BRAGG SAYS A PRISON SENTENCE SHOULD BE A 'LAST RESORT'

More young men will end up in prison under Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg 

 

By Nicole Gelinas

 

New York Post

January 23, 2022

 

 

                                

Camrin Williams is charged with attempting to murder a police officer in the Bronx. Williams had already had his second chance: He was on probation for a 2020 gun-possession arrest

 

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg wants to keep teens and young men out of prison. Reserving prison as a “last resort,” as Bragg repeatedly pledges, is a laudable goal — but his policies will achieve the opposite. He’ll end up sending more teens and young men to prison and for longer sentences. 

We know how to keep people from long prison sentences: keep them from committing serious crimes. And we know who commits serious crimes: people who have committed less serious crimes.

Let’s look at the first subway murder of 2022 — no, not the killing of Michelle Go in Times Square Jan. 15 but the death of 36-year-old Roland Hueston at The Bronx’s Fordham Road station on New Year’s Day. Two alleged knife-wielding attackers, Jonathan Aponte, 16, and Braulio Garcia, 17, menaced a random victim until he fell to the tracks. Hueston rescued this stranger and was hit by a train. 

The two teens face murder, robbery and assault charges in adult court. 

They could have faced only knife-possession and farebeating charges. Just before the assault, you can see them on video brazenly walking into the subway through the exit gate, not at all afraid that a police officer will apprehend them. 

It’s too bad police didn’t catch them. Cops would have saved them the risk of doing some serious time.

Farebeating arrests and summonses are already way down citywide — but Bragg, in saying that he won’t prosecute them at all, will send them down further in Manhattan. Most farebeating charges are simply civil summonses. But with no prosecution at all, there is now no incentive to ever pay a civil summons to keep them from piling up — so no incentive to keep issuing them. 

 

Winston Glynn allegedly killed Kristal Bayron-Nieves after robbing a Burger King where she worked

 

What about Winston Glynn, the 30-year-old charged with robbing and killing Burger King clerk Kristal Bayron-Nieves? Before allegedly shooting Bayron-Nieves, Glynn faced recent charges of menacing with a screwdriver in November and criminal possession of a weapon in 2020. Glynn was released without bail on the November charge. 

Bragg will double down on this policy, saying he won’t seek any pre-trial detainment at Rikers in any such case because it hasn’t resulted in homicide or “serious physical injury.” 

Yet.

Then there’s 16-year-old Camrin Williams, facing a charge in The Bronx of attempted murder of a cop. Last week, cops tried to apprehend Williams when he refused to comply with their orders to remove his hands from his pockets. Williams’s illegal gun fired, hitting an officer. 

Williams had already had his second chance: He was on probation for a 2020 gun-possession arrest.

In Manhattan, Bragg has already said that he won’t seek prison sentences for gun possession at all, even for adults. “The office will not seek a carceral sentence other than for homicide” or “serious physical injury,” as well as sex crimes and public corruption, his infamous memo reads. 

What does he think people are going to do with those weapons? 

As the playwright Anton Chekhov said, “one must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off.” That is fine advice for plays, but Bragg has now ensured that more guns are going to “go off.” 

If there is no serious penalty for carrying a loaded weapon around, more teens and young men will carry loaded weapons around. 

If there is no penalty at all for farebeating and the other genuinely small crimes that spur police to interact with lawbreakers, there’s less chance to remove guns and knives from the streets before they’re used.

Bragg argues that the answer is diversion: He’ll do a better job of intercepting Manhattan’s future farebeaters and gun carriers after they’re arrested for such crimes — but before they’re able to kill someone. 

The mechanism by which this is going to work, though, is murky. 

Why bother to cooperate with “diversion” when you have already been told, via the DA’s memo, that you won’t face any prison time for any charge much short of murder? 

Plus: Glynn had a paying job, also at Burger King, until recently. Williams is a gifted high-school student. What kind of “diversion” did they need? 

Last week, Rashaun Weaver, the now-16-year-old who stabbed Columbia student Tessa Majors to death two years ago, won a 14-years-to-life adult sentence for the crime. “I’d give anything to go back in time so that it never happened,” he said. 

He’ll be joined soon enough by others.