I Can't Breathe

by Matt Taibbi

  As he talked about all of this on the phone, you could hear traffic on the Bronx streets rushing by.

  “It’s like, everywhere I go to get help, they’re like, ‘Well, our reputation’s on the line,’ ” he said. “Or it’s basically, ‘Here, you got to take this deal.’ So it’s like, I don’t know who to run to, who to go to.

  “I just don’t know who to trust.”

  Minutes later, Orta hung up and walked outside to head to a store. Almost immediately, at the intersection of Reverend James Polite Avenue and East 165th Street, police rushed him and threw him in a car. They’d keyed in on his cellphone, apparently.*2 By the time he made it to the Seventh Precinct, local news photographers were waiting for him. The local media knew he was busted before he did.

  —

  At any given time, on any list of the most miserable places in New York City, the downtown arraignments court at 100 Centre Street in Manhattan would have to rank pretty high. This grim little hall smells like mold and features beat-up wooden pews for benches, and most of the action inside involves sending people nobody cares about to places the public will never see, down the toilet of the city’s medieval jail system.

  It’s Saturday, the morning after Ramsey’s arrest in the Bronx. While the rest of the city is sleeping in, a ragtag group of angry-looking lawyers, bailiffs, and defendants march one after another before an even surlier-sounding magistrate, Judge Patricia Nuñez. The honor of being a judge must feel a little muted when you’re spending your weekends doing bail hearings for the kind of people you wouldn’t even step over on a New York City sidewalk.

  An African American man stands with his head bowed before Nuñez. He is charged with stealing soap. The city, ludicrously, is asking for five thousand dollars’ bail.

  “For a box of Dove soap,” the man’s attorney pleads. “I submit, Your Honor, that five thousand dollars is above and beyond the scope of this case.”

  Nuñez rolls her eyes and whacks her gavel.

  “Bail is set at two hundred fifty dollars,” she says, then sighs and looks with undisguised anguish at the sizable row of defendants waiting their turn.

  In the next case, a defense lawyer stands up and tries to stammer out an argument that his client, another African American man, has insufficient funds to make bail. The accused supposedly stole a $769 leather jacket from a Gap store. He has nineteen failures to appear on his sheet. The guy is screwed, but his lawyer, juggling a pile of manila folders, gives it a college try.

  “Your Honor, my client is of very limited means,” he begins. “And bail at all is tantamount to remand…”

  Nuñez, annoyed, whacks her gavel before he can finish. “Bail is set at ten thousand dollars,” she says. “Next!”

  Ten thousand! The Gap patron sags like he’s taken a bullet, then shakes his head in rage. The bailiffs, sensing trouble, quickly move to take him away, but he struggles and shouts a string of obscenities at the judge on the way out.

  Nuñez snaps awake.

  “I heard that,” she says. Then, slowly, so the court reporter can get all of it, she repeats the defendant’s tirade.

  “The defendant just said, ‘I ain’t pleading guilty to shit and this is fucking bullshit.’ ” She looks over at the man crossly and decides to throw a little judgeifying at him. “That increases his bail to twenty thousand dollars.”

  “Motherfucker!” the man hisses as the bailiffs drag him out.

  A few minutes later, the monotony is broken when the hotshot lawyers Aronin and Perry appear. It’s a bit of a surprise that they’re here. The relationship between the two lawyers and their client has deteriorated to the point where it was unclear that they still represented him.

  Late-night phone calls between Bella and the two men had not ended well, and whether or not Orta would even have a lawyer this morning had been in question until a few minutes before the hearing.

  But once the two men showed up, nobody in the gallery would have guessed at any problems. They were the pros from Dover, and they acted like it.

  Aronin is young, fit, has slick hair, and looks like an extra from a stockbroker-chic movie like Wall Street or Boiler Room.

  Perry meanwhile has flowing silver hair that’s thin on top, long in back, and kept in a faintly hippieish style. His look hints a little at famed countercultural activist lawyers like Bill Kunstler and J. Tony Serra.

