Conditions there are notoriously grim. InAugust of this year, a report by the U.S.Attorney for the Southern District of NewYork described R.N.D.C. as a place with a“deep-seated culture of violence,” whereattacks by officers and among inmates arerampant. The report featured a list of inmateinjuries: “broken jaws, broken orbital bones,broken noses, long bone fractures, andlacerations requiring stitches.”

Browder’s family could not afford to hire anattorney, so the judge appointed a lawyernamed Brendan O’Meara to represent him.Browder told O’Meara that he was innocentand assumed that his case would concludequickly. Even the assistant district attorneyhandling the prosecution later acknowledgedin court papers that it was a “relativelystraightforward case.” There weren’t hours ofwiretaps or piles of complicated evidence to siftthrough; there was just the memory of onealleged victim. But Browder had entered thelegal system through the Bronx criminalcourts, which are chronically overwhelmed.Last year, the Times, in an extended exposé,described them as “crippled” and among themost backlogged in the country. One reason isbudgetary. There are not nearly enough judgesand court staff to handle the workload; in2010, Browder’s case was one of five thousandsix hundred and ninety-five felonies that theBronx District Attorney’s office prosecuted.The problem is compounded by defenseattorneys who drag out cases to improve theirodds of winning, judges who permit endlessadjournments, prosecutors who are perpetuallyunprepared. Although the Sixth Amendmentguarantees “the right to a speedy and publictrial,” in the Bronx the concept of speedyjustice barely exists.

For as long as Browder could remember, hehad lived in the same place, a two-story

brick house near the Bronx Zoo. He was theyoungest of seven siblings; except for the oldesttwo, all the children were adopted, and themother fostered other children as well. “Kaliefwas the last brought into the family,” an olderbrother told me. “By the time it came toKalief, my mom had already raised—in fostercare or adoption—a total of thirty-four kids.”Kalief was the smallest, he recalled, “so mymom called him Peanut.”

As a child, Browder loved Pokemon, theW.W.E., free Wednesdays at the Bronx Zoo,and mimicking his brother’s workout routine.“At six years old, he had an eight-pack,” hisbrother said. When Browder was ten, theirfather, who worked as a subway cleaner, movedout, though he continued to help support thefamily.

For high school, Browder went to the small,progressive New Day Academy. A former staffmember remembered him as a “fun guy,” thetype of kid others wanted to be around.Occasionally, he would grab a hall pass, sneakinto a friend’s classroom, and stay until theteacher caught on. He told me that his reportcards were full of C’s, but the staff member Ispoke to said, “I thought he was very smart.”

Inside R.N.D.C., Browder soon realizedthat he was not going to make many friends.He was assigned to a dorm where about fiftyteen-age boys slept in an open room, each witha plastic bucket to store his possessions in.“Their conversations bored me,” he told me.As far as he could tell, the other inmates wereinterested only in “crimes they committed andgirls that they did.” When Browder asked aguard how inmates were supposed to get theirclothes cleaned, he was told that they had towash them themselves. He thought this was a

joke until he noticed other inmates scrubbingtheir clothes by hand, using their bucket andjailhouse soap. After he did the same and hunghis wet clothes on the rail of his bed, he woundup with brown rust stains on his white T-shirt,his socks, and his boxers. That day, he toldhimself, “I don’t know how I’m going to live inthis place.”

Browder’s mother visited every weekend. Inthe visiting room, he would hand her his dirtyclothes and get a stack of freshly launderedclothes in return. She also put money in a jailcommissary account for him, so he could buysnacks. He knew that such privileges madehim a target for his fellow-prisoners, whowould take any opportunity to empty someoneelse’s bucket of snacks and clothes, so he sleptwith his head off the side of his bed, atop hisbucket. To survive inside R.N.D.C., hedecided that the best strategy was to keep tohimself and to work out. Before Rikers, he toldme, “every here and there I did a couplepullups or pushups. When I went in there,that’s when I decided I wanted to get big.”

