When the Massachusetts supreme court banned sentences of life without the possibility of parole against children in late 2013, the state was ahead of the curve—just five states had taken that step as of the start of that year. 

Today there are 28. In an unusually rapid sea change over the last decade, red and blue states alike have rushed to bar that punishment, which denies someone any possibility of ever leaving prison, for anyone under age 18. That includes GOP-run Ohio in 2021, and Democratic-run Minnesota and New Mexico last year. 

Will a similar surge now shield even more youths from being incarcerated for life with no hope of release?

Once again, Massachusetts is ahead of the curve: The state supreme court issued landmark rulings on Jan. 11 that expanded its earlier holding, and raised the minimum age for a life without parole sentence from 18 to 21. 

In a 4-3 vote, the majority ruled that youth aged 18 to 20 are never beyond redemption, and that they should receive the same consideration as minors due to their continuing mental development. “A sentence of life in prison without parole eligibility review for those up to age twenty-one—individuals with diminished culpability and a heightened capacity for change—is no less cruel or unusual than it is for those up to age eighteen,” Justice Scott Kafker wrote in a concurrence that drew a direct line between the court’s decision in 2013 and its new ruling. 

The decision doesn’t guarantee actual release to anyone. Rather, it grants people opportunities to appear in front of a parole board to showcase their growth—and only once they’ve spent 15 to 30 years in prison, depending on the case. State officials estimate that the ruling made roughly 200 people newly eligible for a parole hearing.

“Emerging adults… must be granted a ‘meaningful opportunity to obtain release based on demonstrated maturity and rehabilitation,’” Chief Justice Kimberly Budd wrote for the majority, quoting from a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that applied to children. The court was considering the cases of two people, Sheldon Mattis and Jason Robinson, who were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole as 18- and 19-year olds. (All seven justices who took part in the decision were nominated to the court by Governor Charlie Baker, a Republican.)

Massachusetts is just the second jurisdiction to ensure that everyone incarcerated over a crime committed before age 21 has some opportunity for release. 

In 2021, Washington, D.C., adopted a “second look” reform that’s functionally equivalent: People convicted as young adults can ask for a review after serving 15 years in prison. (D.C. does not call this review “parole,” so people in this group can technically still be sentenced to life without parole, but they have a mechanism to petition for release.) 

In fact, D.C. applies that reform all the way to age 25, rather than 21, a narrower definition of who is a full adult in the eyes of the law.

The Massachusetts ruling also builds on other very recent gains for reformers pushing for a higher cutoff age than 18. 

Just over the last twelve months, Connecticut and Illinois both adopted laws to restrict LWOP up to age 21. In Michigan and Washington state, judges banned sentencing rules that mandate life without parole for people under 19 and 21, respectively. Each has important carve-outs: Illinois’ law does not apply to people convicted of predatory sexual offenses, nor does it apply retroactively; Connecticut’s law applies only to people convicted before 2005; in Michigan and Washington, judges still have discretion to impose the sentence as long as it’s not automatic. But each concretizes the same principle as Massachusetts’ ruling: that 18 is not the proper place to set a limit for who gets to be considered a young person deserving of special protections. 

“People who committed crimes at a very young age have the capacity to turn their lives around and become productive citizens,” said Alex Taubes, a Connecticut lawyer who represents people on parole and supports his state’s 2023 reform. 

Preston Shipp, who advocates for such reforms nationwide as policy counsel with the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, says his advocacy work gets easier when he can tell lawmakers that more and more states have acted against juvenile life without parole. “When one domino falls, it causes the next domino to fall,” Shipp said. “These are very important steps that we’re continuing to take on our journey to make sure that people who don’t have fully formed brains are not thrown away and told there’s no hope.”

Reform proponents in other states are already lining up to be next. California’s supreme court heard a similar case in early December; it could prohibit life without parole up to age 26. 

In Washington state, legislation that would end life without parole up to age 25 received its first hearing on Jan. 15, just days after the Massachusetts ruling. Chelsea Moore, an advocate with the ACLU of Washington, and co-founder of Look2Justice, an organization centered on the rights of incarcerated Washingtonians, is championing that bill. “It’s wonderful that we see this acknowledgement spreading across the U.S.,” she said. “It’s very helpful for us to be able to interact with folks in those states, and to point to those states.”

This momentum reflects the extraordinary changes since the “superpredators” panic of the 1990s, which fueled more life sentences for children. The notion that a young person who commits a crime is particularly dangerous and unredeemable has been debunked, replaced with a consensus that youth is redeeming, a sign that one really could change. But to translate that idea into law would seem to demand drawing a bright line—a legal age that separates youth and adulthood, at least for the purpose of deciding what counts as too young to be sentenced to die in prison. And with different visions of change competing, that task itself is making reformers confront the nuances of age and development, and ponder how to best restrict a sentence that many refer to as “death by incarceration” without leaving too many people behind. 

This sense of an emerging momentum is not just a political boost for reformers like Moore. In the Massachusetts ruling, it actually served as legal evidence.

To justify raising the age from 18 to 21, the state supreme court appealed to the “evolving standards of decency,” an approach to constitutional law that connects people’s rights to contemporary norms, and that’s long been used to expand protections on juvenile defendants. The majority talked about recent laws and rulings in other states—as well as reforms in other nations—to conclude that these standards are shifting. 

Among the reforms the court cites: D.C.’s 2021 law, and Illinois’ 2023 law. 

Bolts asked Lindsey Hammond, policy director of the Illinois-based organization Restore Justice, for her reaction about the Massachusetts court drawing on a law she championed hundreds of miles away. “I think it’s incredible to see this momentum continue to build,” she said. In turn, she hopes that this out-of-state ruling can help her persuade Illinois lawmakers to revisit last year’s law and make it retroactive. 

“It is so encouraging for legislators to know that other states are reaching that same decision that young people are different,” she explained.

Besides these “evolving standards,” the Massachusetts court grounded its ruling on research in neuroscience and psychology that shows that people’s brains continue to develop into their mid-20s. “Advancements in scientific research have confirmed what many know well through experience: the brains of emerging adults are not fully mature,” the majority wrote.

Stephanie Tabashneck, a psychologist and senior fellow at the Center for Law, Brain and Behavior at Harvard Medical School, offers an example: Young adults “can’t regulate their emotions” as well as older adults because their frontal lobes are not fully developed. Tabashneck is not surprised that such findings resonated with the court. She often gives presentations to judges and attorneys, showing them brain scans highlighting the marked differences between younger and older adults; just seeing those images has a powerful effect on her interlocutors, she said. 

Some public officials echoed the science in praising the Massachusetts ruling. “The practice of putting a person behind bars forever, without paying attention to decision-making ability based on age and the science of brain development, should end,” Kevin Hayden, the district attorney of Suffolk County (Boston), said in a statement. Hayden succeeded Rachael Rollins, a reform-minded DA who’d also backed the litigation against life without parole, as well as efforts to raise the age of youth justice from 18 to 21 in other contexts.

But here’s a rub: Much of this research has found that people’s brains continue developing for years beyond age 21, leaving a gap with where the Massachusetts justices landed. The majority recognizes this, writing that “we acknowledge that the scientific record in this case suggests that the unique attributes of youth may persist in young adults older than twenty-one.” 

And here, too, the majority invoked examples from other states to explain how it reached its decision—except this time, it did that to justify not going up higher, say to 25, rather than to support going beyond 18: “The contemporary standards of decency that govern our decision today do not suggest a societal consensus that those aged twenty-one and above should be treated differently from older adults.”

On this point, the dissenting justices harshly criticized the majority for having it both ways. “[E]ven if it could, science does not definitively place the line of brain maturation at twenty-one, but rather suggests that it extends into the mid-twenties,” wrote Justice David Lowy. He accused his colleagues of “manufactur[ing] a new category of individuals entitled to distinct constitutional treatment,” and usurping the prerogative of lawmakers by deciding what he argues ought to be a political question—what is youth for the purposes of punishment. 

