This isn't fiction or hyperbole.
Kalief Browder served for three years in Riker's Island without ever being convicted of a crime.
Carlos Montero is in Riker's now and has served seven years there without ever being convicted.
But then, on a whole other level of outrageous injustice, is Jerry Hartfield. When I first learned of his story earlier today, I thought I was mistaken or was somehow misreading the facts. I wasn't.
His conviction for murder was overturned all the way back in 1980. He was never retried.
A full 35 years later (that's more than 12,500 days), Hartfield, without being formally convicted of a crime, remains in a Texas prison.
In June, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, with a great deal of prodding from the federal courts, confirmed that Hartfield was currently in custody for no good reason—under penalty of no "conviction or sentence," the state judges ruled. And yet he still has not been released. Instead, prosecutors intend to retry him and are fighting to keep him in prison pending that retrial. What kind of trial? A trial at which there is likely to be precious little physical evidence against the defendant because, his attorneys say, it may have been lost over time.
Facing a retrial he could win, Hartfield says he is entitled to get help now, today, because his constitutional right to a speedy trial has long since been violated. If the Sixth Amendment means anything anymore, the defense says, it means that the state must try a man at some point before he has spent a third of a century behind bars for no legitimate reason. He should be immediately released from custody, they say, even if prosecutors want to re-try him for a murder they say he committed in 1977.
In times past, I've declared that our justice system is broken. It isn't broken. It's operating exactly how it intends to operate.
Jerry Hartfield should be released immediately and this country, which could never fully repay him, must do some serious soul searching, then rebuild our justice system by starting over from scratch. This can't happen.