Reconsider plight of juvenile 'lifers'

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Editorial

It was a remarkable coincidence. While the U.S. Supreme Court this week was considering whether teenage criminals deserve to be sentenced to life in prison without parole in cases that do not involve homicide, three South Florida teens were charged as adults for setting fire to another teenager.
The horrible suffering inflicted on 15-year-old Michael Brewer of Deerfield Beach represents one of the most abhorrent crimes South Florida has witnessed in a long time, which is saying a lot. Five teens acting in concert, according to the police, doused him with alcohol and set the boy aflame. The victim has managed to survive thus far, with burns over 65 percent of his body, but he remains in critical condition and his life will be changed forever.

`Cruel and unusual punishment’

This is precisely the kind of case that makes juries, prosecutors and judges want to “send a message” to other would-be criminals by imposing sentences severe enough to match the crime. The question before the Supreme Court is whether sentencing juveniles to life in prison without parole in such circumstances constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

It is no coincidence that the cases before the court came from Florida, because this state leads the nation in the number of criminals serving life sentences for crimes they committed while juveniles in which no one was killed. Out of 106 such prisoners, 77 are in Florida. This is not something to be proud of.

Instead, argued the attorneys who want the court to ban such sentences, it is something to be ashamed of. The lopsided numbers indicate widespread repudiation of such sentences elsewhere.

Further, they argued, the immature and “transient” nature of adolescence makes it impossible to determine at such an early age who should be deemed unredeemably incorrigible and thrown into a jail cell forever.

Opportunity for change

In support of this view, former U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming filed a brief saying teen criminals deserve a chance of freedom. He was involved in arson and other serious crimes as a teen before making a better life for himself. He may be an exception, but his life would have been wasted in prison without the opportunity provided by parole.

The answer may be to allow for some sort of mandatory parole hearing at a later stage in life. Even Charles Manson, the iconic incarnation of evil, gets a chance to plead his case occasionally, although he’s been denied 11 times by the parole board in California.

A parole hearing is not a get-out-of-jail card, but rather an opportunity to show that the prisoner has been rehabilitated. Horrible crimes deserve serious time — but adolescents deserve a second chance at life beyond prison walls.

Florida leads nation in locking up kids in adult jails

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By Colleen Jenkins

This week, as the U.S. Supreme Court heard appeals in two Florida juvenile cases, scholars took note that the state leads the nation in locking up kids for life who committed crimes in which no one died.

That isn’t Florida’s only distinction.

The state sends more children to adult jails and prisons, period. Laws make it easy for prosecutors to pluck young people out of the juvenile justice system before they turn 18.

And in sheer numbers, Hillsborough County transferred more juvenile cases to the adult system than any other county in fiscal year 2007-08, a St. Petersburg Times review of Florida Department of Juvenile Justice data shows. Percentage-wise, Palm Beach County ranked No. 1, with Pinellas following as a close second among the state’s largest counties.

Six Tampa Bay area counties — Hillsborough, Pinellas, Pasco, Hernando, Citrus and Manatee — deemed juveniles in 1,410 cases bad enough to be charged as adults. On the other end of the spectrum, seven counties in Florida didn’t send any young people to the adult system.

Local prosecutors say the numbers reflect an aggressive stance against juvenile crime, but they stress that the decision to charge teens as adults isn’t made lightly. Kids who wind up in felony court can still walk away with juvenile sanctions.

“It gives them one more bite at the apple, but we have a much bigger hammer over their head,” Hillsborough Assistant State Attorney Pam Bondi said.

Advocates for juvenile justice reform argue that the statutes Florida enacted in the 1990s response to a surge in juvenile crime need updating. Researchers say the laws fail to consider that adolescents, less developed than adults, are often capable of change. Or that, all things equal, juveniles are more likely to re-offend if convicted in adult court.

The stain of an adult conviction, they say, threatens a young person’s ability to join the military, get a job or enroll in school.

“You essentially pull the rug out from under these kids, and it’s no wonder that they end up back in the system,” said Liz Ryan, chief executive officer of the Campaign for Youth Justice in Washington, D.C., an organization dedicated to keeping youth out of the adult criminal justice system.

Statewide during the 2007-08 fiscal year, the number of juveniles transferred to adult court increased to 3,592. That’s a 45 percent jump since 2003-04, but only about half as many transfers as the state had at its peak in the mid 1990s.