“Perhaps nothing speaks louder to the flaws in the court’s holding,” Lowy wrote, “than the court having crafted a line that ends at age twenty-one, thereby engaging in legislative line-drawing inconsistent with the science upon which it relies.” 

If there’s no switch that flips in a person’s brain the day they turn 18, neither is there one the day they turn 21. For Lowy, the seeming arbitrariness of setting a line at one’s 21st birthday was a reason to not raise the age at all. But for some reformers, it’s a reason to think even bigger.

Moore, the Washington advocate, feels a twinge of concern that if politicians and judges settle on 21 as the new age for juvenile justice, it may make it trickier to push bills with a higher age cutoff—like her state’s proposed legislation, which goes to 25, closer to what scientific studies envisage. “Just like the age of 18 was socially constructed, I think the age of 21 is also socially constructed,” she said. “We’re hopeful that we will continue to move past these social constructions of what we see as mature, into what we really know in science.”

Still, Moore is confident that, no matter how a particular reform defines who counts as young enough, it’ll pave the way for still more change down the line. Since Washington state abolished life without parole for teenagers under 18 in 2018, “We have people running nonprofits, we have people doing anti-violence work,” she said. “It’s so impressive what folks have done.” She points to a study conducted last year by two University of Washington scholars that showed low recidivism among the incarcerated people whose petitions were granted. 

“We just know that that model can be replicated if we bump the age up to 25 for those folks serving life and long sentences,” she added. “Those folks can come home safely and our parole board can determine when it is safe to return to their homes: They’re already doing it, and so they would be able to do it for this other group of folks.”

James Zeigler, who leads the Second Look Project, a D.C.-based group that championed D.C.’s reform and has helped implement them, questions if an age cutoff is needed at all. “If you have to draw a line somewhere, identify when someone becomes a full blown adult for culpability purposes, [25] probably makes the most sense, and it makes more sense than 18 or 21, which are both ages after which people continue to grow and develop quite a bit,” Zeigler said.

But “developmental maturation process doesn’t end at 25 for anybody,” he pointed out. “While it may slow down as a kind of general rule, everybody continues to kind of grow, change, and mature… I have seen it in my work that plenty of people who commit crimes and make serious mistakes well into adulthood, past the age of 25, past the age of 30, can still grow and change in the way that we are talking about, that you hope for in people.”

Katy Naples-Mitchell, a special litigation advisor at Harvard Law School’s Criminal Justice Institute, also wonders how to draw a rigid line as to when one enters adulthood, when the characteristics that make humans capable of change don’t just disappear as one ages.

As the Massachusetts supreme court considered the Mattis and Robinson cases, Naples-Mitchell co-authored an amicus brief in support of ending life without parole for young adults in Massachusetts. The brief focused on the huge racial disparities in who’s serving life without parole in Massachusetts, finding that Black youth between ages 18 and 20 are sixteen times more likely to have received that sentence than white youth.

“People of color are facing more extreme charges for less serious conduct,” Naples-Mitchell told Bolts, explaining that Black people in particular are more likely to face a charge that triggers life without parole. Research by the American Psychological Association has found that people perceive Black youth as older than they are, making judges more prone to treating Black defendants as full adults than they are with white defendants.

Those disparities also apply across age groups, though. According to research conducted by the Sentencing Project, an organization that researches criminal justice, the majority of people serving life without parole in Massachusetts as of 2020 were Black and Latinx; those groups make up less than one-fourth of the state’s overall population. Studies nationwide show prosecutors and judges use harsher charges and sentences for people of color.

For Naples-Mitchell, the debate over young adults should be a gateway for a broader reckoning with how we dole out punishments. “This is an opportunity to reshape norms about life sentences more broadly, beyond the categorical approach in the brain science,” she said. She described the neuroscientific research as critically important to understanding the need for reform but also says “the brain science is a window for the public to access new empathy.”

“There are lots of ways to build on that,” she added, “whether it’s to build to another later-in-life bright line, or to think more holistically about sentences of life without parole, and whether that is something that public policy should promote.”

D.C. underwent just the trajectory that Naples-Mitchell envisions. It first provided an opportunity for release to anyone convicted as a minor. Then, in 2021, it extended that approach to offenses committed up to age 25. And then, the local government chose to expand its reform yet again by guaranteeing any incarcerated person a judicial review after a lengthy term in prison—no matter their age at the time of the offense. That ordinance was part of the omnibus package that was blocked by Congress and President Biden last year. 

State Senator Liz Miranda, a progressive politician from Boston, wants Massachusetts to take the same route. She is sponsoring legislation that would repeal life without parole sentences regardless of the age at which someone commits a crime. Under the bill, anyone incarcerated in Massachusetts would receive a parole hearing after 25 years of incarceration.  

At a hearing for her bill, Miranda talked about her brother, who was murdered in Boston, explaining why she opposes life without parole as a punishment for his alleged killer. “I believe life without parole is death by another name, and I do not believe in death sentences,” Miranda said.

The post A Wave of States Reduce “Death by Incarceration” for Young Adults  appeared first on Bolts.

For more than 25 years, Mike Rose felt alone. After his son Jeremy was arrested at age 17 in 1994, sentenced to life in prison, Mike and his wife had no community with which to share the pain of losing a son to prison. “In the battle to help your loved ones, it feels like you’re by yourself, fighting this battle on your own,” he says. Jeremy was shipped to an out-of-state prison, as New Mexico does with many kids serving long sentences, deepening his parents’ isolation. 

Then, about four years ago, Mike says his world opened up after he stumbled upon a coalition that had assembled in New Mexico to fight extreme sentences imposed on children. 

“It was like a breath of fresh air,” he told Bolts. “I was able to join them and it’s like, I’m not by myself anymore. We’ve got resources, we’ve got people who are in the same situation, we can pull our knowledge and our strengths and start working on the passage of legislation. It was a godsend.” 

The coalition has for years pushed legislation to give every ‘juvenile lifer’ a meaningful chance at release, which faltered in repeated legislative sessions until they finally succeeded this spring: In March, lawmakers adopted Senate Bill 64, a law abolishing sentences of life without parole for children. 

The law also addresses other extreme sentences by making anyone convicted of a crime they committed under the age of 18 eligible for parole hearings—usually after 15 years in prison, though in some cases after 20 or 25 years behind bars. 

“In a moment of pretty extreme political polarization around crime and public safety, our community was able to pass one of the more progressive juvenile parole laws in the country, and we did it with bipartisan support,” said Denali Wilson, an attorney at the ACLU of New Mexico who co-founded this coalition, though she also stresses that 15 years remains too long a time. “For people that went to prison when they were 15-16 years old, we’re talking about a lifetime to wait for just an opportunity—just an opportunity to come home.”

The law does not guarantee release for anyone. It only provides review by a parole board, a shot to showcase one’s rehabilitation inside and ask for a second chance that the governor-appointed board can still deny. Many people newly eligible for review will still likely remain in prison for decades. 

Still, Mike Rose calls himself “eternally optimistic” and says the law’s passage opens the door to having his son home by the end of the year. Jeremy, who was convicted of murder alongside two other minors for the stabbing deaths of two elderly people three decades ago, received a sentence that made him eligible for parole after 30 years in prison, and likely would have had a parole hearing next near even without the new law. But Mike, whose wife died of cancer two years ago without seeing her son have a hearing, is keenly aware of what shaving even just a few years off his sentence could have meant—and now he’s eager to help others besides his son get a second look. 

“He left a boy of 17 and hopefully I get the opportunity to have him here shortly as a man of 47,” Mike said of his son. “There’s a huge push across the country to recognize the fact that we as a society cannot sentence our juveniles to a life behind bars… You’re not doing things to solve the crime problem, what you’re doing is throwing the next generation away.”

So far in 2023, two other states besides New Mexico have adopted similar reforms, making people convicted as children eligible for release after some lengthy term of incarceration: Illinois with House Bill 1064 in February, and Minnesota, which included the reforms in a large public safety package, in May. 