The dayroom was ruled over by a gangleader and his friends, who controlled inmates’access to the prison phones and dictated whocould sit on a bench to watch TV and who hadto sit on the floor. “A lot of times, I’d say, ‘I’mnot sitting on the floor,’ ” Browder said. “Andthen they’ll come with five or six dudes. They’dswing on me. I’d have to fight back.” Therewas no escape, no protection, and a suspicionthat some of the guards had an agreement withthe gang members.

Browder told me that, one night soon afterhe arrived, a group of guards lined him andseveral other inmates up against a wall, tryingto figure out who had been responsible for anearlier fight. “They’re talking to us about whydid we jump these guys,” he said. “And as

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they’re talking they’re punching us one byone.” Browder said that he had nothing to dowith the fight, but still the officers beat him;the other inmates endured much worse. “Theirnoses were leaking, their faces were bloody,their eyes were swollen,” he said. Afterward,the officers gave the teens a choice: go to themedical clinic or go back to bed. But theymade it clear that, if the inmates went to theclinic and told the medical staff what hadhappened, they would write up charges againstthem, and get them sent to solitaryconfinement. “I just told them I’ll act likenothing happened,” Browder said. “So theydidn’t send us to the clinic; they didn’t writeanything up; they just sent us back.” TheDepartment of Correction refused to respondto these allegations, or to answer any questionsabout Browder’s stay on Rikers. But the recentU.S. Attorney’s report about R.N.D.C.recounts many instances in which officerspressured inmates not to report beatings—to“hold it down,” in Rikers parlance.

n the morning of July 28, 2010, Browderwas awakened at around half past four.

He was handcuffed to another inmate andherded onto a bus with a group of otherprisoners. At the Bronx County Hall of Justice,they spent the day in a basement holding pen,each waiting for his chance to see a judge.When Browder’s turn came, an officer led himinto a courtroom and he caught a glimpse ofhis mother in the spectator area. Seventy-fourdays had passed since his arrest. Already hehad missed his seventeenth birthday, the endof his sophomore year, and half the summer.

A grand jury had voted to indict Browder.The criminal complaint alleged that he and hisfriend had robbed a Mexican immigrantnamed Roberto Bautista—pursuing him,

pushing him against a fence, and taking hisbackpack. Bautista told the police that hisbackpack contained a credit card, a debit card,a digital camera, an iPod Touch, and sevenhundred dollars. Browder was also accused ofpunching Bautista in the face.

A clerk read out the charges—“Robbery inthe second degree and other crimes”—andasked Browder, “How do you plead, sir, guiltyor not guilty?”

“Not guilty,” Browder said.An officer escorted him out of the

courtroom and back downstairs to return toRikers. It no longer mattered whether hismother could find the money to bail him out.The Department of Probation had filed a“violation of probation” against him—standardprocedure when someone on probation isindicted on a new violent felony—and thejudge had remanded him without bail.

Browder repeatedly told O’Meara, his court-appointed lawyer, that he would never pleadguilty and that he wanted to go to trial.O’Meara assumed that his courtroom defensewould be “Listen, they got the wrong kid.”After all, the accusation had been made a weekor two after the alleged robbery, and the victimhad later changed his mind about when itoccurred. (The original police report said “onor about May 2,” but Bautista later told adetective that it happened on May 8th.)

With each day he spent in jail, Browderimagined that he was getting closer to trial.Many states have so-called speedy-trial laws,which require trials to start within a certaintime frame. New York State’s version isslightly different, and is known as the “readyrule.” This rule stipulates that all felony cases(except homicides) must be ready for trialwithin six months of arraignment, or else thecharges can be dismissed. In practice, however,

this time limit is subject to technicalities. Theclock stops for many reasons—for example,when defense attorneys submit motions beforetrial—so that the amount of time that isofficially held to have elapsed can be wildlydifferent from the amount of time that reallyhas. In 2011, seventy-four per cent of felonycases in the Bronx were older than six months.

