Rand Paul Reacts to Death of Kalief Browder

When Kentucky Senator Rand Paul talks to conservative audiences about overhauling the criminal-justice system, he refers to a few deeply reported stories from the mainstream press. Sometimes, he'll praise the Washington Post's series on civil asset forfeiture. Often, he'll encourage his audience—typically Republican, mostly white—to read Jennifer Gonnerman's 2014 New Yorker profile of Kalief Browder, a young black man in New York who spent three years on Rikers Island, as a teenager, while waiting for a trial.

"We should have speedy trials in our country," Paul told the crowd at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference. "Kalief Browder was a 16-year-old boy accused of a crime. He's from the Bronx. He's an African-American kid from the Bronx. Accused of a crime, he was sent to Rikers. He spent three years in Rikers. He was never tried. He tried to commit suicide four times. If you ask Kalief Browder and you ask his mom or you ask anybody that lives around him in the Bronx whether or not the Bill of Rights is being defended—he lives in that other America that Martin Luther King talked about. If we want to get—if we want to get new people into our party and get libertarians and others who believe in privacy, what we have to do is we have say to people like Kalief Browder that big government's not only a problem as far as regulations and taxes, big government's a problem with sometimes not giving justice to those who deserve it."