They are just the latest states to adopt such laws over the last decade, ever since the U.S. Supreme Court issued a series of decisions in the late 2000s and early 2010s affirming that minors deserve “meaningful opportunities to obtain release.” The laws passed in New Mexico, Illinois and Minnesota mean there will now be 28 states that no longer sentence kids to life without parole.

“Every state that ends the practice of condemning children to die in prison creates pressure for the next state to do so,” said Preston Shipp, a policy counsel with the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, a national organization that is helping spread those reforms.

Shipp traveled to Santa Fe and St. Paul this year to lobby lawmakers and share information about the many similar reforms that have already been implemented elsewhere, pointing to the low recidivism rate for people who have been released on parole in other states. He also tries to talk to lawmakers about research in neuroscience and psychology showing developmental differences between adults and youth.

“We know from the science of adolescent brain development that [kids] don’t appreciate all the consequences of their conduct; peer pressure hits differently,” Shipp said. ”In a flash point, this person does something that’s tragic, and it changes people’s lives, but it doesn’t mean that they cannot experience rehabilitation. It doesn’t mean that they’re beyond the hope of redemption.”

More states could soon make reforms. Shipp has traveled to Lansing three times this year to help bills that would end juvenile life without parole in Michigan. Connecticut already adopted similar reforms in 2015 for kids under age 18, but in June lawmakers passed a bill that extends parole eligibility to people with long sentences who were convicted before age 21. (The new Illinois law also applies to people up to age 21.) That measure now goes to Governor Ned Lamont, a Democrat who has blocked other efforts to curtail long sentences for juveniles. 

Despite the similarities, the youth sentencing reforms that three states have passed so far this year will vary widely in actual impact. In Illinois, people already serving extreme sentences for juvenile convictions are still set to spend their lives behind bars without review: The bill that passed this year—just like the 2019 law it builds on—isn’t retroactive. 

In New Mexico and Minnesota, by contrast, dozens of people incarcerated for decades are now suddenly poised to receive parole hearings very soon because of the new laws. “There are just a lot of people who have spent a lot of time in prison being introspective and growing and developing into adults,” State Representative Sandra Feist, a Democrat who helped shape Minnesota’s legislation, told Bolts. “And I’m just excited for them to get a second chance.”

For advocates like Wilson who hope to reduce the prison population and spent years guiding these bills through the state legislatures, that effort was just about setting up the difficult parole processes that are only now starting.  

“It’s the moment that our community has been preparing for,” Wilson said. “We knew that passing the law was only the first step. Making the law mean something, making it mean real opportunity for people to come home, is the next chapter.”

The states that adopted new juvenile sentencing reforms this year significantly limited if not eliminated discretionary parole in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a period during which many states toughened sentencing and gutted paths to release throughout the country. That gives advocates a chance to start fresh—after all, established parole boards are typically dysfunctional and punitive—but creating a new process out of virtually nothing is also a daunting task. 

Wilson warns that legal services in New Mexico aren’t trained to counsel the people who are newly eligible for parole, even as their hearings are coming up soon. “The work ahead is happening outside of existing institutions in the state because this is new work,” she said. “This reform was passed without any kind of budget allocation from the state, and so much of the work is around shoring up resources to make sure that people are supported in the way that they deserve.” Wilson has set up an organization, Deserving Life, that’s crowdfunding to help provide people with this support. 

Wilson says she knows of at least 75 people incarcerated in New Mexico who were given decades-long sentences for crimes they committed as minors and will be affected by SB 64. More than half are already eligible for a hearing under the new law because they’ve served more than the minimum period (15 to 25 years, depending on the crime). The actual number is likely higher: ProPublica exposed in March how the state lost track of nearly two dozen people locked up since they were sentenced to life in prison as kids. 

Meanwhile, close to 100 people will be affected by Minnesota’s new law, according to Perry Moriearty, who helps run a law clinic at the University of Minnesota that represents “juvenile lifers” and played a central role in crafting and championing the reforms over the last decade. In Minnesota, like in New Mexico, most people will be eligible after 15 years in prison, though it will be longer for some categories of crimes. Moriearty says nearly half have been in prison long enough that they are already eligible for a hearing.

But the panel that will review these cases doesn’t even exist yet. Minnesota lawmakers this spring created a brand new review board that must still be staffed. For cases that involve people who were sentenced as minors, that five-member board will be supplemented by two additional members who must be experts in neurodevelopmental science.  

Advocates for the law say these two additional members will be critical to remind the rest of the board of what makes youth different. “One of the things that neurodevelopmental experts may be able to speak to is why, with a lot of kids who are incarcerated, the first few years look bumpy,” said Moriearty, the University of Minnesota professor.  “For kids who are told that they’re entering prison and they’re gonna die there, there tend to be more infractions in those early years.”

Avra Anagnostis was 14 when her 16-year-old best friend, Roberto Lopez-Rios, was arrested and sentenced to life in Minnesota in 2001. “Life in prison, obviously, as kids, we couldn’t really comprehend what that meant,” she told Bolts. “It sounded so scary and overwhelming.” 

For more than two decades, Anagnostis has advocated for her friend to get a second look. She and Lopez-Rios co-founded an organization called Juvenile Sentencing Reform MN, paired up with Moriearty to advocate for reform, and reached out to people who have been incarcerated since they were kids. “Some of these guys are really alone,” she said. “Several have never had anyone reach out to them.” 

“For them to know that this group of people was coming together, people that they’ve never met, and advocating for them and saying, you are more than the worst thing you did as a child, that was huge,” she added.

From prison, Lopez-Rios has developed his painting, working with a group called Art from the Inside to have his art sold and shown at exhibitions. In April, this Minnesota-based organization hosted an art workshop in St. Paul alongside Juvenile Sentencing Reform MN that featured Moriearty and other coalition members talking about their bill.

Moriearty says that most kids sentenced to spend their life in prison in Minnesota come from Hennepin and Ramsey counties, which include the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, the most diverse area in the state—and that the vast majority, 81 percent, are also Black and Latinx. The prosecutors who represent these population centers—Ramsey County’s John Choi, who has long backed this issue, and Hennepin County’s Mary Moriarty, who was elected in November in a victory for progressives—both supported the reform this year. 

Nevertheless, the statewide association of county attorneys opposed Minnesota’s bill this year. Robert Small, its executive director, told Bolts that the organization agreed with the principle of ending juvenile life without parole but thought that people should wait for longer periods before being eligible, and that the decision should be made by a judge and not by a parole board. Feist says the support her bill received from Choi and Moriarty helped counter the idea that local law enforcement was uniformly hostile to it.

New Mexico’s prosecutors association, which has a long history of torpedoing criminal justice reforms and opposed prior iterations of this bill, remained neutral on the 2023 version after extracting concessions that extended how long kids have to wait before becoming eligible for parole. (An earlier version of the bill made most minors eligible for parole after 10 years.)

Advocates in both New Mexico and Minnesota say they insisted the bills be retroactive, bringing hope to the very people who were championing them. They also pressed lawmakers to cover anyone who was convicted of a crime as a kid, no matter how serious. 

“The reason why we are so adamant that there should not be carve outs is because this whole policy is all about the difference between kids and adults,” Shipp said. “It’s not about the nature of the offense.”

All three bills adopted this year passed Democratic-led legislatures and were then signed by Democratic governors. In each case, the opposition largely came from GOP ranks, even though the bills in Illinois and New Mexico each received Republican support. (Minnesota’s package, which incorporated many other reforms, passed on strict party lines.) Some GOP-run states have adopted similar legislation—most recently, Ohio in 2021. 

In Illinois, a Republican state senator even played a lead role this year in pushing lawmakers to fix the fact that HB 1064 does not apply to past cases. In the same week Governor J.B. Pritzker signed it into law in February, Senator Seth Lewis filed new legislation, SB 2073, to make it retroactive. Lewis’ bill would also apply to an earlier sentencing reform that Illinois adopted in 2019, which curtailed juvenile life without parole but did not eliminate it. If it passes, it would make hundreds of people incarcerated since they were kids eligible for parole, according to Lindsey Hammond, policy director of the Chicago-based Restore Justice. 

