By Anna Deen, Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, July 16, 2021
Since being released from New York City’s Rikers Island jail — where he’d been sentenced to four months for not being where his parole officer expected him to be on a certain day and time — Dakem Roberts has been living in a Brooklyn homeless shelter.
It was his latest incarceration since, in the late 1970s, when he was 16, he was arrested and sentenced to life in prison. He’d been arrested for his involvement in a robbery whose victim died the next day of heart failure, he said.
“They said I took off my mask in front of somebody and showed my face to one of the kids in the neighborhood,” said Roberts, who maintains that he was falsely accused. He said the arresting officers smacked him around in the car, singing “happy birthday.”
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