'Teen illegally imprisoned and tortured for three years commits suicide'

[kalibex]

This seems to me an especially bad one. Warning: Article at the end mentions the suicide method and the fact that his mother found him.

Browder was arrested at the age of 16 for allegedly stealing a backpack, then kept in prison without trial for three years because his family couldn’t afford his ransom, er, bail of $10,000. While in prison he was routinely beaten by both guards and other inmates. He also spent 400 days in solitary confinement. Again, this was all because he was accused of allegedly stealing a backpack, for which he was never charged, in direct violation of pretty much every one of his constitutional rights.

_http://www.examiner.com/article/teen-illegally-imprisoned-and-tortured-for-three-years-commits-suicide_


It's really depressing to feel obliged to post this...but then again it's a perfect example of how bad things can be. How the {expletive self-deleted} can something like this be allowed to occur?

 

[A Jay]

This is absolutely tragic and infuriating. How did those guards sleep at night knowing they were torturing a teen that had never been charged or tried for any crime?

 

[hlat]

This brings to mind the idea that sometimes small bad things lead to big bad things, so that trying to cut out the small bad things may be worthwhile in order to prevent the big bad things from happening.

The article link to another article about the case.
_http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/06/before-the-law
The victim was already on probation for a previous crime, so his arrest while on probation was a problem and then his family's failure to borrow $3,000 immediately by any means necessary to bail him out was another problem. If he hadn't been friends with the people who stole a vehicle that resulted in his previous conviction, then it is likely he wouldn't have been held in jail.

The article also linked to a different case.
_http://www.wnyc.org/story/guilty-until-proven-innocent/
In this other case, apparently the victim sometime bought and sold marijuana, and went on a ride with 2 others who told him that they wanted to buy marijuana. But the problem was that the 2 others actually planned on robbing a drug dealer, the victim ended up with a gun and firing it, and a drug dealer's friend was murdered in the attempted robbery. The victim was found guilty on a weapons charge. If the victim never used marijuana, he almost certainly wouldn't have gone down the path that resulted in more than 5 years behind bars waiting for trial.

Temptation and other dangers can be hard to overcome in the moment, so it is best to plan ahead of time in order to completely avoid those kinds of situations.