SB 2073 drew numerous Democratic co-sponsors but it received no vote by the end of the legislative session in May. Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford, a Democrat, did not respond to a request for comment on her plans for next year.

While the sentencing reforms in Illinois are limited to only new convictions, the state has still gone further than most others (including New Mexico and Minnesota) in another dimension: age. 

Reforms that take a more rehabilitative approach to youth are traditionally written to apply to people who committed a crime before age 18, but the laws Illinois passed in 2019 and 2023 instead both draw the line at 21. Hammond says the usual arguments for treating kids differently apply to young adults too. “Eighteen isn’t a line that you magically become an adult,” she told Bolts. “The emerging brain science shows that our brains continue to develop till the mid-20s.” 

Hammond says there was interest in the Illinois legislature to set the age of eligibility at 25: “Why are we stopping?”

Back in 2021, Washington, D.C., became the first jurisdiction to eliminate life without the possibility of parole for anyone convicted of a crime committed under age 25. Bolts reported last year that the reform sparked releases but at a slower pace than its proponents hoped for because of pandemic delays and recalcitrant prosecutors. Other states, like Massachusetts and Vermont, have also raised the age until which someone can be treated as a juvenile past 18. Connecticut could join that roster if its governor, Lamont, signs SB 952, the bill that ends life without parole for youth under 21. 

People in other states are watching these developments closely. In Minnesota, Moriearty says they didn’t press raising the age of adult criminal liability in this year’s session but hopes to revisit it in the future. “We didn’t necessarily feel like we had time,” she says.

Some advocates also hope to build on these new laws to make a broader case: They wonder if re-opening the door to parole for juveniles may make people more receptive to the idea that we shouldn’t throw anyone away for life. They’re pushing for reforms to cap prison terms, expand parole hearings for the elderly, or guarantee everyone some form of “second look.”

“If we allow ourselves to believe or to entertain the possibility that a child is more than the worst thing that they’ve ever done,” Wilson says, “it’s really not that far of a leap for people to wonder if that may be true for everybody.”

The post “Just an Opportunity to Come Home” appeared first on Bolts.

In Minnesota, a disagreement on how to prosecute two teenagers suspected of killing a 23-year-old has put two of the state’s leading criminal justice reformers into a high-profile political dispute, testing how much change even progressive politicians are willing to embrace.

Last Friday, Governor Tim Walz assigned State Attorney General Keith Ellison–a former six-term congressman and Deputy Chair of the Democratic National Committee–to handle the prosecution of the murder, taking the case away from Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty. Walz decided to give Ellison the case after Ellison criticized Moriarty as too lenient and requested it be transferred to him. His move is a direct rebuke of the newly elected Moriarty, whose win in November had marked a major triumph for criminal justice reformers. 

Moriarty is one of many progressives who believe there is a false choice between public safety and a punitive carceral system. She ran last year for prosecutor because after the murder of George Floyd she saw “an opportunity for racial reckoning” in Minneapolis, and the possibility of it slipping away as racialized fears of crime took hold. Moriarty promised to change the criminal legal system in Hennepin County by using more rehabilitative options and diversion programs to reduce incarceration as opposed to imposing harsh sentences. 

A central plank of that vision, as she explained to Mother Jones and Bolts last October, was changing how the criminal legal system treats kids, including moving away from trying minors as adults. “It’s really important to focus many more resources on our youth. And also to look at it from a science perspective,” she said. “We know kids are very susceptible to impulsive behavior….And with so many guns out there, we’re ending up with a lot of tragic consequences.”

A recent memo from Sarah Davis, Moriarty’s Director of the Children and Families division, translated that campaign rhetoric into office policy. Citing youth brain development as “the foundation of our approach,” Moriarty’s prosecutors would “make every effort to keep children out of the court system when possible” to reduce youth recidivism. 

Ellison and Moriarty have long worked together in Minnesota to push reform. A Democrat who endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders for president, Ellison gained nationwide acclaim for leading the successful prosecution of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd. At the time, Moriarty had recently been controversially dismissed from her position as chief public defender. During the Chauvin trial, she worked as a local television analyst, translating Ellison’s prosecution for a lay audience. Ellison called for an investigation of her dismissal and publicly raised the possibility that it was punishment for her racial justice advocacy. In 2022, when Moriarty began to campaign for County Attorney, Ellison endorsed her. The political nonprofit TakeAction hosted canvassing events supporting Moriarty’s election and Ellison’s reelection. 

This case radically changes their relationship. After narrowly winning his election for attorney general against an opponent who called him “soft” on crime, Ellison has swooped in to prosecute the murder despite Moriarty’s insistence he should not. 

She harshly criticized the move by Walz and Ellison as an “undemocratic” overreach, likening the decision to those made by Republican politicians nationwide who have attempted to usurp the authority of local prosecutors. 

The case shows the immense difficulties that progressive prosecutors face as they attempt to carry out the mandate of reform on which they were elected, and guide the public away from a tough-on-crime approach. “One of the reasons being a prosecutor is so difficult is because you have to look at a case where there’s an unimaginable harm and then decide what accountability, justice and punishment are appropriate to request,” Moriarty said in a press conference Friday.

On November 8, 2022, just days after Moriarty and Ellison won their elections, Zaria McKeever, 23, was killed in a home invasion in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Park. Prosecutors claim two brothers, ages 15 and 17 years old at the time, killed McKeever on behalf of Erick Haynes–McKeever’s ex-boyfriend and the father of her one-year-old child. Initially, Michael Freeman—the long-serving county attorney who embodied the traditional carceral approach Moriarty ran against and came under immense criticism for his handling of police killings—planned to try the brothers in adult court. 

After Hennepin County elected Moriarty, prosecutors changed course. Instead of a trial, her office offered plea deals that sentenced the brothers to two years in a juvenile facility with extended probation in exchange for testimony against Haynes. If they violated their probation, the brothers would be subject to an adult sentence under a doctrine called Extended Juvenile Jurisdiction (EJJ)– a hybrid approach reserved for young people over the age of 14 who are accused of committing certain serious crimes, the adult sentence can be imposed up to the age of 21. The elder brother accepted the deal.

The announcement of the change in prosecution deeply angered McKeever’s family. “It was choked down our throat without any concern about how we felt,” her stepfather Paul Greer told the Star Tribune. “We will not stand for it.”At a community meeting that McKeever’s family attended at Shiloh Temple, a prominent Black church in Minneapolis, Ellison voiced his disapproval of the plea deals. Ellison then sent a letter to Walz last Thursday asking to take over the case before the Friday hearing for the young brother. In the letter, he noted that Moriarty had “refused” his initial request to take over the prosecution. Walz granted the request, saying that “this authority is rarely used, and it should remain an option of last resort.” According to the Star Tribune, a Minnesota governor has stepped in only one other time in the state’s modern history to reassign a case against the will of a county attorney. 

“While I share the belief that too many juveniles are involved in the adult criminal-justice system, accountability for the seriousness of this crime has been missing in this case,” Ellison said in a statement on Friday. “I respect that county attorneys are duly elected by their constituents to exercise their discretion; however, the disposition of the juvenile shooter that Hennepin County has proposed in this case is disproportionate to the seriousness of the crime committed and falls far short of the family’s and community’s expectations for justice and safety.”

In a tense press conference on the same day, Moriarty defended the plea deals as her following through on campaign promises–changing how the county attorney’s office would deal with young people involved in gun violence. In 2021, when homicides approached a near record high, two thirds of shooting victims in Minneapolis were under the age of 31, according to a city report. “I am keeping a promise,” Moriarty said “[Ellison and Walz] are not.”

Moriarty said Ellison and Walz “are entitled to their opinion, but their actions here show that they also don’t really believe fully in democracy–because they are stopping me from doing the job voters elected me to do. That is unacceptable. They have set a very dangerous precedent.” 