Hillsborough County prosecutors sent 660 juvenile cases to adult court in 2007-08, the most in the state. Hillsborough also had the most juvenile arrests in 2007 and 2008, according to data from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

Pinellas prosecutors transferred 517 cases, up from 271 cases four years earlier. Pasco County transferred 84 cases, down from previous years; Hernando had 46, Citrus had 33 and Manatee had 70.

In five of the six counties, burglary was the most common ticket to the adult system.

Researchers say the majority of juvenile cases land in adult court through “direct file,” meaning at the discretion of prosecutors. Florida is one of just 15 states that give prosecutors that power.

Some juvenile advocates contend that the decision to transfer juveniles to adult court should be left up to judges because they are neutral parties in the criminal justice system. Pinellas-Pasco Chief Assistant State Attorney Bruce Bartlett counters that the current arrangement includes sufficient checks and balances, allowing judges to give young offenders juvenile sanctions or youthful offender sentences if they don’t feel the cases merit adult punishment.

Florida statutes require prosecutors to direct file or seek indictment for certain violent crimes — such as murder — in adult court no matter the offender’s age. Beyond that, prosecutors say their filing decisions are dictated by each offender’s individual circumstances rather than strict guidelines.

Some crimes are so heinous that the public interest requires adult charges, prosecutors say. That was the rationale they used to pursue adult charges against 13-year-old Jose Guadalupe Walle, who was suspected in a string of rapes and robberies at restaurants in St. Petersburg and Apollo Beach and a Gibsonton home.

“He was 13 going on 25,” Bartlett said this week. Some young offenders are “behaving as adults, and the crime itself warrants them to be charged as adults.”

Prosecutors also turn to the adult system to deal with repeat offenders.

“Frankly, there are some of the kids we have in juvenile court who have not been amenable to any sanctions we can impose,” said Pinellas Judge Raymond Gross. “You run out of options.”

The charging decision isn’t always clear cut. Defense attorneys and prosecutors spent weeks wrestling over whether Davis Islands teen Jordan Valdez should be charged in juvenile or adult court with fleeing the scene of a fatal crash when she was 16. The teen’s attorneys said she was a good kid who made a mistake, and they worried that a felony charge would dash her college scholarship hopes.

Prosecutors ultimately filed an adult charge, saying only that they based the decision on the nature of the crime. Valdez is expected to plead guilty and be sentenced Nov. 24.

In Pinellas, Bartlett admits he struggled with the decision to charge five teenagers as adults after they terrorized neighborhoods over two nights in January and February with firebombs, slashed tires and shattered windows. Though the young men were good students, Bartlett said the amount of property damage and the repeated offenses tipped the scale for him to adult charges.

“I was pretty comfortable in my mind that those kids would never reoffend,” he said. “But there’s a certain level of punishment that has to be attached to it.”

Last month, a judge sentenced the teens as youthful offenders to varying combinations of prison and probation.

Advocates acknowledge that young offenders need to be punished, but they lament that the state’s tough stance on juvenile crime has shifted the focus, and funding, away from rehabilitation and prevention.

There are bright spots. After terrible crime rates in the 1990s, Miami-Dade is now considered a national model for effective juvenile justice. The county puts special emphasis on getting services for first-time offenders based on their needs rather than their crimes, a model Hillsborough and Pinellas counties have watched with interest.

Taking a holistic view with juvenile offenders is the only approach that makes sense, said Hillsborough Public Defender Julianne Holt.

“If you don’t modify the behavior of the child and you don’t create a values system,” Holt said, “there’s no doubt that the community suffers at a later time and so does that child.”

Times researcher John Martin contributed to this report.

Supreme Court Weighs Juvenile Life Sentences

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By Alex Kingsbury

Nationwide, there are more than 2,200 juveniles serving sentences of life without parole. That figure includes dozens of children as young as 13 years old. Four years ago, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-to-4 decision that executing anyone for a crime committed when he or she was younger than 18 is unconstitutional. On Monday, lawyers arguing on behalf of two Florida prisoners tried to convince the court that the rationale behind the death penalty decision also should extend to life sentences because they are equivalent to executions behind bars.

The court’s death penalty ruling was based on two key principles: Minors are not as culpable for their crimes as adults are, and it is possible for youths to reform. The court held that their execution would therefore be “cruel and unusual punishment,” which is banned by the Eighth Amendment. The same logic should be applied for Joe Sullivan and, in a separate case, Terrance Graham, lawyers contended.