  Their client by then was famous enough that he was recognizable from a distance. Dressed in a trademark black ski hat and a black jacket, the lean, withdrawn-looking Orta, now twenty-four, sat glumly in the back of the courtroom. He looked like he expected an anvil to fall on his head at any moment. He certainly didn’t look like he expected to get bail.

  But he was wrong. After the DA finished a monotonous recitation of Orta’s many misdeeds, ending with a Freudian flourish—“He, uh, threatened his knife, I mean his wife, uh, with a knife”—the judge asked Perry to respond.

  Perry moved to the lectern.

  “Let me address some of these factual allegations,” he said, and plunged into an impressive impromptu speech.

  “Since we have been representing him he has made every appearance,” he said. He then turned to indicate Bella, who was sitting in the gallery. “We have been in touch with the plaintiff and her attorney, and she is in this courtroom today.”

  Bella waved.

  “Your Honor, she has put a video online that describes what happened as an argument between newlyweds,” continued Perry.

  He switched gears and accused police of harassment. “Members of the warrant squad have made persistent threatening phone calls,” he said. “He was very scared. There were further issues about articles in the press about unnamed police sources indicating he was suicidal. He is very active in the Black Lives Matter movement, Your Honor.”

  He gestured in the direction of the judge and smiled. It was unclear what effect the words “Black Lives Matter” had on the judge, but they certainly got her attention.

  “Bail in this case is improper,” Perry went on. “This case isn’t going anywhere. It will disappear.”

  Nuñez looked at Perry and sighed. She did not appear to relish dealing with a case with this kind of profile. On the other hand, she didn’t quite seem to buy Ramsey Orta as an innocent victim. She looked down at his file and shook her head.

  “There’s a lot of open cases,” she said, raising an eyebrow.

  Perry said nothing.

  The judge went on: “And it’s not unusual for the complainant of a domestic violence case to change her statement.”

  She looked over at Ramsey and his now-famous black hat for a moment, clearly not wanting this headache.

  “Bail is set at ten thousand dollars,” she said. “That’s in light of the fact that the case will probably be discharged.”

  In the gallery, Bella smiled and jumped up and down in her seat, giddy. Ramsey said nothing and went back in the pen. He knew enough not to celebrate anything. He was getting out again, but for how long?

  —

  Just weeks after his arrest on domestic violence charges, Orta was arrested again, this time back at the Baruch Houses on the Lower East Side. He was out with Copwatch when police nabbed him for “interfering” with an arrest.

  Orta hadn’t moved back to the sidewalk as quickly as the police had wanted him to. He also handed a business card to the man being arrested. So they hit him with the usual pupu platter of legally vague/meaningless charges, including disorderly conduct and obstructing government administration.

  This time, the judge just wrote Orta a desk appearance ticket and let him go, apparently unimpressed with the arrest.

  When he got out, Orta and Bella had another argument and she took off for the West Coast to get away from him. He wondered if he should go after her to try to work things out. At the same time, he found himself increasingly perplexed by his situation. The mere fact that he could travel at all he found strange.

  He was becoming exhausted and confused b
y this pattern of being arrested, then released to give interviews and travel the world, then arrested again, then released again, then arrested again, seemingly every few minutes.

  “My rap sheet, the felonies that I copped out to before,” he says. “Basically I should have never been home. I got six new cases and they keep letting me out on bail. If I’m such a criminal, I’m guilty, you got all this evidence against me, but why you keep giving me bail, though?”

  Orta by then worked himself into such a state, he now wondered if this was some kind of weird cat-and-mouse game, like maybe the police enjoyed letting him out and hunting him down each time or something. He said he’d even taken grief for it inside.

  “Even people in jail is looking at me like if I’m fucking snitching on people,” he says. “Because they be like, ‘How the fuck you keep coming home, nigga?’ ”

  Things were so much simpler before.