In fact, Ellison is doing what his recent Republican opponent Jim Schultz warned of throughout the campaign last fall. “In a scenario in which we have somebody like a Mary Moriarty in the Hennepin County Attorney’s office,” Schultz told MinnPost when asked about the possibility of taking over prosecution, “I think we have to take a look at something along those lines.” Ellison denounced this overreach at the time. (When Mother Jones and Bolts asked about using a technique Ellison criticized, his office said they “don’t have anything to add” beyond the initial statement.) 

The Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers Guild sent a letter to Walz and Ellison expressing their “vigorous objection” to the decision, warning that it joins a national trend. 

In Florida, Ron DeSantis removed twice-elected Hillsborough County state attorney Andrew Warren after Warren pledged not to prosecute those who seek or provide abortions. In Pennsylvania, the state legislature attempted to impeach Larry Krasner, one of the most well-known reform prosecutors in the country. In Missouri, the attorney general is in the process of trying to remove St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner from office. A new bill in the Georgia state senate would create a “Prosecuting Attorneys Oversight Commission” with the power to remove prosecutors from office, just as Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis ramps up an investigation into Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. 

“You have tragically become part of a disturbing reactionary national trend and placed yourselves in the company of the likes of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Missouri Governor Mike Parson by preventing a local progressive prosecutor from exercising her prosecutorial discretion in acting consistently with her principles–and the principles that she was elected to carry out,” the Guild wrote. “Your decision to play to the crowd does grave damage toward making reform a reality.”

The Minnesota County Attorneys Association voted unanimously to oppose Walz’s decision to hand the case to Ellison, despite the attorney general asking for their support. The MCAA is made up of prosecutors across the state, showing a rejection of this kind of jurisdictional encroachment that transcends traditional political lines. “To so-called left wing prosecutors and so-called right wing prosecutors there seemed to be general agreement that this was a problem,” said Friedman.

During the 2022 campaign, Ellison was hammered by Schultz as being “soft on crime,” before narrowly defeating him in the closest statewide race of the year. “To what extent is this about the perception of him politically across the state versus what he thinks is justice in this situation?” asked Michael Friedman, the former Executive Director of the Minneapolis based Legal Rights Center. “I’m not saying that with a specific accusation. I just think those are the kinds of questions that would need to be asked of him.”

At the press conference Friday, Moriarty said that in offering the two teenagers a plea deal she was trying to “make sure that there is accountability” without incarcerating someone for an extended period of time, after which it is likely they would “come out more dangerous to the community.” 

There is research to back up this idea. “If you can keep children out of the adult justice system until they’re in their mid-twenties, they’re extremely unlikely to enter it,” said Chris Uggen, the Distinguished McKnight Professor in Sociology, Law, and Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. “So in that sense, much of the science is on [Moriarty’s] side.” (However, Uggen added that “blended sentences” like the EJJ offered to the two teenagers is itself a “compromise” that has mixed results.)

But at the event, Moriarty was shouted down by McKeever’s loved ones for these ideas.

“What do you get for executing someone and shooting somebody five times? What’s the law for that? asked McKeever’s cousin Shontell Bishop and her sister Tiffynnie Epps.” “The law, not the science.”

“We could send this 15-year-old to prison and he’d get out in his early 30s,” Moriarty explained. 

“Wonderful,” a supporter of McKeever shouted back. “Zaria didn’t make it to her early 30s.”

This confrontation highlights the complex racial dynamics of the case. Ellison is the most powerful Black political figure in the state coming to the aid of a Black family who believe their calls for justice have gone unheard in a place where Black people are “overpoliced and underprotected.” In 2021, there was one Black shooting victim for every 150 Black residents in Minneapolis. For white people, there was one shooting victim for every 3,768 residents. According to a data analysis by the Minnesota Reformer, police fail to solve nearly eight in ten shootings in Minneapolis. 

Moriarty is a white prosecutor with a track record of calling out racist practices in the office she now leads. Her 30-plus year career on the other side of the courtroom has enshrined a steadfast belief that punitive policies disproportionately harm Black people, and don’t produce public safety in the long term. “There was no bait and switch here,” said Uggen. “This is exactly what she ran on.” 

Her opponent last year, a Black former judge and prosecutor who argued for a more punitive approach, framed Moriarty’s policies as putting criminals first, saying she was insensitive to the dilemma that Black people who live in high-crime neighborhoods face. Moriarty went on to win every single one of those neighborhoods. But this episode reveals the hurdles that await reform prosecutors as they seek to go about the job differently, especially among the populations experiencing violence most acutely.

“I don’t want to imply that Moriarty is on the wrong side of the racial justice issues at all, because she has been a true champion,” said Uggen. “[But] race is very much front and center in this issue, as it is in everything regarding justice in Minnesota.”

The post Minnesota’s Keith Ellison Thwarts a Reform Prosecutor He Endorsed appeared first on Bolts.

Public defender Sajid Khan still remembers watching his fourteen-year-old client walk into court in California’s Santa Clara County, laden with shackles around his waist, wrists, and ankles. It was 2015, and Christian Haro Cotero was being charged as an adult for stabbing an older boy who’d threatened him. He had confessed without an attorney or his mother present, and prosecutors were seeking steeper punishment over a gang affiliation. Khan had urged prosecutors to keep Christian’s case in juvenile court. He detailed the abuse Christian had suffered at the hands of his father, and the resulting depression and suicidal ideation that had plagued him since childhood. But District Attorney Jeff Rosen’s office refused.

“It was just viscerally, emotionally, professionally, one of the most jarring experiences of my career,” Khan told Bolts. The DA’s office, he said, “insisted that this 14-year-old child who had a serious history of trauma, but had also manifested a significant display of potential for rehabilitation—they insisted that he suffer an adult felony conviction, that he suffer a prison sentence.” In court, he said, Christian was very quiet. He seemed bewildered by the legal proceedings. 

After Christian pled guilty and was sent to prison, Khan and Rosen moved their showdown into the legislative sphere. In 2018, they argued on opposite sides of a measure to ban the prosecution of children under age 16 as adults, a frequent practice under Rosen at the time. When the California legislature passed Senate Bill 1391 in 2018, Rosen joined a lawsuit attempting to strike it down, though the effort failed. Veronica Haro, Christian’s mother, advocated fiercely on behalf of Senate Bill 1391 “so that other families wouldn’t have to go through what my son went through,” she told Bolts in Spanish. The bill’s adoption, she said, “was huge for me. I knew it wasn’t going to help my son, but it would help other young people.” 

With Rosen up for reelection this year, the fight has moved to the ballot box: Khan is now running against the incumbent DA.

Youth justice remains a key component of Khan’s critique of Rosen, whose office has continued to charge some 16- and 17-year-olds as adults—a policy that Khan says he would end outright. “The DA has the power, right now, to stop prosecuting kids as adults, … to stop pursuing life sentences against youthful offenders,” Khan told Bolts. 

But Khan, who works in Santa Clara County’s Alternate Defender office, has long called for changing the norms and practices of prosecution far beyond youth sentencing. “We should fire our very righteous outrage, fury and ire at District Attorney’s [sic] offices too,” he wrote in a blog post published in 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, that condemned prosecutors’ role in furthering systemic racism. Rosen replied to that post by accusing Khan of threatening violence against his office and filing a formal complaint, which he later retracted.

Beyond the two candidates’ contentious public relationship, their race underscores a larger debate over what DAs should do to curtail mass incarceration. The race has already revealed growing rifts within the reform community about what constitutes meaningful criminal justice reform in the Black Lives Matter era.

Rosen, who was first elected DA in 2010 and has never faced an opponent since, also casts himself as a reformer. He is quick to cite a series of accomplishments, including a major legislative measure adopted in 2019 that created a new mechanism to release people from prison by empowering DAs to review their sentences. Rosen now enjoys the endorsement of Hillary Blout, a prominent reformer who spearheaded that law. (Blout declined an interview for this piece.) 