In order for a trial to start, both the defenseattorney and the prosecutor have to declarethat they are ready; the court clerk thensearches for a trial judge who is free andtransfers the case, and jury selection can begin.Not long after Browder was indicted, anassistant district attorney sent the court a“Notice of Readiness,” stating that “the Peopleare ready for trial.” The case was put on thecalendar for possible trial on December 10th,but it did not start that day. On January 28,2011, Browder’s two-hundred-and-fifty-eighthday in jail, he was brought back to thecourthouse once again. This time, theprosecutor said, “The People are not ready. Weare requesting one week.” The next court dateset by the judge—March 9th—was not oneweek away but six. As it happened, Browderdidn’t go to trial anytime that year. An indexcard in the court file explains:

June 23, 2011: People not ready, request 1 week.August 24, 2011: People not ready, request 1 day.November 4, 2011: People not ready, prosecutor

on trial, request 2 weeks.December 2, 2011: Prosecutor on trial, request

January 3rd.

The Bronx courts are so clogged that when alawyer asks for a one-week adjournment thenext court date usually doesn’t happen for sixweeks or more. As long as a prosecutor hasfiled a Notice of Readiness, however, delayscaused by court congestion don’t count toward

the number of days that are officially held tohave elapsed. Every time a prosecutor stoodbefore a judge in Browder’s case, requested aone-week adjournment, and got six weeksinstead, this counted as only one week againstthe six-month deadline. Meanwhile, Browderremained on Rikers, where six weeks still feltlike six weeks—and often much longer.

Like many defendants with court-appointedlawyers, Browder thought his attorney was notdoing enough to help him. O’Meara, whoworks mostly in the Bronx and in WestchesterCounty, never made the trip out to Rikers tosee him, since a visit there can devour at leasthalf a day. To avoid this trek, some lawyers setup video conferences at the Bronx courthousewith their clients who are in jail. O’Meara sayshe’s “pretty sure” he did this with Browder, butBrowder says he never did. Court paperssuggest a lawyer in a hurry: in the fall of 2010,O’Meara filed a notice with the court in whichhe mistakenly wrote that he would soon bemaking a motion on Browder’s case in“Westchester County Court,” instead of in theBronx.

New York City pays lawyers like O’Meara(known locally as “18-B attorneys”) seventy-five dollars an hour for a felony case, sixtydollars for a misdemeanor. O’Meara handlesall types of cases, from misdemeanors tohomicides. When I met him, earlier this year,he was eating a hamburger and drinking coffeeat a diner in Brooklyn after an appearance at acourthouse there. He was about to take thesubway back to the Bronx, and his briefcasewas bulging with papers. He told me thatBrowder, compared with some of his otherclients, “was quiet, respectful—he wasn’t rude.”He also noted that, as the months passed, hisclient looked “tougher and bigger.”

Most of the time, however, Browder had no

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direct contact with O’Meara; the few times hetried to phone him, he couldn’t get through, sohe was dependent on his mother to talk toO’Meara on his behalf. Every time Browdergot the chance, he asked O’Meara the samequestion: “Can you get me out?” O’Meara saysthat he made multiple bail applications on hisclient’s behalf, but was unsuccessful because ofthe violation of probation. Meanwhile, otherinmates advised Browder to tell his lawyer tofile a speedy-trial motion—a motion to dismissthe case, because it hadn’t been brought to trialwithin six months. But, with so many one-week requests that had turned into six-weekdelays, Browder had yet to reach the six-monthmark.

For a defendant who is in jail, the more acase drags on the greater the pressure to giveup and plead guilty. By early 2012, prosecutorshad offered Browder a deal—three and a halfyears in prison in exchange for a guilty plea.He refused. “I want to go to trial,” he toldO’Meara, even though he knew that if he losthe could get up to fifteen years in state prison.Stories circulate on Rikers about inmates whoplead guilty to crimes they didn’t commit justto put an end to their ordeal, but Browder wasdetermined to get his day in court. He had noidea how rare trials actually are. In 2011, in theBronx, only a hundred and sixty-five felonycases went to trial; in three thousand ninehundred and ninety-one cases, the defendantpleaded guilty.

ot long after arriving on Rikers, Browdermade his first trip to solitary confinement.