At the age of 16, Graham and an accomplice robbed a restaurant, a crime for which he served a year behind bars. In 2004, at age 17, he was sentenced to life without parole after he violated the terms of his probation by committing another robbery, this time with a gun.

Joe Sullivan, meanwhile, was convicted of sexual battery against a 72-year-old womanafter committing a burglary when he was 13 years old. In the two years before this conviction, Sullivan, who is mentally disabled, had been found guilty of 17 criminal offenses, including several serious felonies. The sexual battery conviction was based on the testimony of two of his older codefendants, who then received lighter sentences. At the trial, which ended with a life sentence, Sullivan was represented by an attorney who has since been suspended from practicing law.

Legal experts say these two examples of life sentences for juveniles are particularly noteworthy. “What separates these cases from cases of life sentences for [other] children is that they received the sentences for crimes short of homicide,” says Elizabeth Scott, a professor at Columbia University Law School.

Supporters of such sentences say those who commit crimes should face the full penalty, regardless of their age. “Outside of capital punishment, this court has never exempted a whole class of offenders from a particular category of punishment on the ground that it would be cruel and unusual,” the National District Attorneys Association said in an amicus brief.

The arguments also could touch on one of the most politicized aspects of constitutional law—the applicability of foreign precedent. A critical component of the Eighth Amendment relies on the “evolving standards of decency” in a mature society. In the death penalty case, the court used this criterion in part to reverse earlier precedent.

At least 135 countries have expressly rejected life sentences for juveniles, according to Amnesty International. And though 10 foreign nations do allow such sentences in theory, no children are currently serving them. A United Nations treaty that forbids the imprisonment of children without parole has been signed by all countries except the United States and Somalia.

During the confirmation hearings for Justice Sonia Sotomayor, conservative senators pressed particularly hard on the question of whether judges can consider foreign jurisprudence. While foreign law could be used in considering rulings, she said, it could not be used “as a holding or a precedent.” Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn disagreed, saying, “I’m not sure I agree with that on certain Eighth Amendment and 14th Amendment cases.”

The conservative Heritage Foundation echoes his concerns with regard to these Florida cases the court will consider, contending that the application of “foreign sources of law to determine domestic law, in addition to being legally problematic, too often overlooks the qualitative differences between the United States and other countries.”

Cruel and Unusual

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Editorial

On Monday, the Supreme Court heard petitioners argue that sentencing people to life in prison without any possibility of parole for crimes they committed as juveniles, where no homicide was committed, violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

There should be little argument over whether the punishment is unusual: The United States is the only country in the world to impose such a draconian sentence on children, with 109 people serving life without parole for non-homicide juvenile offenses. Even here, it is rare to non-existent in all states but Florida, which accounts for 77 of that total, according to a recent Florida State University study.

Seven other states account for 32 of the 109, while 39 states have none, including Texas, which — as of September, 2009 — does not permit life without parole sentences for offenders under 17. (Statistics for three states were not available.)

The cases argued, both in Florida, involve Joe Sullivan, convicted of raping a woman at the age of 13, and Terrance Graham, who was 16 when he pleaded guilty to attempted robbery and was placed on probation. A year later, at 17, he was one of three youths who forced their way into an apartment and robbed two men at gunpoint. Both Sullivan and Graham were sentenced to life without parole.

These juveniles committed serious crimes and deserved punishment for them. But to abandon all hope, irrevocably, for a young person whose character is still developing — as multiple scientific and psychological studies have shown — is surely cruel and unusual punishment.

Four years ago, the Supreme Court faced a similar situation in Roper v. Simmons, when it decided 5-4 that executing a child for crimes committed as a juvenile is a violation of the Eighth Amendment. The same arguments used in that case are equally valid when applied to locking a child up for life — a long-term death sentence.

In the Roper case, Justice Anthony Kennedy, arguing for the majority, called the death penalty “a disproportionate punishment for juveniles,” citing three major areas of differences between them and adults: first, juveniles’ lack of maturity and undeveloped sense of responsibility; second, their vulnerability to “negative influences and outside pressures, including peer pressures”; and third, a character not as well formed as an adult’s, with personality traits that are “more transitory, less fixed.” To a large extent, noted Stevens, our laws also reflect these differences, barring juveniles from serving on juries, voting or marrying without parental consent.