Rosen has also broken with the old guard of tough-on-crime prosecutors on other occasions. In 2014, he was one of just three California DAs to support Proposition 47, a successful ballot initiative that reduced sentencing for some lower-level offenses. In 2019, he invoked a public health approach to drug use, announcing he would prosecute fewer simple possession cases. But Rosen has also proven a fierce opponent of some of the state’s milestone sentencing reforms, such as the law that banned the adult prosecution of children under 16 and another major reform adopted in 2018 that narrowed California’s felony murder statutes. He long drew fire from progressives for seeking the death penalty, though he announced in 2020 that he would no longer do so.

As more DA candidates across the nation don the mantle of the “progressive prosecutor,” the expectations for those who claim that label have also risen. “We’ve seen a tremendous sea change over the last five years in what it means to be an elected prosecutor,” said Miriam Krinsky, the California-based executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution, an organization that promotes criminal justice reform through DA offices. 

Khan has criticized the “squishy” standards that allow many DAs to dub themselves “progressive prosecutors.” He co-wrote a law review article grousing,  “Any person prepared to say, ‘We need to be smart on crime,’ can claim to be a card-carrying member.” He told Bolts that the Santa Clara DA’s office needs to spearhead “drastic, transformational change,”  calling for a slate of policy upheavals that Rosen has thus far resisted. 

Rosen declined requests for an interview. “DA Jeff Rosen is a nationally recognized leader in criminal justice reform that works,” said Leo Briones, his longtime political advisor. Rosen and Khan are running alongside former Santa Clara prosecutor Daniel Chung in the nonpartisan June primary (if none of them receive more than 50 percent of the vote, the top two finishers will move to a November runoff). Like Khan, Chung says that Rosen sought to punish him over a piece of public writing, though Chung is criticizing the incumbent from the opposite direction. Chung claims he was demoted and later fired by Rosen for writing an article that criticized sentencing reforms proposed in California, on the grounds that they risked exacerbating  anti-Asian violence. Chung, who did not respond to a request for comment about his critiques of Rosen, has accused the DA of posturing as a progressive to get the governor to appoint him as California’s attorney general last year. “DA Rosen has had his finger to the wind, disingenuously pivoting himself to be perceived as a progressive prosecutor,” he wrote in a local outlet.

Jon Grobman first met Rosen when the DA attended a criminal justice reform symposium at California State Prison in Lancaster, back when Grobman was still serving six consecutive life sentences for a nonviolent drug-related robbery. Believing he would die in prison, Grobman had started creating and running programs for the other men, and eventually helped found Paws For Life, a dog rehabilitation and training program. In 2018, after the California Department of Corrections (CDCR) recommended Grobman’s release for “exceptional conduct” in prison, Rosen agreed —over the objections of the DA who’d presided over his original condemnation.  

“The DA’s office could have said, ‘This guy was given six life sentences for a reason. We wanted him off the streets,’” Grobman said. “But what Jeff did was truly look at the person that I had become.” 

Around the same time, Rosen helped write and publicly advocated for a landmark reform that allows California prosecutors to propose reducing incarcerated people’s sentences. Until then, DA offices were effectively barred from reviewing and changing past sentences they considered to be excessive. Rosen then made Santa Clara into one of the first counties to initiate a sentencing review pilot program. Rosen told Bolts through a spokesperson that the DA’s office has requested resentencing for around 25 people thus far.  

The community organization Silicon Valley De-Bug helps petition the DA’s office for the release of people with long sentences under the new program. Its founder, Raj Jayadev, told Bolts that the DA’s office began by mainly considering people without sentencing enhancements or charges considered violent. “We knew that our position and the district attorney’s version of who should be home would be starting from very different places,” he told Bolts, clarifying that reform efforts often “end up at this point where they will exclude people with violence charges or gang enhancements.” (Rosen’s office did not respond to a request to clarify the program’s scope). Still, Jayadev credited Rosen’s office with “starting to expand” its definition of who is eligible, noting that the resentencing program ultimately led to the release of two people with higher-level convictions after De-Bug advocated on their behalf. 

But Jayadev also cautioned that Rosen’s broader record is not in line with these efforts. “I’ve seen actions taken by his office that are very counter to a larger reform movement in California,” he said. (Jayadev has endorsed Khan in his private capacity; De-Bug does not endorse candidates.) 

In characterizing his approach to criminal justice reform, Rosen has said he strives to achieve a balance between reevaluating the sentences of those who’ve turned around their lives in prison and the aggressive prosecution of “murders, rapists, gangsters, [and] child molesters.” 

LaDoris Cordell, a retired state trial judge who has worked alongside Rosen and endorsed Khan, told Bolts that she finds many of Rosen’s policies inconsistent with his public persona. “You cannot claim to be a DA who cares about being progressive and oppose a bill that says you should not try 14- and 15-year-olds as adults,” she said. “They’re not compatible.” She further rebuked Rosen for a 2016 law he spearheaded that required a mandatory minimum prison sentence in cases of sexual assault of an unconscious victim. The law followed a public outcry over a judge’s perceived leniency in the case of Brock Turner, a Stanford student convicted of rape and sentenced to six months in jail followed by three years of probation. A mandatory minimum law, Cordell said, is “undoubtedly going to impact defendants of color more than it will white defendants.” 

Rosen has framed the mandatory minimum law as reflective of a societal shift in consciousness around the need to tackle sexual violence. In 2016, Khan defended Turner’s sentence and decried the new mandatory minimum law, writing in an editorial that “robotic, one-size-fits-all punishment schemes” will “disproportionately impact the underprivileged and minorities in our communities.”  

Khan’s stance on the matter may likewise prove to be a liability as a candidate. The leader of the movement to recall Turner’s sentencing judge has been sharply critical of Khan since he jumped into the race. This past August, Khan apologized for his language in the editorial, which, he wrote, “does not reflect my evolved views on how to discuss sexual violence,” while standing by the arguments he’d made about sentencing, rehabilitation, and race. Reflecting on his views more broadly, Khan told Bolts that he favors “a real investment in services and in holistic treatment of people—as opposed to what we’ve come to do, which is defining justice by months in jail and years of incarceration.” 

Just a decade ago, it would have been unlikely for someone with Khan’s background to run for prosecutor. But candidates like him are no longer anomalous. Other young public defenders have leveraged their outsider status to mount successful bids for DA, from Austin to San Francisco.

For a long time, Khan told Bolts, “I had a very difficult time understanding how running for the DA’s office would be in alignment with my values and pursuit of criminal legal system reform.” But during the 2020 protests, he began to see how running for DA could actually advance the demands for “true transformational change” articulated by local organizers and residents.

Khan now describes his experience representing the accused as an advantage. “Being a public defender for the last over 13 years here in Santa Clara County has given me unique insight into how our system perpetuates mass incarceration, how it perpetuates systemic racism, how it perpetuates police brutality,” he said. 

Khan is “wearing the mantle of a Chesa Boudin,” said Robert Weisberg, the faculty co-director of Stanford University’s Criminal Justice Center, referring to the former public defender who is now the San Francisco DA. “Rosen has sort of protected that flank by being, if not a radical, ‘progressive’ DA, a fairly liberal reformer,” Weisberg said, adding that the DA is “very, very good at promoting what his office does.”

But Rosen is now largely outflanked to the left by Boudin and other high-profile counterparts, like George Gascón in Los Angeles. Both DAs have instructed their staff prosecutors not to use some sentencing enhancements that can significantly increase prison sentences, for instance, and both have ended the prosecution of minors as adults.

Rosen has rejected taking either of those steps. While he supported a 2012 ballot initiative that narrowed the state’s Three Strikes statutes, and has written about the overuse of sentencing enhancements, his office has continued to file some enhancements over alleged gang affiliations or prior convictions . “We are very selective and careful about when we charge an enhancement under the Three Strikes Law and only do that for individuals who have repeatedly committed serious and violent crimes that endanger the community,” Rosen told Bolts through a campaign spokesperson.