It lasted about two weeks, he recalls, andfollowed a scuffle with another inmate. “Hewas throwing shoes at people—I told him tostop,” Browder said. “I actually took hissneaker and I threw it, and he got mad. He

swung on me, and we started fighting.”Browder was placed in shackles and transferredby bus to the Central Punitive SegregationUnit, which everyone on Rikers calls the Bing.Housed in one of the island’s newer jails, theBing has four hundred cells, each about twelvefeet by seven.

In recent years, the use of solitaryconfinement has spread in New York’s jails.Between 2007 and mid-2013, the total numberof solitary-confinement beds on Rikersincreased by more than sixty per cent, and areport last fall found that nearly twenty-sevenper cent of the adolescent inmates were insolitary. “I think the department becameseverely addicted to solitary confinement,”Daniel Selling, who served as the executivedirector of mental health for New York City’sjails, told me in April; he had quit his job twoweeks earlier. “It’s a way to control anenvironment that feels out of control—lockpeople in their cell,” he said. “Adolescents can’thandle it. Nobody could handle that.” (InMarch, Mayor Bill de Blasio appointed a newjails commissioner, Joseph Ponte, whopromised to “end the culture of excessivesolitary confinement.”)

For Browder, this was the first of severaltrips to the Bing. As he soon discovered, aprisoner there doesn’t leave his cell except togo to rec, the shower, the visit room, themedical clinic, or court; whenever he doesleave, he is handcuffed and strip-searched. Topass the time, Browder read magazines—XXL,Sports Illustrated, Hip Hop Weekly—and streetnovels handed on by other inmates; one wasSister Souljah’s “Midnight.” He’d alwayspreferred video games, but he told me, “I feellike I broke myself into books through streetnovels.” He moved on to more demandingreading and said that his favorite book was

Craig Unger’s “House of Bush, House ofSaud.”

Summer is the worst time of year to be stuckin the Bing, since the cells lack air-conditioning. In the hope of feeling a breeze,Browder would sleep with the window open,only to be awakened at 5 A.M., when the cellfilled with the roar of planes taking off fromLaGuardia, one of whose runways is less thanthree hundred feet from Rikers. He wouldspend all day smelling his own sweat andcounting the hours until his next shower. Hethought about the places he would have beenvisiting if he were not spending the summer injail: Mapes Pool, Coney Island, Six Flags. Oneday, when he called home to talk to his mother—he was allowed one six-minute call a daywhile in solitary—he could make out thefamiliar jingle of an ice-cream truck in thebackground.

There hadn’t been much to do at R.N.D.C.,but at least there was school—classroomswhere the inmates were supposed to be takenevery day, to study for a G.E.D. or a high-school diploma. The Bing had only “cellstudy”: a correction officer slid work sheetsunder the door in the morning, collected thema few days later, and, eventually, returned themwith a teacher’s marks. Some inmates neverbothered to fill in the work sheets, butBrowder told himself, “I’m already in jail—Imight as well keep trying to do something.”There were times, however, when nobodycame by to collect the work sheets on the dayhe’d been told they were due. If Browder saw acaptain walk by through the small window inhis door, he would shout, “Where is the schoolcorrection officer to pick up the work?”

Near the end of 2010, Browder returned tothe Bing; he was there for about ten months,through the summer of 2011. He recalls that

he got sent there initially after another fight.(Once an inmate is in solitary, further minorinfractions can extend his stay.) WhenBrowder first went to Rikers, his brother hadadvised him to get himself sent to solitarywhenever he felt at risk from other inmates. “Itold him, ‘When you get into a house and youdon’t feel safe, do whatever you have to to getout,’ ” the brother said. “ ‘It’s better thancoming home with a slice on your face.’ ”

Even in solitary, however, violence was athreat. Verbal spats with officers couldescalate. At one point, Browder said, “I hadwords with a correction officer, and he told mehe wanted to fight. That was his way ofhandling it.” He’d already seen the officerchallenge other inmates to fights in theshower, where there are no surveillancecameras. “So I agreed to it; I said, ‘I’ll fightyou.’ ” The next day, the officer came to escorthim to the shower, but before they even gotthere, he said, the officer knocked him down:“He put his forearm on my face, and my facewas on the floor, and he just started punchingme in the leg.” Browder isn’t the first inmate tomake such an allegation; the U.S. Attorney’sreport described similar incidents.