  “I don’t want the fame, I don’t even want to be Ramsey Orta,” he said. “I don’t want none of this shit no more.”

  —

  Within a few weeks, Orta was giving in. The city was pressuring him to deal. A few years inside, they said, and all the cases go away.

  On July 7, 2016, almost exactly two years after Eric Garner’s death, Orta’s saga came to an end. In Part Six of the Staten Island court, ironically before Judge Stephen Rooney, the original magistrate overseeing the Garner grand jury, Orta agreed to his plea deal. In yet another example of how chaotic and random the criminal justice system is, the deal wasn’t settled until literally seconds before Orta stood before the judge.

  Ramsey had decided to take the deal mainly because he had been told, in negotiations, that the case against his mother, Emily Mercado, would go away as soon as he pleaded out.

  “They told me that if I copped, they’d drop her case,” says Orta, minutes before his court hearing. Dressed in slacks and a plaid dress shirt, he was resigned to the years, but there was late news that had him worried.

  “Now all of the sudden they’re acting weird about that,” he says. His mother, a quiet, sad-looking woman in her forties, sat next to her son, nodding. “They’re telling me they have to review it or something.”

  A moment later, Orta disappeared into a conference room with Aronin and Perry, who’d just arrived. He came back shaking his head.

  “They’re telling me I’ve got to cop to weed, crack, or heron, but since weed isn’t a felony, it’s got to be crack or heron.”

  Orta shook his head. It was strange that it didn’t matter which crime he did or didn’t do; in the end, he just had to pick one that fit the sentencing guidelines in the right way. Which charge would he take?

  “I’ll take heron.” He shrugged.

  Meanwhile, there were conflicting reports about his mother’s situation. At first the deal was five years’ probation. When he and his mother went up to stand before the judge, the lawyers were still frantically whispering with one another. Not until a moment before Rooney began speaking did they settle on three years’ probation for his mother.

  Orta was sworn in. “Do you swear to tell the truth in all matters before this court?” he was asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  But then Rooney began asking him the usual boilerplate questions: is he mentally, physically and emotionally able to plead guilty today, is he on drugs or alcohol, does he understand the charges, etc.

  Orta dutifully answered each question correctly. Then Rooney asked, “Has anyone offered you anything with regard to your plea deal today?”

  Orta paused, mouth open. He looked at his lawyers. The true answer was yes. After all, he was offered a lower sentence for his mother.

  “That’s what I was thinking. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say,” he said later.

  There was a heated exchange for a moment, and Judge Rooney looked miffed. Perry began to try to offer an explanation about the situation with Orta’s mother, then cut himself off. You have to avoid literal truths sometimes in court. Finally Ramsey shook his head and just answered.

  “No, Your Honor.”

  That was that. Four years in prison was the final tally, plus eighteen months to three years of postrelease supervision. Orta seemed exhausted and glad to be done with it.

  His mother, Emily, seemed relieved, too. “I mean, it’s not the ideal thing,” she said. “But it’s better than going to jail.”

  As he and his mother collected their thoughts on the sidewalk outside the Staten Island courthouse, the Internet was blowing up with the latest police videos.

  A man named Alton Sterling had been shot to death by police in Baton Rouge while pinned to the ground, while a man named Philando Castile had been killed during a car stop while reaching for his documents.

  By evening, the same bloody cycle that had marked the Garner case would have run its course, as a sniper in Dallas would shoot and kill five people, including four police, igniting a countermovement against Black Lives Matter. The stories stay the same, only the actors change.

  Orta was about to disappear from the stage for a while.

  “Crazy fucking system,” he said.

  * * *

  *1 Orta would go on to have interactions with countless reporters in the next eighteen months, and many of those relationships ended the same way. Journalists would tie themselves into knots trying to present him as the innocent victim of a racist manhunt, not seeming to grasp that he could be technically guilty and railroaded at the same time. So they tended to flee the first time one of Orta’s explanations for an arrest didn’t add up.