Professor Ellen Marrus of the University of Houston Law Center told the Chronicle that the juvenile justice system was never intended to treat children as miniature adults: “We have to look beyond the offense and look at children as children,” she said. “We should not be putting them into a system that is going to make them worse instead of helping them.”

Most juveniles grow up to become responsible adults, many of them surviving serious youthful mistakes and terrible choices. To abandon all hope of ever redeeming a young life before that life is fully formed should never be a choice in a civilized society.

Imprisoning a Child for Life

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Editorial

The United States could be the only nation in the world where a 13-year-old child can be sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole, even for crimes that do not include murder. This grim distinction should trouble Americans deeply, as should all of the barbaric sentencing policies for children that this country embraces but that most of the world has abandoned.

The Supreme Court must keep the international standard in mind when it hears arguments on Monday in Graham v. Florida and Sullivan v. Florida. The petitioners in both argue that sentencing children to life without the possibility of parole for a nonhomicide violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

The court came down on the right side of this issue in 2005 when it ruled that children who commit crimes before the age of 18 should not be subject to the death penalty. The decision correctly pointed out that juveniles were less culpable because they lacked maturity, were vulnerable to peer pressure and had personalities that were still being formed.

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy said the practice of executing 16- and 17-year-olds violated the Eighth Amendment, conflicted with “evolving standards of decency” and isolated the United States from the rest of the world.

The Roper decision took scores of juveniles off death row. It also threw a spotlight onto state policies under which young juveniles were increasingly being tried in adult courts and sentenced to adult jails, often for nonviolent crimes.

The practice is even more troubling because it is arbitrary. Children who commit nonviolent crimes like theft and burglary are just as likely to be shipped off to adult courts as children who commit serious violent crimes. And the process is racially freighted, with black and Latino children more likely to be sent to adult courts than white children who commit comparable crimes.

The rush to try more and more children as adults began in the 1980s when the country was gripped by hysteria about an adolescent crime wave that never materialized. Joe Sullivan, the petitioner in Sullivan v. Florida, was sentenced to life without parole in 1989 — when he was just 13 — after a questionable sexual battery conviction. His two older accomplices testified against the younger, mentally impaired boy. They received short sentences, one of them as a juvenile.

The case of Terrance Graham has similar contours. A learning disabled child — born to crack-addicted parents — Mr. Graham was on probation in connection with a burglary committed when he was 16 when he participated in a home invasion. He, too, had older accomplices. He was never convicted of the actual crime but was given life without parole for violating the conditions of his probation.

These were two very troubled children in need of adult supervision and perhaps even time behind bars. But it is insupportable to conclude, as the courts did, that children who committed crimes when they were so young were beyond rehabilitation. The laws under which they were convicted violate current human rights standards and the Constitution.

Myths of get tough law

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By Jeffrey Fagan

Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum is defending the state’s life without possibility of parole sentences for 13- and 16-year-olds against constitutional attack. But this isn’t the first time McCollum has made history in the politics of juvenile justice. As a member of Congress in the 1990s, he promised the United States a “coming storm” of superpredators as a result of a population surge of kids from fatherless homes.

His 1996 warning was a world-class mistake. Juvenile homicide arrests promptly dropped in the United States by half. Yet anyone who thinks that a catastrophic statistical error like a phony crime wave would slow down McCollum needs to think again. In his brief before the Supreme Court in Graham vs. Florida, a constitutional challenge to laws permitting life sentences without the possibility of parole for very young minors, the attorney general now asserts that Florida’s 30 years of get-tough legislation are the reason juvenile crime rates have fallen since the mid 1990s.

But this month’s claim for deterrence is as phony as last decade’s crime scare.

After mentioning a wide variety of Florida legislation after 1980, McCollum’s brief says “these deliberative and focused strategies worked: violent crime rates plummeted from their 1990s highs both nationwide and in Florida.” The statistical case he presents for cause and effect is that “serious violent offenses committed by juveniles aged 12-17 declined 61 percent from 1993 to 2005 nationwide” while “the rate of juvenile crime in Florida fell 30 percent from 1994 to 2004.”

On its face, McCollum’s claim suggests that youth crime in Florida declined more slowly than it did elsewhere. This is an odd endorsement for the state’s tough juvenile sentencing laws.

The next thing that is remarkable about the state’s position is that it presents no evidence that sentencing policies produced fewer crimes in the Sunshine State or anywhere else. The post-1980 legislation in Florida that McCollum embraces was also in place when Florida homicide rates shot up in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but his brief makes no assumptions that the harsh laws were the cause of Florida’s bad news in that decade. Why, then, assume that any decline that happens at any time after the new laws passed was evidence that the laws worked?