Browder’s brother reconsidered his advicewhen he saw him in the Bing visiting area. Forone thing, he says, Browder was losing weight.“Several times when I visited him, he said,‘They’re not feeding me,’ ” the brother told me.“He definitely looked really skinny.” Insolitary, food arrived through a slot in the celldoor three times a day. For a growing teen-ager, the portions were never big enough, andin solitary Browder couldn’t supplement therations with snacks bought at the commissary.He took to begging the officers for leftovers:“Can I get that bread?” Sometimes they wouldslip him an extra slice or two; often, they

refused.Browder’s brother also noticed a growing

tendency toward despair. When Browdertalked about his case, he was “strong, adamant:‘No, they can’t do this to me!’ ” But, when theconversation turned to life in jail, “it’s a totallydifferent personality, which is depressed. He’s,like, ‘I don’t know how long I can take this.’ ”

Browder got out of the Bing in the fall of2011, but by the end of the year he was back—after yet another fight, he says. On the night ofFebruary 8, 2012—his six-hundred-and-thirty-fourth day on Rikers—he said tohimself, “I can’t take it anymore. I give up.”That night, he tore his bedsheet into strips,tied them together to make a noose, attached itto the light fixture, and tried to hang himself.He was taken to the clinic, then returned tosolitary. Browder told me that his sheets,magazines, and clothes were removed—everything except his white plastic bucket.

On February 17th, he was shuttled to thecourthouse once again, but this time he wasnot brought up from the court pen in time tohear his case called. (“I’ll waive his appearancefor today’s purposes,” his lawyer told thejudge.) For more than a year, he had heardvarious excuses about why his trial had to bedelayed, among them that the prosecutorassigned to the case was on trial elsewhere, wason jury duty, or, as he once told the judge, had“conflicts in my schedule.” If Browder hadbeen in the courtroom on this day, he wouldhave heard a prosecutor offer a new excuse:“Your Honor, the assigned assistant iscurrently on vacation.” The prosecutor askedfor a five-day adjournment; Browder’s lawyerrequested March 16th, and the judgescheduled the next court date for then.

The following night, in his solitary cell onRikers, Browder shattered his plastic bucket by

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stomping on it, then picked up a piece,sharpened it, and began sawing his wrist. Hewas stopped after an officer saw him throughthe cell window and intervened.

rowder was still on Rikers Island in June of2012, when his high-school classmates

collected their diplomas, and in September,when some of them enrolled in college. In thefall, prosecutors offered him a new deal: if hepleaded guilty, he’d get two and a half years inprison, which meant that, with time served, hecould go home soon. “Ninety-nine out of ahundred would take the offer that gets you outof jail,” O’Meara told me. “He just said, ‘Nah,I’m not taking it.’ He didn’t flinch. Nevertalked about it. He was not taking a plea.”

Meanwhile, Browder kept travelling fromRikers to the Bronx courthouse and backagain, shuttling between two of New YorkCity’s most dysfunctional bureaucracies, eachsystem exacerbating the flaws of the other.With every trip Browder made to thecourthouse, another line was added to agrowing stack of index cards kept in the courtfile:

June 29, 2012: People not ready, request oneweek.

September 28, 2012: People not ready, requesttwo weeks.

November 2, 2012: People not ready, request oneweek.

December 14, 2012: People not ready, requestone week.