  *2 Ramsey had to wonder about me, too, after that phone call, given that he was arrested minutes after we hung up. For the record, I didn’t turn him in.

  FIFTEEN IBRAHIM

  January 4, 2016. On a bench in the hallway of Staten Island’s gleaming new courthouse building, Ibrahim Annan sits holding a cane between his knees. He looks up and around, casting a glance at the high ceiling.

  This new Staten Island court had been under construction when Eric Garner was killed. Now completed, it’s a gaudy, idiosyncratic piece of architecture, difficult to navigate but full of common space, curious angles, and sunlight. If you can imagine Frank Gehry designing a morgue, it might look something like this.

  Annan scrolls through his phone. Someone has sent him the mug shot of Robert Lewis Dear, the fifty-seven-year-old white lunatic who shot up a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs a little over a month before. Dear shot five cops and killed one, but the police conspicuously forgot to beat him after capture, a fact that didn’t go unnoticed in Eric Garner’s old neighborhood.

  “Look at him. Not a mark on his face,” Annan says, shaking his head.

  Every court hearing involving the Eric Garner case has been a packed, media-filled affair, but this isn’t typical of police brutality cases. Annan’s situation is much more the norm. Cases like his, hundreds if not thousands of them every year, move through empty or near-empty courtrooms, heard by overworked judges who are often too exhausted to show any humanity.

  In the courtroom of Judge Raymond Rodriguez, the island’s first Hispanic judge, Annan and his lawyer are practically the only people in the room. They are present to witness the last stages of the preposterous game of legal chicken that marks a large portion of these less-famous brutality cases.

  It’s been almost two full calendar years since Annan was dragged from his car and beaten by a pair of Staten Island police officers, who left his leg broken in three places.

  In that time he’s been back and forth to court nearly a dozen times, playing out a macabre negotiation that has a lot more to do with a possible future brutality lawsuit than it does Annan’s actual guilt or innocence.

  To recap: Ibrahim Annan was parked in his car on private property on April 2, 2014, when two Staten Island cops, Dominick Raso and Joseph D’Albero, took him by surprise. Without warning they smashed his car window, yanked him from his seat (so forcefully he had to have his seat belt replaced), beat h
im with a police ASP (a telescoping metal wand), and threw him on the ground. There, says Annan, they handcuffed him, choked him, and stomped on his leg until it snapped in three places.

  The ostensible probable cause for this arrest, as described by Officer Raso in the complaint, was that from his own seat inside his police cruiser, he somehow saw Annan in his own front seat waving around a bag of weed that was “open to public view.”

  Defense lawyers laugh about the probable cause excuses that police come up with in their reports. The “center console” phrase is a running joke. Another common literary device in police complaints is the suspect who drops his drugs on the ground as he flees police pursuit. Lawyers affectionately call these cases “dropsies.”

  In Annan’s case, if Officers Raso and D’Albero had managed to avoid crippling their suspect, they’d probably have gotten a conviction. Even if what actually happened is that two cops barged into a parked car and committed a groping blind search on private property without any reason at all beyond Annan being black and in the wrong place, it likely would’ve worked.

  But things went sideways, and the police not only beat the suspect but left him with undeniable injuries. Worse, they left him with an automatically compelling cause of action for a potentially expensive federal civil rights lawsuit. So what to do?

  The three most common civil suits targeting law enforcement are for excessive force, malicious prosecution, and false arrest. Even a person found guilty of a crime can sue for excessive force. But as it happens, certain types of criminal convictions, even the most minor, obviate the possibility of federal lawsuits for false arrest or malicious prosecution.

  Therefore when the authorities find themselves dealing with a case like Annan’s, it becomes a math game almost immediately.

  The DA usually gets behind the cops and piles charge upon charge on the defendant. In the beginning of the process, he or she then typically plays up the bad cop routine in court, representing that the state will go all out for a conviction and a maximum sentence.