Monday was bittersweet for Squire Patton Boggs senior attorney Carine Williams. In the morning she awoke to the news that a young man whose case she’d been closely following, Kalief Browder, committed suicide. The 23-year-old had spent three years on Rikers Island, often in solitary confinement, though he was never convicted of a crime.
“I was pretty shook up and heartbroken,” says Williams. Browder was the subject of a 2014 New Yorker profile depicting a broken criminal justice system that imprisoned him without a trial when he was only a teenager. “It really drove home for me how dangerous the use of solitary confinement can be,” Williams says.