By the end of 2012, Browder had been injail for nine hundred and sixty-one days andhad stood before eight different judges. Healways maintained his composure, neverberating his attorney or yelling protests incourt. O’Meara was impressed by his control.

“I can’t imagine most people sitting in therefor three years and not becoming very upsetwith their attorney,” he says. “He just nevercomplained to me.” Privately, though, Browderwas angry. About the prosecutors, he wouldtell himself, “These guys are just playing withmy case.”

On March 13, 2013, Browder appearedbefore a new judge, Patricia M. DiMango,who had been transferred from Brooklyn aspart of a larger effort to tackle the Bronx’sbacklog. She was known for her no-nonsensestyle when dealing with defendants; at theBrooklyn courthouse, she was referred to asJudge Judy. (As it happens, this year shebecame a judge on “Hot Bench,” a newcourtroom TV show created by Judge Judy.) Inthe Bronx, DiMango’s job was to review casesand clear them: by getting weak casesdismissed, extracting guilty pleas fromdefendants, or referring cases to trial in anothercourtroom. At the start of 2013, there werenine hundred and fifty-two felony cases in theBronx, including Browder’s, that were morethan two years old. In the next twelve months,DiMango disposed of a thousand cases, someas old as five years.

Judge DiMango explained to Browder, “Ifyou go to trial and lose, you could get up tofifteen.” Then she offered him an even moretempting deal: plead guilty to twomisdemeanors—the equivalent of sixteenmonths in jail—and go home now, on the timealready served. “If you want that, I will do thattoday,” DiMango said. “I could sentence youtoday. . . . It’s up to you.”

“I’m all right,” Browder said. “I did not doit. I’m all right.”

“You are all right?” DiMango said.“Yes,” he said. “I want to go to trial.”Back at Rikers, other prisoners were

stunned. “You’re bugging,” they told him.“You’re stupid. If that was me, I would’ve saidI did it and went home.” Browder knew that itwas a gamble; even though he was innocent, hecould lose at trial. “I used to go to my cell andlie down and think, like, Maybe I am crazy;maybe I am going too far,” he recalled. “But Ijust did what I thought was right.”

On May 29th, the thirty-first court date onBrowder’s case, there was anotherdevelopment. DiMango peered down from thebench. “The District Attorney is really in aposition right now where they cannotproceed,” she said. “It is their intention todismiss the case.” She explained that this couldnot officially happen until the next court date,which ended up being a week later. “I willrelease you today, but you have to come backhere on time without any new cases,” she said.“Do you think you can do that, Mr. Browder?”

“Yes,” he said.Browder could not believe what was

happening. His battle to prove his innocencehad ended. No trial, no jury, no verdict. Anassistant district attorney filed a memo withthe court explaining that Bautista, the manwho had accused Browder, had gone back toMexico. The District Attorney’s office hadreached his brother in the Bronx and tried toarrange for him to return and testify, but thenthe office lost contact with the brother, too.“Without the Complainant, we are unable tomeet our burden of proof at trial,” theprosecutor wrote.

Browder had to spend one more night onRikers. By now, he had missed his junior yearof high school, his senior year, graduation, theprom. He was no longer a teen-ager; four daysearlier, he had turned twenty.

He didn’t know what time he would bereleased, so he told his mother not to bother

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picking him up. The next afternoon, he walkedout of jail, a single thought in his mind: “I’mgoing home!” He took the bus to QueensPlaza, then two subways to the Bronx, and hiseuphoria began to dissipate. Being around somany people felt strange. Except for a fewweeks, he had been in solitary confinement forthe previous seventeen months.

fter leaving Rikers, Browder moved backhome, where his mother and two of his

brothers were living. Everybody could see thathe had changed. Most of the clothes in hisbedroom no longer fit; he had grown an inchor two while he was away and had becomebrawnier. Many of his former pastimes—playing video games, watching movies,shooting hoops in the park—no longerengaged him. He preferred to spend time byhimself, alone in his bedroom, with the doorclosed. Sometimes he found himself pacing, ashe had done in solitary. When he saw oldfriends, he was reminded of theiraccomplishments and what he had notachieved: no high-school diploma, no job, nomoney, no apartment of his own.

