The police treated Briley as a suspect because he matched aspects of the description the victim gave when he called 911: He was young and Black and wearing a gray hoodie.īriley had tried hard to reach me and included information for contacting him through JPay, a privately run service for incarcerated people. Though it’s terrifying to be held up at gunpoint, the victim of the robbery, a man in his 20s, was physically unharmed. But either way, an effective life sentence, for a teenager convicted of robbery, seemed excessive. I didn’t know whether Briley was telling the truth about his innocence. He was sentenced to prison for 60 years without the possibility of parole. “I went to trial on the armed robbery because not only was I innocent, I have never robbed nobody in my life.”īriley told me one more thing. “I pled guilty to the gun because I had a gun,” he wrote. Then they also booked him for an armed robbery that occurred nearly a day earlier. The police stopped him on his way to a store and arrested him for carrying a gun. In the following years, two people he was walking with the night he was arrested would be shot and killed, too.īriley ended up facing two kinds of serious charges, he explained. “I felt like I had to carry a gun for protection in the city of New Orleans.” In the months before he was arrested in November 2012, in the Mid-City neighborhood, two of his friends were shot and killed there. “At 19 I was one of those people you described,” Briley wrote. In the radio interview, I talked about an effort in the D.A.’s office in Brooklyn to give second chances to young people who are prosecuted for carrying guns illegally. He wrote to me two months earlier after hearing me on the radio talking about my 2019 book, “Charged,” about how prosecutors have historically used their power to increase incarceration - and about how a growing number of district attorneys around the country have begun to change that approach after winning elections on progressive platforms. When I returned from my trip, I found Briley’s letter buried in a stack of unopened office mail. Oehler’s email came while I was idly scrolling on my phone, waiting in the airport for a flight. It’s impossible for me to read all of them, and though I don’t feel good about it, many go unanswered. The pages are dense with facts, about a conviction or an appeal. The letters usually go on for pages, carefully handwritten on lined note paper, sometimes with sentences in smaller print crawling up the margins. Like many journalists who write about criminal justice, I get a lot of mail from people in prison. “In his last letter to me, he said he’d written to you at The Times but wasn’t sure if you received the letter,” Oehler explained. She wanted to let me know that Briley was trying to reach me. For a couple of years, Oehler and Briley had been writing to each other through a support program for incarcerated people. “I correspond with an inmate, Yutico Briley, at Dixon,” a prison in Jackson, La. Bazelon,” Karen Oehler wrote in July 2019. It all started with an email I received from a retired librarian in Oregon. Meet an inmate now & create a memorable, lasting relationship with a female inmate that wants to better themselves.To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. If you have any questions for me, ask and I will do my best to give you an honest answer. Someone who loves to write and will do so and who also loves to have fun. It looks like I will be here for a while yet and would like to meet someone who is willing to have this pen pal type of relationship for the time being. I have two children that I love and would love to connect with someone who loves children and family life. I am looking for a long term relationship and or friendship.
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