New Year's Resolution on Punishing Kids

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By James Alan Fox, The Boston Globe

The turn of the calendar always brings news about how crime levels have trended over the previous year.  And like many cities around the country, Boston witnessed fewer crimes in 2011 than 2010, including a double-digit drop in homicide.

With crime rates at a 50-year low, this is a good time to re-examine our criminal justice policies, especially those measures implemented in a knee-jerk fashion when crime rates and higher levels of fear were peaking. We should begin in the areas that are a significant drain on the budget, such as our over-reliance on lengthy prison terms for juvenile murderers who, after decades of incarceration, no longer pose a danger to society. And this is hardly a left-wing, soft-on-crime idea, as even conservatives like Newt Gingrich have argued that we can’t afford to continue pouring vast sums of tax dollars into prison systems.

Many people are surprised to learn that Massachusetts is one of the toughest places in the world in punishing juvenile murderers. Defendants as young as 14, who are charged with murder are automatically tried as adults. If convicted, they are automatically sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. No other state has this harsh and rigid combination, and several states, including ultra-conservative Texas, have recently abolished life without parole sentences for juveniles.

Read the entire article here.

Bay State must relax youth punishments

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By Jody Kent Lavy.  Letter to the Editor, The Boston Globe

I WAS pleased to read the Globe’s story highlighting some of the injustices in the practice of sentencing children to life in prison without the possibility of release in Massachusetts (“For teens guilty of murder, penalties can vary widely; Review finds no pattern in young killers’ terms since Mass. law change,’’ Page A1, Dec. 27).

Massachusetts has one of the strictest sentencing schemes for juveniles in the country: children as young as 14 charged with murder must be transferred to adult court and receive a mandatory life without parole sentence, if convicted. There is no opportunity to consider the influence of older co-defendants, history of abuse or neglect, or any other mitigating factors.

 

Read the entire article here.

For my son, 18 years is too many

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By Joseph Donovan, Sr.  A Letter to the Editor, The Boston Globe

THE GLOBE’S Christmas Day editorial (“If sentences vary too widely, courts should make corrections’’) meant a great deal to my family. My son, Joseph Donovan Jr., is serving life without the possibility of parole for a crime that took place when he was a teen. Joey was convicted of murder, though he did not kill Yngve Raustein. By every account, he had no intention of participating in a murder. But he was convicted of armed robbery under the state’s felony murder law, which means he is ineligible for parole.

Joey’s actions were immature, stupid, and regrettable. But Shon McHugh’s desire to kill created a lifetime of sorrow for Yngve’s family as well as ours. Yngve was a brilliant, studious young man whose bright future was brutally taken from him. And my son, who had never been incarcerated before, became a lifer. What should have been his senior year of high school became his freshman year in the state’s most notorious prison, MCI Cedar Junction.
Read the entire article here.

Young have greater ability to reform

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By David Fassler, Letter to the Editor, The Boston Globe

RE “FOR teens guilty of murder, penalties can vary widely; Review finds no pattern in young killers’ terms since Mass. law change’’ (Page A1, Dec. 27):

More states are re-examining their laws regarding life without parole for juvenile offenders. Such initiatives underscore the growing recognition that adolescents differ from adults in how they think, solve problems, and make decisions. Their brains are not yet fully developed, particularly in the areas that govern reasoning and complex behavior. As a result, they’re more likely to act on impulse, without fully considering the consequences of their actions. Fortunately, they’re also more likely to mature and change over time, enhancing the possibility of rehabilitation.

Read the entire article here.

Juvenile lifers should get a second chance

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A Letter to the Editor
Re: “Supreme Court may review life sentences,” Page A1, Dec. 2.
After serving more than 20 years in the Department of Corrections, two years as a warden at the Avoyelles Simmesport Correctional Facility, I have seen the best and worst of people in prison. Because of this experience, I can tell you that sentencing juveniles to life without the possibility of parole benefits no one.
Many of the juvenile lifers I have worked with have been a huge help to staff in our prisons. Whether by keeping programs alive, training new inmates on how to become compliant to the rules or even in some cases training staff on how to handle inmates, juvenile lifers prove to be some of the most active, mature and often times rehabilitated inmates. These juveniles can live four times the amount of time they spent on the outside in prison, more time then an adult with the same charge even though they are not as mature or as culpable as adults.
Read the entire article here.