Before he went to jail, he used to like sittingon his front steps with his friends, and when agroup of attractive girls walked by he’d call out,“Hi. What are you doing? Where’s the partyat? Can I go with you?” Now, if he managed toget a girl’s number, the first real conversationwould always go the same way: she would askhim if he was in school or working, and hewould feel his anxiety rise. Once he revealedthat he was still living at home, without a jobor a diploma, “they look at me like I ain’tworth nothing. Like I ain’t shit. It hurts tohave people look at you like that.” He couldexplain that he’d been wrongfully arrested, butthe truth felt too complicated, too raw and

personal. “If I tell them the story, then I gottahear a hundred questions,” he said. “It getsemotional for me. And those emotions I don’tfeel comfortable with.”

Not long after Browder returned home, oneof his relatives called an attorney named PaulV. Prestia and told him that Browder hadspent three years on Rikers only to have hiscase dismissed. “Send him down,” Prestia said.A former prosecutor in Brooklyn, Prestia nowhas his own firm. On his office wall hangs a2011 Post story about a Haitian chef from theBronx who was mistakenly arrested for rapeand spent eight days on Rikers; Prestia got thecase dismissed.

When Prestia first heard Browder’s story, hethought there must be a catch; even by thesorry standards of justice in the Bronx, the casewas extreme. “It’s something that could’ve beentried in a court in a matter of days,” he toldme. “I don’t know how each and everyprosecutor who looked at this case continuedto let this happen. It’s like Kalief Browderdidn’t even exist.” Earlier this year, Prestiafiled a suit on Browder’s behalf against the city,the N.Y.P.D., the Bronx District Attorney,and the Department of Correction.

Robert T. Johnson, the Bronx DistrictAttorney, will not answer questions aboutBrowder’s case, because, once the charges weredismissed, the court records were sealed. Butrecently when I asked him a general questionabout cases that drag on and on, he was quickto deflect blame. “These long delays—two,three years—they’re horrendous, but the D.A.is not really accountable for that kind of delay,”he said. His explanation was that either thecase did not actually exceed the six-monthspeedy-trial deadline or the defense attorneyfailed to bring a speedy-trial motion.

Prestia, in his lawsuit, alleges “malicious

prosecution,” charging that Johnson’sprosecutors were “representing to the courtthat they would be ‘ready’ for trial, when infact, they never were.” Prestia said, “Themillion-dollar question is: When did theyreally know they didn’t have a witness? Didthey really not know until 2013?” He suspectsthat, as he wrote in his complaint, they were“seeking long, undue adjournments of thesecases to procure a guilty plea from plaintiff.”The city has denied all allegations ofwrongdoing, and Johnson, when I asked aboutthese accusations, said, “Certainly if there issomething uncovered that we did wrong, I willdeal with that here. But I don’t expect that tobe the case.”

Prestia has represented many clients whowere wrongfully arrested, but Browder’s storytroubles him most deeply. “Kalief was deprivedof his right to a fair and speedy trial, hiseducation, and, I would even argue, his entireadolescence,” he says. “If you took a sixteen-year-old kid and locked him in a room fortwenty-three hours, your son or daughter,you’d be arrested for endangering the welfareof a child.” Browder doesn’t know exactly howmany days he was in solitary—and Rikersofficials, citing pending litigation, won’tdivulge any details about his stay—but heremembers that it was “about seven hundred,eight hundred.”

One day last November, six months after hisrelease, Browder retreated to his bedroom witha steak knife, intending to slit his wrists. Afriend happened to stop by, saw the knife, andgrabbed it. When he left the house to findBrowder’s mother, Browder tried to hanghimself from a bannister. An ambulancerushed him to St. Barnabas Hospital, where hewas admitted to the psychiatric ward. In hismedical record, a social worker describes the

Osuicide attempt as “serious.”

ne afternoon this past spring, I sat withBrowder in a quiet restaurant in lower

Manhattan. He is five feet seven, with a highforehead, tired eyes, and a few wisps of hairabove his upper lip. “Being home is way betterthan being in jail,” he told me. “But in mymind right now I feel like I’m still in jail,because I’m still feeling the side effects fromwhat happened in there.”