Indeed, the Florida brief provides evidence that the state’s legislative frenzy may actually be slowing down efforts at crime control. By McCollum’s own calculations, the 30 percent juvenile crime decline in Florida is only half the more than 60 percent drop in the rest of the country. If these statistics are genuine indications of the impact of legislation, the “deliberative and focused strategies” in Florida have caused the state’s juvenile crime reduction to badly trail the national average during the same time period. Using McCollum’s data the way he is trying to use them, the real question is what is Florida doing so badly that its crime trends are only half as good the rest of the country?

Of course, tracing aggregate crime trends over long periods with no controls for other influences on crime is a silly way to test the impact of a particular sentencing policy. Real evidence requires sensitive measurements of the specific provisions of a criminal punishment. In the case before the Supreme Court, the policy McCollum is defending is a law that allows young teens to be sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole after criminal convictions. The true test of the effectiveness of this kind of law is whether states that provide this eternal imprisonment for juveniles experience lower proportions of violent crime among very young offenders than states that do not allow juveniles to suffer life without parole.

Our search of FBI crime totals for the distinctive patterns that would happen if the prospect of life without parole scared off juveniles not deterred by standard life sentences comes up empty. We find no evidence that any of the get-tough laws such as Florida’s law produced significant crime declines among young teenagers in Florida or anywhere else. The young groups that Florida locks up forever do not make up a smaller proportion of violent crime in Florida and the other life without parole states than in the states that don’t use life without parole for juveniles. This is where the tell-tale fingerprints of life without parole deterrence would be visible, but it doesn’t happen. As extra prevention, juvenile life without parole is useless.

In a way, McCollum should be relieved that our careful analysis shows the life without parole policy has no effect. Taking the statistics presented in his brief seriously would suggest that Florida’s celebrated crackdowns were reducing the crime decline benefits that other states are enjoying. The only bad effects we can demonstrate from Florida’s brief in the Graham case are on legal argument and statistical logic.

Jeffrey Fagan is a professor of law and public health and director of the Center for Crime, Community and Law at Columbia Law School. Franklin E. Zimring is a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Due to an editing error, a sentence in a column by law professors Jeffrey Fagan and Franklin E. Zimring on Florida’s sentencing laws that was published Monday included an incorrect time frame. The sentence should have read, “The post-1980 legislation in Florida that McCollum embraces was also in place when Florida homicide rates shot up in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but his brief makes no assumptions that the harsh laws were the cause of Florida’s bad news in that decade.”

[Last modified: Nov 02, 2009 03:32 PM]

Don’t give up on the Kids

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Supreme Court should reject life without parole for juveniles, says one who knows the system

November 1, 2009
By R. Dwayne Betts

A life sentence begins with Rashid’s name.

I can’t walk away from the first time I looked into his 15-year-old eyes, the eyes of someone close to my age, and knew he was sentenced to die in prison. When I met Rashid, his voice still carried the cracks and high notes that signaled adolescence, and his smooth face had never felt a razor. The same signs that belied my youth belied his. We were at the Southampton Receiving Center in Virginia, waiting on a bus to take us to prison.

No fewer than a dozen of us were Rashid’s age, all with peers at home waiting on driver’s licenses, graduations and proms – while we waited for the morning that would lead us to a prison cell. Rashid’s time was legend: three life sentences with no chance for parole. It meant he awoke each morning knowing he would one day flatline within arm’s reach of a cell.

I looked at him, and the judge’s voice echoed in my head: “Are you aware your charges carry a life sentence?” Rashid wasn’t old enough to drive, vote or serve on a jury of his peers – but he was old enough to walk out of a courtroom with a sentence that ends in a casket. After I met Rashid, my nine-year sentence for carjacking seemed like a gift.

Five years after my own release from prison – and months after delivering a commencement speech at the University of Maryland’s graduation, speaking moments before CIA Director Leon Panetta – I found myself on an American Bar Association panel with lawyers and psychologists. A woman in the audience asked me what I thought should be done to a child who commits the kinds of crimes that end with life without the possibility of parole; I misheard her question and kept thinking that she had asked what I would do or say if the victim had been my family member.