US must stop jailing minors for life, says Amnesty

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Amnesty International has called for the US to stop sentencing juveniles to life in prison without parole.

More than 2,500 adults are in US jails for crimes committed as a child – under current rules they will never be freed.

In its new report, Amnesty says the practice is incompatible with the basic principles of juvenile justice.

The US and Somalia are the only two countries not to have ratified a UN convention that bans life in jail without parole for under-18 year olds.

‘Potential for rehabilitation’

Amnesty says offenders as young as 11 have faced such sentences in the US.

“In the USA, people under 18 years old cannot vote, buy alcohol, lottery tickets or consent to most forms of medical treatment,” said Natacha Mension, of the human rights group.

 

Read the entire article on the BBC News website.

Share our new video!

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There are many people who have no idea that the United States sentences youth to life without parole–or that we are the only country that imposes this extreme sentence on youth. The CFSY has produced a new video to raise awareness about this unjust practice.

You can help inform and inspire supporters by sharing our new video with your networks.

View and share the video on YouTube or Facebook.

 

 

New trials ordered for 4 in 1994 rape, murder

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By Steve Mills, Tribune Reporter

A Cook County judge today ordered new trials for four men who served long prison terms for a 1994 murder and rape.

Paul Biebel, the presiding judge at the Criminal Courts Building, said he based the decision on DNA evidence recovered from the victim and linked to a convicted murderer.

The four were teenagers when they were convicted in the slaying of 30-year-old Nina Glover in the Englewood neighborhood. All confessed.

Michael Saunders and Harold Richardson are still in prison. Terrill Swift is out on parole. Vincent Thames has served his sentence but must register as a sex offender because of the rape conviction.

At a hearing last month before Biebel, Joshua Tepfer, an attorney at Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth, said a recent DNA test linked Johnny Douglas to Glover’s murder. Before he was shot to death in 2008, Douglas was convicted of murdering another woman, acquitted of a second homicide and was a suspect in other murders and sexual assaults.

 

Read the entire article here.

Life without parole for young criminals -- it's too cruel

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Editorial

The Supreme Court will decide whether it is inherently cruel and unusual to lock up someone forever for a crime committed when the perpetrator hasn’t developed an adult capacity to grasp the consequences of his or her actions.

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear two cases brought by inmates in Alabama and Arkansas who were sentenced to life in prison without parole for killings they committed as 14-year-olds. On the face of it, that sounds right; in the popular imagination, it’s those Bible-belt states in the South that subject children to unthinkable lifelong punishment before they are deemed, by society’s cooler heads, to have had the mental and emotional capacity to vote, smoke a cigarette or even see a movie made for older teens. 

It was in a Florida case last year that the Supreme Court rejected life without parole for juveniles whose crimes fell short of murder. Once again, it was the federal judiciary that had to straighten out a Southern state only too willing to impose the too-cruel and, for a teenager, too-unusual sentence of life without parole for a crime in which no one died, committed by someone with less than full adult capacity.

 

To read the entire editorial, click here.

Same crime, different outcomes: One twin killer leaves prison, the other stays and stays

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By Barton Deiters

For three decades, the Samel twins dreamed about leaving prison.

Thirty years ago this fall, they were stoned, drunk and looking to steal marijuana and cash from an 18-year-old maintenance worker, asleep in a Grand Rapids pool hall basement.

The next day, David and Michael Samel were $50 richer and the worker was dead — strangled by nunchucks and beaten with a hammer.

“I walked out the door and vomited,” David Samel says. “I couldn’t believe it.”

Today, David is inmate No. 170197, one of 359 prisoners in Michigan serving life without parole for crimes committed as juveniles.

His brother Michael is free. He was released on Jan. 28, 2009.

In some ways, the Samels embody an argument by reformers that justice can be uneven: identical twins, the same victim, yet unequal outcomes. A federal lawsuit pending in Detroit seeks to require juvenile lifers at least be considered for parole at 21, and every five years after.

 

Read the entire article here.