By Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon Maxwell book
SDNY COURTHOUSE, Dec 29 – A restitution payment of $1.651 from a defendant named Quinteria Daniels was docketed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on December 29, 2022.
Inner City Press, in the nearly empty SDNY courthouse, decided to read back into the case.
The lead defendant in this three-person Hobbs Act robbery conspiracy case, Kamel Osborne, had written to the second judge in the case, District Judge Valerie E. Caproni, on January 10, 2022 saying that in ten days he would be transferred to the Connecticut State prison and to please intervene and show mercy.
His letter, with address redacted, said "I have never been in trouble with the law before, until that dark day in 2019 that I decided to follow my friends to commit a crime, just trying to be accepted in a crowd of friends that I was trying to impress."
But, digging further back into the docket, it was more than that.
Living in The Bronx in 2015 and attending Vaughn College in Queens in its aviation program, part time, he met Quinteria Daniels, his first serious girlfriend and soon to be co-defendant (and restitution payer).
In 2016 Osborne moved out of his mother's apartment and with Daniels and her one-year-old daughter into a homeless shelter in The Bronx.
They had their own daughter in 2018, and Kamel fully dropped out of school to try to make money. He was promised a delivery job at $20 an hour, but it turned out to be as a package handler, three hours a day. Co-workers told him to steal cell phone from the warehouse and he did.
A man named Lywan Reed moved in with them. He didn't have a job, but Daniels referred to him as the "man of the house," according to Osborne's sentencing memo which unsuccessfully requested a non-custodial sentence.
From the memo:
"The first time they traveled to a bodega with the intention of committing a robbery, Kamel's mind and body rebelled against their plans... He took on the role of taking money from the cash register, while Mr. Reed took on the more menacing role of displaying the BB gun and stating their demands."
They were charged in November 2019 for 11 days of robberies in September 2019.
On February 4, 2021, amid COVID, Osborne was sentenced by video to 24 months in prison to be followed by three years of supervised release.
He was re-referred to his Federal Defender after his pro se letter, but after repeated calls informed her, she wrote on February 28, 2022 that "Mr. Osborne is currently incarcerated at FCI Danbury. At this time he does not wish to file any motion for relief."
The case is US v. Osborne, et al., 19-cr-931 (Caproni)
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