As I began to answer her question, I thought about Rashid, and about how I couldn’t escape the nightmare of being in a closed cell. I thought about my relatives, and how in my family tree there were both victims of violence and perpetrators. I thought about the judge reminding me of the life sentence I faced. And then I asked myself: What would I want if the victim were my daughter, or my sister? In my head there were two horrors, and I realized that the horror of life in prison and everything it means doesn’t make right the horror of crimes I can’t begin to imagine.

I told the woman that the justice system was not created to respond the way a family member would. We ask our justice system to do more than just act on impulse. We ask it to stand for more than vengeance. A system that didn’t believe in the rehabilitation of young people would have left Alan K. Simpson a statistic and not given him room to mature to the point where he could become a United States senator. Charles S. Dutton wouldn’t be a renowned actor. Many nameless men and women who are productive members of our society would still be in prison cells.

On Nov. 9, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Sullivan v. Florida and Graham v. Florida, cases in which juveniles were sentenced to life without parole for non-homicide offenses. The court will decide whether such sentences are constitutional. I, along with a number of former juvenile offenders – including Mr. Simpson and Mr. Dutton – filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the justices to give young offenders the opportunity to have their sentences reviewed later.

Sixteen years doesn’t prepare you for much. Fifteen years prepares you for even less, and I remember what Rashid’s eyes looked like the day he walked to my cell door asking who he should or shouldn’t let be a friend to him. He was a boy in a jungle and I, only a year older, was playing at being a man. Fifteen years doesn’t prepare you for prison, and it doesn’t prepare you to understand just how lasting scars can be.

As teenagers, our lives were impulse and reaction. Our lives were filled with uncertainties and the insanity around us, and all we ever wanted people to know, after we’d walked out of a courtroom, was that we could be more than our crimes, one day – that rehabilitation is real. All we wanted was to believe that our lives could be more than a series of cell doors.

R. Dwayne Betts lives in Prince George’s County and is the author of “A Question of Freedom.” His e-mail is [email protected].

Copyright © 2009, The Baltimore Sun

‘Thug’ senator Alan Simpson condemns teen convicts’ life sentence

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6898123.ece

Tony Allen-Mills

AT the end of a distinguished political career full of honour and achievement, Alan Simpson, the former senator from Wyoming, wants America to know that he was not always a pillar of the Republican establishment. A committee chairman, who nearly became a vice-presidential candidate, he was once a teenage thug.

Simpson’s story of his violent youthful past will be told to the US Supreme Court this month as part of an unusual submission on behalf of two Florida convicts who are serving life in prison without parole.

Both were sentenced for crimes they committed as teenagers. America’s highest court, which recently acquired a new member in Sonia Sotomayor, the Hispanic justice appointed by President Barack Obama, will next week consider defence claims that no teenager should be sentenced to effective “death by imprisonment”, especially when their crimes do not include murder.

Defence lawyers argue that removing the prospect of parole for prisoners so young violates the constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual” punishment. They have recruited Simpson and several other high-profile former youth offenders in the hope of persuading the court that teenagers deserve a second chance.

The Supreme Court’s rare decision to consider separate cases on the same issue reflects a slow and, many believe, long overdue reassessment of the uniquely American judicial policy of locking up teenagers and throwing away the key.

Joe Harris Sullivan was 13 when a Pensacola judge sentenced him to life without parole for raping a 72-year-old woman.

The judge described Sullivan as “beyond help” and declared that he would “send him away for as long as I can”. He has already spent 20 years in jail.

Terrance Graham was 16 when he was arrested for armed burglary while on probation for a previous robbery.

At the time Florida was cracking down on repeat offenders and in 2005 a different judge declared Graham “incorrigible” and imposed the maximum sentence. More than 100 cases have been under the microscope since the Supreme Court ruled, after bitter internal debate in 2005, that juveniles should not be executed for murder.

Numerous legal and medical associations are supporting Sullivan and Graham on the grounds that the courts should not judge teenagers in the same way as they judge adults, just as governments recognise the difference by placing certain restrictions on juvenile drinking, voting and marrying.

Yet the most poignant testimony is likely to come from Simpson and other former offenders, most of whom went to prison but emerged to rebuild responsible lives.

Others include Charles Dutton, an Emmy-winning black actor and director who was convicted of manslaughter and discovered acting after reading a book of plays in prison, and Luis Rodriguez, a former Los Angeles gang member who is now an acclaimed poet.

The most surprising of the bunch is Simpson, whose father was a Republican senator too; he frankly admits of his wayward youth: “I was a monster.”

