Prometheus 6

“There is not a day that transpires that I don’t think about this case,” the judge said. “This case is profoundly upsetting to me because I gave you every chance I could.”

A ‘Good Kid’ Gets a Day in Court, Again and Again
By JOHN ELIGON

By the cold math of his police record, Yiskar Caceres already had at least three strikes against him. In seven months, he had been arrested three times on cocaine charges and had pleaded guilty to each one. And that came after four arrests for marijuana.

But the judge saw something different when he looked over Mr. Caceres’s school transcripts and read the letters praising him as an intelligent, promising, family-oriented young man ready to change his ways.

The judge told Mr. Caceres that if he completed a rehabilitation program and stayed out of trouble for six months, he would avoid prison and his record would be virtually wiped clean.

“I have every confidence that you will not let your family or yourself down in this and complete the program, and it will work out well for you,” the judge, Justice Thomas Farber of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, told Mr. Caceres that day in January.

Three months later, Mr. Caceres was back in jail. The police had caught him with cocaine again.

Recidivism is as common to the justice system as orange jumpsuits and iron bars. Mr. Caceres’s case will not make any law journals, but it seemed to be more than the customary New York City criminal case.

In court on Thursday, the judge was struggling to decide what to make of the young man before him. It was hard to tell who was in more pain, Mr. Caceres, his weeping mother or the judge.

“There is not a day that transpires that I don’t think about this case,” the judge said. “This case is profoundly upsetting to me because I gave you every chance I could.”

Mr. Caceres, who is 19, does not easily fit the mold of a habitual defendant. He is articulate and affable, and he had no lack of positive role models. Except for his time in jail, he has lived in only one place, with his family in a fifth-floor walkup on Broadway near 138th Street. The judge who handled his case before it passed to Justice Farber wrote a note in his file: “A good nonviolent kid from a good background.”

“It was dumb,” Mr. Caceres said in an interview last week on Rikers Island. “I had the best chance. It couldn’t be put better for me. I didn’t have to spend a day more in jail.”

Ultimately, Mr. Caceres said, his greed, desire for extravagance and weakness under peer pressure did him in.