The DA’s office currently charges 16- and 17-year olds as adults, and it only stopped prosecuting 14- and 15-year olds as adults when state law was changed to forbid it. Rosen continued to defend the practice afterward. “If we’re going to ask for 14- or 15-year-olds to be tried as an adult, it’s a horrendous crime,” he told Imprint in 2019.  “It’s someone we think is a psychopath.” (Rosen told Bolts through a spokesperson that since 2017, his office has only requested for 13 minors to be charged as adults.)

Khan rebuts that perspective. Beyond wanting to put a categorical end to the prosecution of minors in adult court, he told Bolts that he would work to create restorative justice programs and expand diversion opportunities for youth up to age 25, in recognition of research showing that the parts of the brain responsible for impulse control keep developing into the mid-twenties. He also said he would advocate to raise the age of qualification for juvenile court beyond 18, as other states are considering. Khan told Bolts that he’s running “so that we have a DA that honors individuals’ capacities for redemption and rehabilitation—that doesn’t define people, especially young people, by their worst moments.” 

Christian Haro Cotero, the teenager whose case spurred Khan to advocate for statewide youth justice reforms, was released in 2021 after spending seven years and three months in prison. His mother, Veronica Haro, said that he matured a lot in those years. Still, the experience of growing up inside prison has left its mark. “There’s a lot of injustice in those places,” she told Bolts, “they treat them horribly.”While incarcerated, Christian spent two years in a firefighting training program called Pine Grove, the last “fire camp” for incarcerated youth in the state. There, Veronica said, “they only paid $2 dollars an hour—while he was risking his life and his health.” Today, Christian is 21, and he’s hoping to become a professional firefighter. But many people who fight fires while incarcerated struggle to find work once released. “We just hope to god that they’ll give him an opportunity,” Veronica told Bolts.

The post Longstanding Grievances Between Prosecutor and Public Defender Boil Over in California DA Race appeared first on Bolts.

Washington State is now presenting a blueprint for how progressives can shield themselves and even amp up civil rights protections beyond what federal courts are willing to extend.

Its state Supreme Court last week issued a landmark ruling that bars mandatory sentences of life without parole for anyone under the age of 21. This decision is a judicial milestone in moving past the cutoff age of 18 that the U.S. Supreme Court established in its federal rulings. 

That decision came on the heels of another sweeping ruling, issued two weeks earlier, that struck down the state’s statutes criminalizing drug possession. The wide scope of the drug possession decision stunned even reform advocates who hoped for a favorable ruling. It has made drug possession effectively legal in the state, retroactively; the ruling is now forcing state and local officials to cease arrests, drop ongoing cases, and vacate old convictions.

For people who are wary of the federal judiciary’s rightward turn, these decisions may signal a path forward.

The Washington Supreme Court grounded its two new rulings in part on the state constitution’s due process clause and on its ban on “cruel punishments.” Federal courts tend to not review such interpretations, showing off what advocates have to gain by pursuing claims in state courts and strategizing on how to win there. 

The decisions also crystalize the stakes of who sits on state benches, even if the scrutiny around the selection of these judges pales in comparison to federal battles.

“It is hard to miss what I call the Trumpification of federal courts,” said Daniel Greenfield, an attorney at the MacArthur Justice Center. “Increasingly, there’s a feeling among civil rights litigators and other lawyers and organizations interested in challenging the criminal legal system that the focus has been on federal courts for too long, and that there’s another potent tool that ought to at least be tried. That doesn’t mean that important gains can’t be made in federal courts, … but there are these 50 other court systems, all of which have a duty to vindicate the rights of their citizens.” 

Some of these courts have “untapped potential” for civil rights litigation, he added. These judges shape the landscape on voting rights, criminal justice, labor rights, and more.

On Washington’s highest court, at least, a progressive bloc may now be consolidating. This shifting balance of power is clarifying that this is not just a matter of which party has more judges. On this liberal-leaning court, distinctions are emerging based on how broadly judges are interpreting rights and how willing they are to rock the boat when faced with violations.

Both decisions came in narrow 5-4 rulings that broke along the same lines. In each case, the controlling side was made up of the five most recent justices to join the court. Two of them were appointed just last year by Governor Jay Inslee—appointments that at the time raised the possibility that the court may swing toward bolder outcomes on criminal justice cases. They then won elections in November and clinched the majorities in these two 2021 rulings.

“This last year has been pretty extraordinary, and it’s heartening,” said Mary Kay High, a public defender who is chief deputy in Pierce County’s Department of Assigned Counsel. “Those are elected judges, and I applaud the courage of putting their names on a decision that may be controversial,” she added, pointing to law enforcement’s mobilization against the rulings.

—

The Washington Supreme Court is not new to the business of overturning sentencing statutes. In the fall of 2018, it struck down the death penalty and barred all life without parole sentences for youth under 18. But with those rulings, the court was playing catch-up to standards set in other states. It made Washington the 20th state to abolish capital punishment and the 21st to end juvenile life without parole.

The rulings issued over the last month, by contrast, showed off a newfound willingness to forge ahead and set benchmarks for the rest of the country. 

The court’s evolution, fueled by the arrival of the two new justices, is evident compared to what happened almost exactly one year ago. In January 2020, a justice who had dissented in the 2018 case ending juvenile life without parole retired and was replaced with Raquel Montoya-Lewis. Even with that switch, the votes were still not there for those justices looking for a bolder path. In March, as the pandemic was spreading, all nine justices agreed that law enforcement should reduce unnecessary arrests to shield people from COVID-19 in jails, but they split 5-4 on how much to restrict arrests. The majority, which included judges who were part of the 2018 rulings, took a narrower approach. But now they faced a minority—made-up of Montoya-Lewis, Steven González, Sheryl Gordon McLoud, and Mary Yu—that was urging them to go even further.

Within weeks, the court’s membership changed again. Charles Wiggins, one of the five justices in the majority in that COVID-19 ruling, retired. Inslee replaced him with Helen Whitener, whose arrival flipped the balance between the two camps exposed by that pandemic decision. 

In both of the court’s new rulings on life without parole and drugs, the majority consisted of Whitener plus the four justices who argued that last year’s COVID-19 ruling was too timid. 

First, on Feb. 25, this five-member majority struck down the statute that criminalized drug possession. “Our state constitution’s due process clause provides even greater protection of individual rights [than the federal clause] in certain circumstances,” the court wrote.

State lawmakers are now considering whether, and how, to replace the overturned statute. Some have proposed criminalizing drug possession again, but reform advocates want the state to reckon instead with the failures of the war on drugs. Just four months ago, a ballot initiative made neighboring Oregon the first state to decriminalize drug possession. 

This decision was made on narrow grounds in that the court did not take issue with the broad aim of punishing drug possession. It took issue instead with a rare feature of state law: Washington convicted people without having to prove that they were aware they had drugs. 

But the problem’s specificity only underscores the boldness of the court’s choice to issue a sweeping remedy and overturn the statute in its entirety, which voided thousands of convictions. Courts, much like lawmakers, are often sensitive to arguments that it is just not practical to repair rights violations and that bringing finality to cases justifies ignoring the past, so they refuse to make changes retroactive. But not this time.

Reform advocates are delighted that the majority was undaunted by concerns that it would be too much of a burden to ask the state’s legal system to fix the unjust harm it has caused. 

“While it may strike some lawmakers and law enforcement as burdensome, it is only the beginning of what is required to deliver true justice to our communities,” said Kendrick Washington II, the youth policy counsel at the ACLU of Washington 

High echoed this assessment. “Do we really think that workload should outweigh a constitutional protection?” she asked.

The life without parole ruling, issued on March 11, will similarly force the state to confront the past and review existing sentences. 

Up to 26 people who are now incarcerated will be eligible for resentencing hearings, according to the Associated Press. Under the ruling, judges can still sentence people ages 18 to 21 to life without parole, but they need to consider factors specific to the individual, and they will have the option to offer another sentence in murder cases where that option did not previously exist. 

Advocates nationwide have been making the case for broadening youth justice by pointing to studies that show people undergo major cognitive development well into their 20s. 