In his submission to the court, Simpson describes how he and some friends set fire to a federal building; played a gun game with friends to see how close they could fire without hitting someone; went on shooting sprees, blasting away at mailboxes and killing a cow; and finally punched a police officer, who arrested him and threw him in jail.

With the help of his probation officer, Simpson redeemed himself and ultimately served 17 years in the US Senate.

The Supreme Court may decide that 13 is too young for a maximum sentence, but that 17 is not. For Sullivan and Graham, the ruling will in effect decide whether they die in jail.

Life without parole is not sentence for teens

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http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=292840&ac=PHedi
It is barbaric to punish juveniles as if they had an adult’s capacity to control their behavior.

Children can commit terrible crimes, but they are still children. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case next month that tests that basic truth. The court should do the right thing and outlaw life sentences for juveniles.

The issue comes before the court as states increasingly bind over young defendants and charge them as if they had been adults when they committed their crimes to avoid the relatively short sentences available in the juvenile justice system. If convicted, the youths are sentenced to adult sentences and serve them in adult prisons.

Twenty years ago, that meant life in prison without the possibility of parole for Joe Harris Sullivan, who was convicted of the rape of an elderly woman when he was 13. Sullivan is appealing his sentence to the nation’s highest court, saying that it violates the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

Sullivan is not alone. There are 111 juveniles serving life without parole, 77 in Florida alone.

The issue is not whether Sullivan’s crime was heinous – it was. And it’s not whether he has been rehabilitated by his prison experience.

The real question is whether Sullivan, at age 13, was capable of forming the intent necessary to make him criminally responsible for his actions in the way that we normally apply the standard to adults.

Recent research on the development of the human brain strongly suggests otherwise. Scientists used to believe that the brain stopped growing in early childhood, but the latest research shows there is continuing development into the mid-20s. One of the last things to form is the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls impulse, anger and judgment.

Even without this research, people instinctively know that 13-year-olds are not capable of making certain kinds of decisions. That’s why they can’t drive, own guns or vote and that’s why we have a separate system of justice that places a higher value on rehabilitation than punishment.

The Supreme Court recognized this in 2005, when in a 5-4 opinion it ruled that the death penalty for juveniles was unconstitutional. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy found: “The reality that juveniles still struggle to define their identity means it is less supportable to conclude that even a heinous crime commited by a juvenile is evidence of irretrievably depraved character.”

The logic outlawing a juvenile death penalty should be the same for a juvenile life sentence. A grim courthouse joke defines life without parole as “death on the installment plan,” and it should be reserved for those who knowingly commit crimes that most shock the conscience. Those are the people who knew what they were doing.

Adolescents cannot fit in that category, no matter how bad their crimes. The Supreme Court should recognize that and end this barbaric practice.

Justices will scrutinize life sentences for youth

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Cases of two Florida juveniles raise questions about penalty for non-homicide crimes

By Robert Barnes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 29, 2009

It did not take long for the judge to determine that the convicted rapist in front of him was irredeemable.

“He is beyond help,” Judge Nicholas Geeker said of Joe Harris Sullivan. “I’m going to try to send him away for as long as I can.”

And then Geeker sentenced Sullivan to life in prison without the possibility of parole. At the time, Sullivan was 13 years old.

Now, 20 years after that sentencing in a courtroom in Pensacola, Fla., the Supreme Court will consider whether Sullivan’s prison term — and what his supporters say is an only-in-America phenomenon of extreme sentences for juveniles — violates the Constitution’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.

The case — which has drawn widespread notice and briefs from former senator Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) and others describing their own youthful crimes — is likely to be a cardinal criminal justice decision for the court this term.

It is a natural outgrowth of the court’s bitterly divided ruling in 2005 that juveniles cannot be executed for murders they commit.

Those challenging sentences of life without parole for teenagers base their optimism on words in Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s majority opinion in that case: “The reality that juveniles still struggle to define their identity means it is less supportable to conclude that even a heinous crime committed by a juvenile is evidence of irretrievably depraved character. . . . It would be misguided to equate the failings of a minor with those of an adult, for a greater possibility exists that a minor’s character deficiencies will be reformed.”

Sullivan is represented by Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama, who said his client’s sentence is no different from the punishment the court found unconstitutional.

“They are both effectively death sentences,” Stevenson said in an interview. “One is death by execution, and the other is death by incarceration, but they are both terminal sentences.”

