Jelani Henry
This is an absolutely tragic story. The DA used conspiracy statutes to charge a young man named Jelani Henry who was attending a trade school with two counts of attempted murder and other charges because he liked some posts on Facebook. He refused to take a plea deal so the DA let him rot in Rikers for two years figuring that she could break him and force him to take the deal. The case was eventually dismissed, but now he's facing assault charges for defending himself in a jail fight.
How the NYPD is using social media to put Harlem teens behind bars
"The mix of social media and conspiracy statutes creates a dragnet that can bring almost anybody in," says Andrew Laufer, a New York City attorney who has worked on numerous cases involving teenagers wrongly arrested by police. "It’s a complete violation of the Fourth Amendment and the worst kind of big brother law enforcement." To build the case for the Harlem raid, police had begun social media surveillance of children well before they had built up a serious criminal record.
Affiliation with a crew, even a tangential one, can be a deciding factor in getting locked up. "I find it disturbing and scary," says Christian Bolden, a professor of criminology at Loyola University. "In many states, if police see you together with someone three times — and this can be in real life or in a picture they find online — that is enough to prove conspiracy. That puts the onus on young people to be smart and careful about who they are with and what they post. And if we know one thing about teenagers, it’s that they are rabidly social and often quite reckless." It was this exact mix of neighborhood affiliations and social media that entangled the fates of the Henry brothers.
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Five months after Asheem’s indictment, in April of 2012, the police arrested Jelani at his girlfriend’s home in the Bronx. At first he thought it was for something minor: he had jumped a subway turnstile earlier that year and failed to show up in court for his summons. But he quickly learned that he was under arrest for two counts of attempted murder and other charges.
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Jelani had never been convicted of a crime, but at the arraignment, the District Attorney’s office described him as a known member of a violent gang. As evidence, Jelani and Alethia say, she pointed to posts about Goodfellas that he had "liked" on Facebook. The judge denied Jelani bail, instead sending him to Rikers Island, one of the nation’s most notorious jails. The district attorney offered him 20 years if he pled guilty, but Jelani refused. He was certain that a trial would prove his innocence. Days went by, then weeks, months, a year. The trial never came.
"Because of them pictures, the DA said I was affiliated, that I know what’s going on in the hood," Jelani remembers. On Facebook, Jelani had appeared in pictures with the crewmembers, and he had liked images linked to Goodfellas on Facebook. Again and again, Jelani says, the district attorney pressed him to take a plea bargain, pointing to the evidence on social media. But he refused. "Those are people I would call my friends, but what they was doing, I wasn’t doing. To her, I’m part of them. I’m a monster."
IN A BIT OF KAFKA-ESQUE ARITHMETIC, 19 MONTHS BECAME 83 DAYS
Every so often Henry would be shuttled to the courthouse in Manhattan, and every time, the district attorney delayed the start of the trial. In New York, a defendant is entitled to a trial, and a felony suspect is supposed to be freed on bail after six months without one.
But the district attorney convinced a judge that most of the time Jelani spent in jail shouldn’t count towards that release. She argued that days spent gathering more evidence, delays in testimony by a police officer who was on vacation, or instances where she was unprepared to make her case did not figure into the six-month period. The judge agreed. In a bit of Kafka-esque arithmetic, 19 months became 83 days. Instead of finishing trade school, Jelani celebrated his 20th and 21st birthdays in a cell.
Alethia finally convinced her lawyer to file a speedy trial motion and in November of 2013 Jelani was given bail. Four months later, with no move by the DA to proceed, his case was finally dismissed, almost two years to the day it began. The DA has refused to share the document that outlines the reason for dismissing Jelani’s case with him or his lawyer. To day, there has been no explanation and no apology for Jelani’s detention.
Unfortunately, Henry’s troubles from the arrest aren’t over. He is now facing assault charges stemming from a fight in prison. "He was innocent when he went in there, and now he might come out with a charge for defending himself," says Alethia. His family plans to sue the city over his arrest and to have the charges stemming from his time in Rikers dropped.
Alethia is committed to getting his story out there because she believes the policies of police and prosecutors have to change. "Jelani was brought in over nothing. Because he was Asheem’s brother. Because he was friends with people from the hood on Facebook." Well before the arrest of either boy, she had gone to the local police, begging them to intervene in the deadly neighborhood conflicts. "We asked for help, and we got an indictment instead," she says sitting in her kitchen, tears wetting her eyes. "People don’t understand why it’s so dangerous to put yourself out there on social media. You know what my son is guilty of? Being born on 129th Street."
So disgusting.