When I first asked if I could interview him,he was reluctant, but eventually he agreed, andwe met many times. We always met indowntown Manhattan, near Prestia’s office.He didn’t want to meet in the Bronx, andseemed to feel more comfortable speakingwhere nobody knew him. He almost alwayswore the same uniform: a hoodie with thehood pulled down; a pair of earbuds, one stuckin an ear and the other swinging free; rosarybeads dangling from his neck—not because heis Catholic (his family are Jehovah’s Witnesses)but “for fashion,” he said. When I asked himabout Rikers, he surprised me with hiswillingness to speak. At times, he seemedalmost unable to stop, as if he had long beencraving the chance to tell somebody aboutwhat he endured. Other times, though, the actof remembering seemed almost physicallypainful: he would fall silent, drop his gaze, andshake his head.

Ever since Browder left Rikers, he has triedto stay busy. He sat through G.E.D. prepclasses, signed up for a computer course,searched for a job, and attended weeklycounselling sessions. This past March, helearned that he had passed the G.E.D. on thefirst try. “I gained some of my pride back,” hetold me. He landed a job as a security guard—not his dream position, but it would serve

while he looked for something better. Bycoincidence, one of the places he was sent wasSt. Barnabas. On his second day there, heoverheard some employees talking about him;somebody seemed to have figured out that hehad been in the psychiatric ward. Soonafterward, with a vague explanation, he wasfired.

Prestia helped him find a part-time job,working for a friend who runs a jewelrybusiness in the same building as Prestia’soffice, near Wall Street. On May 29th—fourdays after his twenty-first birthday, and a yearto the day after DiMango told him that hewould be set free—Browder stood on asidewalk in front of a Chase bank, handing outflyers advertising the jewelry business. He toldme that he liked Wall Street—beingsurrounded by people with briefcases and suits,everyone walking with a sense of purpose.“When I see professional people, I see myself,”he said. “I say, ‘I want to be like them.’ ”

Exactly how he would manage this he wasnot sure. Most days, the progress he had madesince coming home did not feel like progress tohim. “It’s been a year now, and I got a part-time job, and I got my G.E.D.,” he said. “But,when you think about it, that’s nothing. Peopletell me because I have this case against the cityI’m all right. But I’m not all right. I’m messedup. I know that I might see some money fromthis case, but that’s not going to help mementally. I’m mentally scarred right now.That’s how I feel. Because there are certainthings that changed about me and they mightnot go back.”

This month, Browder started classes atBronx Community College. But, even now, hethinks about Rikers every day. He says that hisflashbacks to that time are becoming morefrequent. Almost anything can trigger them. It

might be the sight of a police cruiser orsomething more innocuous. When his mothercooks rice and chili, he says, he can’t helpremembering the rice and chili he was fed onRikers, and suddenly, in his mind, he is back inthe Bing, recalling how hungry he was all thetime, especially at night, when he’d have towait twelve hours for his next meal.

Even with his friends, things aren’t thesame. “I’m trying to break out of my shell, butI guess there is no shell. I guess this is just howI am—I’m just quiet and distant,” he says. “Idon’t like being this way, but it’s just natural tome now.” Every night before he goes to sleep,he checks that every window in the house islocked. When he rides the subway, he oftenfeels terrified. “I might be attacked; I might berobbed,” he says. “Because, believe me, in jailyou know there’s all type of criminal stuff thatgoes on.” No matter how hard he tries, hecannot forget what he saw: inmates stealingfrom each other, officers attacking teens, bloodon the dayroom floor. “Before I went to jail, Ididn’t know about a lot of stuff, and, now thatI’m aware, I’m paranoid,” he says. “I feel like Iwas robbed of my happiness.” ♦