Only two 13-year-olds in the country have been sentenced to life without parole for crimes that were not homicides, Stevenson said, and both of them are held in Florida.

Florida officials would not discuss Sullivan’s case before the November arguments, but their brief to the court said states are within their rights to lock up forever those thought to pose a perpetual threat to society.

“There is no consensus against life sentences for juveniles, particularly for heinous crimes such as sexual battery,” Florida Solicitor General Scott Makar wrote.

Across the country, 111 people are serving life sentences without parole for crimes they committed as juveniles that did not result in a death, according to one report; 77 of them are locked up in Florida, for crimes including armed robbery and carjacking. The state took a get-tough approach in the 1990s in response to a crime wave that was “compromising the safety of residents, visitors, and international tourists, and threatening the state’s bedrock tourism industry,” Florida’s brief to the court states.

That brief came in the case of Terrance Jamar Graham, a second petition the court accepted. Graham, of Jacksonville, received a life sentence after being part of a group that robbed a barbecue restaurant when he was 16; while on probation a year later, he was part of an armed burglary. Again, a judge doubted Graham’s ability to ever change his ways; his accomplices served short sentences.

A range of issues

In accepting both cases and deciding to hear them separately, the court gives itself a wide range of issues to ponder. The justices may rule that such sentences are acceptable for 17-year-olds, for instance, but not 13-year-olds. They could look at the relative seriousness of the crimes, or differentiate the non-homicides in both cases with crimes in which someone is killed.

Sullivan, who his lawyer said had been living on the streets since he was 10, had a troubled history with the law. He had 17 offenses before the crime at issue. In 1989, he and two friends burglarized the home of a 72-year-old woman one day while she was away, then returned later. The woman was raped by one of the juveniles; she never saw his face, identifying him only as a “dark, colored boy.” But she remembered that he said something like, “If you can’t identify me, I may not have to kill you.”

At the one-day trial, Sullivan was made to say the words over and over. The victim listened and said: “It’s been six months. It’s hard, but it does sound similar.”

The other boys singled out Sullivan as committing the rape.

“The conviction itself was very questionable,” Stevenson said. “We do think he’s innocent.”

But that is not at issue in the case before the Supreme Court. Stevenson only seeks to have Sullivan, now 33, resentenced so that at some point he becomes eligible for release.

Stevenson contends that Florida made no conscious policy decision that 13-year-olds should be eligible for life without parole for a non-homicide. No state that has debated the question has set the age that low. Instead, he said, Sullivan and others were caught up in a legislative reaction to escalating crime.

“What happened is we lowered the minimum age for trying kids as adults and brought them into the adult system, and we expanded the range of very harsh sentences for an adult, and these two things have collided,” he said.

Besides the two Floridians serving life sentences for non-homicides committed at 13, seven others have received that sentence for crimes resulting in a death, Stevenson said.

‘An index of mercy’

But the state of Florida and its supporters said that is evidence that the sentences are carefully applied to the worst of the worst.

“It is a rare and agonizing decision to sentence a juvenile to life-without-parole,” said a brief filed by Louisiana and 18 other states. “But rare does not mean unconstitutional. Rather, rarity is an index of mercy — of reluctance to take this severe step.”

The National District Attorneys Association, supporting Florida, said that while life without parole for juveniles might be unusual, “permanent incarceration for the most violent, hardened juvenile offenders is by no means ‘cruel.’ ”

Sullivan and Graham are supported by a wide-ranging group of organizations: the American Bar Association, the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and academics and social scientists who argue that juveniles cannot be held responsible for their actions in the same way adults are. For the same reason, they say, younger teenagers are not entrusted with decisions such as voting, marrying or drinking.

A group of educators and social scientists told the court that such research was crucial to the 2005 decision that juveniles should not be subject to the death penalty. “The principal purposes of sentencing — punishing the culpable and deterring the rational — are not furthered by denying the possibility of parole to adolescents,” the group said.

Graham and Sullivan are also supported in an unusual friend-of-the-court brief by former juvenile offenders such as Simpson, director and actor Charles Dutton, and a poet, a software executive and a former assistant U.S. attorney.

“At some point, you have to look at them again and ask, ‘What have you done with your life?’ ” said Simpson, who said that as a youth he burned down an abandoned federal building, destroyed property and fought with a police officer. “Maybe 90 percent of them you throw back in, but what about the other 10 percent?”

The cases are Graham v. Florida and Sullivan v. Florida.