Assani M. Amzati

He was twenty-one and he had an alibi. He had been on the phone. There were records. His lawyer met him for the first time on the day of the trial and did not use any of it. Yutico Briley got SIXTY YEARS. New Orleans, Louisiana, 2012. An armed robbery. Yutico Briley, twenty-one, was arrested nearby and identified. He had been at a motel. He had phone records. He had an alibi that could be checked by anybody willing to spend an afternoon on it. His trial lasted a matter of hours. He was represented by a lawyer who, on the record, had not meaningfully investigated the case and did not present the alibi. He was sentenced to sixty years without parole for a robbery in which nobody was hurt. He wrote letters from prison for years. Nothing moved. What eventually moved it was a journalist. Emily Bazelon, writing for the New York Times Magazine, looked into the case after he reached out, and what she found was that the alibi had been verifiable the whole time. The Orleans Parish District Attorney's office reviewed it and agreed the conviction could not stand. In March 2021 Yutico Briley walked out after **nine years.** Nine years is not the longest sentence on this page today. That is exactly why it is here. Leonard Mack got forty-seven years on the paper. Ricky Jackson got thirty-nine in a cell. You read those and the number does the work for you. Yutico Briley was twenty-one and lost his twenties. He went in before Instagram was a habit and came out at thirty. And the reason he got out is not that the system corrected itself. It is that a reporter at a magazine happened to read his letter. How many letters are there? How many others are still waiting for someone to listen? Join us in uncovering the injustices too often ignored, and help bring these stories into the light. Get our Ebook savvypurchase.samcart.com/pr…