“Washington State’s decision is important in that it ensures that there is consideration of youth,” said Heather Renwick, legal director of the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth. It recognizes that “nobody on their 18th birthday miraculously wakes up an adult” and “that all young people are capable of positive growth and change.” But, she added, “because it still leaves life without parole as an available sentencing option, there is room for the Washington legislature to take the next step and say that no young person should be sentenced to life without parole.” 

According to Renwick, the March 11 ruling is the first state court decision to extend the federal Supreme Court’s ban on mandatory life without parole for minors to youth beyond the age of 18. That said, some legislatures like in California and Washington, D.C. are increasingly taking even stronger steps in this arena. Just last month, a bill that would have barred life without parole for anyone under 25 passed in South Dakota’s  GOP-controlled Senate, though it eventually died. 

“I suspect that this decision reflects what is to come,” said Renwick, “and I think that it is going to be a combination of state constitutional analysis and state legislatures really thinking about what is age appropriate accountability for young people in their state.”

—

The new dividing lines between Washington justices could pave the way for more transformative decisions. And it has observers asking what has fueled the court’s shift. 

When Whitener was appointed last year, High told the Political Report that her background as a defense lawyer was “not the typical path to the bench.” (Gordon McCloud, who wrote the lead opinions in the new life without parole  and drug cases, has worked as a criminal defense lawyer as well.) Whitener, a former prosecutor and trial court judge, has also worked as a public defender, which remains relatively rare for judges. A Political Report analysis in October found that California’s Supreme Court includes three former prosecutors, but that no state justice since the 1980s has been a public defender. Federal appointments have long followed similar patterns.

But California notwithstanding, a new attitude may be spreading to some governors. This week, for his second appointment to the New Jersey Supreme Court, Governor Phil Murphy announced that he had chosen a civil rights attorney and former ACLU of New Jersey staffer, Rachel Wainer Apter. Washington’s justices could also be a model for presidential appointments amid a push to rework who makes the bench. Locally, activism around the power of local judges is growing.

Greenfield warns that until now conservatives have been generally more proactive about organizing state courts.

In recent years, Arizona Republicans expanded the size of the state Supreme Court to drive it to the right; Georgia’s GOP governor maneuvered to cancel multiple judicial elections on the 2020 ballot; and Montana and Pennsylvania Republicans are plotting to overhaul electoral rules and set up gerrymandered judicial maps in hope of grabbing control of the judicial branch.

In addition, it remains challenging for advocates or candidates to explain the stakes of these  appointments and elections—especially in places, such as Washington, where these shifts are about ideological nuances that partisan identification alone cannot manifest. Making elections for local judge salient can be even more difficult despite their vast powers on matters such as bail.

Greenfield, whose litigation focuses on prison conditions, insists that far more can be done to advance civil rights by leveraging the power of state courts. “There’s no reason why, say, Washington can’t afford its citizens greater liberties than is the minimum required by the federal Bill of Rights,” he said. 

And he added that changes in one state can build into a national wave that ends up bigger than the sum of its parts. “If a majority of state courts ultimately hold that, say, prolonged solitary confinement is unconstitutional,” he said, “federal courts would likely take notice of that.”

The post Landmark Rulings Show ‘Untapped Potential’ of State Courts To Advance Civil Rights appeared first on Bolts.

Broward County, Florida, will elect a new prosecutor for the first time since 1976 in November. And it is all but assured that the winner will be a Democrat. Broward—home to Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood, around 2 million people, and the state’s strongest Democratic political machine—virtually always votes blue. But the county has historically been downright hostile to candidates who lean too far left—and friendly to public officials who champion carceral politics.

Joe Kimok, an unabashedly progressive defense lawyer running for state attorney in the Aug. 18 Democratic primary, believes Broward’s typically centrist-Democratic voting bloc is ready to elect a candidate who believes the criminal legal system needs systemic, top-down change. Kimok, who is endorsed by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, would stop prosecuting crimes related to sex work, stop charging cases that stem from poverty, and peel back “tough on crime” policies that have been the norm in South Florida for most of the last century.

“I will tell you, when I started campaigning, that was a question that weighed very heavily on me,” Kimok, who is also a former prosecutor, told The Appeal: Political Report this month about the county’s perceived politics. “I assumed I was going to have to go out and educate voters on the problems with the system. But that has not been my experience. On issues, voters seem like they’re there already—or even farther than we are.”

Signaling at least some shift in Broward County’s politics, some of the other seven Democratic candidates also emphasize a desire to change its status quo and bring about some criminal justice reforms, though their platforms are not as far-reaching when it comes to pushing for decarceration.

Perhaps no politician in Broward exemplifies the county’s punitive politics than its chief prosecutor, State Attorney Mike Satz, a stern, 77-year-old, unapologetically tough-on-crime conservative Democrat. Satz is retiring at the end of his term.

Satz was first elected in 1976, when Broward County was still mostly a Southern, white enclave and not an international tourism destination. For nearly five decades, Satz’s tough-on-crime ethos has barely changed. Broward County, for example, has convicted  11 people who were later exonerated —the highest total in the state. (That includes two people who’d been sentenced to death.) Despite the county’s history of wrongful convictions, Satz’s office didn’t create a conviction integrity unit until 2019.

For years, Satz’s loudest critic has been longtime Public Defender Howard Finkelstein, a ponytailed, media-savvy former defense lawyer for drug cartels who turned his life around after getting arrested for crashing his car while carrying cocaine and prescription pills in 1987. Finkelstein has been the county’s top public defender since his election in 2004 and is also retiring this year.

In August 2019, Finkelstein wrote an open letter to Satz accusing him of, among other things, lackadaisically filing death penalty charges, needlessly trying children in adult court, and refusing to discipline Broward sheriff’s department officials who oversaw a countywide crime lab that was caught mishandling DNA evidence and employing at least one person who was investigated for tampering with drug evidence. Satz’s office closed its investigation into that employee without alerting the public.

“We are requesting that you make changes in your office’s procedures to correct institutional failures impacting the fair administration of justice in our community,” the letter stated. (In response, a spokesperson for Satz’s office in 2019 dismissed the criticisms as “recycled old complaints from the Public Defender’s Office that we have responded to in the past” and added that the prosecutor’s and public defender’s offices simply have “differences of opinion regarding public safety.”)

Satz has also been criticized for allowing police brutality to flourish under his watch. During Black Lives Matter marches earlier this year, protesters routinely chanted the name of Howard Bowe, an unarmed man who was killed by Hallandale Beach police officers in 2014. Satz, however, never charged any of the officers involved. Nor did Satz’s office take action after reporting by The Intercept and the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting suggested that Damain Martin, a 16-year-old boy who drowned in a Broward County canal last year, was shot with a Taser by a Sunrise police officer.

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The race to replace Satz is crowded. Satz himself has endorsed Sarahnell Murphy, a current assistant attorney in his office. Former public defender and ex-Coconut Creek Mayor Joshua Rydell leads the pack in fundraising by a significant margin and has been endorsed by a major local police union, the Broward County Police Benevolent Association. 

All of the candidates have indicated in media interviews and their online platforms that they would be less carceral than Satz, but what that would mean in practice varies widely. The Political Report contacted all eight Democratic candidates, but only Kimok and Justin McCormack provided responses to a set of policy questions. 

McCormack, who says on his website that he wants to “stop the revolving door of mass incarceration” and expand pretrial diversion programs, told the Political Report that he  does “not want to make life even more difficult for poor people by saddling them with unnecessary criminal charges.” He also says he would not seek cash bail for nonviolent offenses. 

McCormack declined to take a stand on legalizing or decriminalizing sex work, but he told the Political Report that “our prosecutorial resources would be better utilized reducing the harms associated with sex work, including trafficking, underage workers, and violence.” 

Murphy, the candidate endorsed by Satz, has highlighted her prosecutorial experience, and has proposed few specific policy changes or reforms outside of boosting funding to diversionary programs already in place at Satz’s office and focusing on diversifying staff. 

Harold Pryor, a former prosecutor and current defense attorney, has scored endorsements from many of South Florida’s Black lawmakers and has promised to “change the system from within.” His website outlines some reform positions, with qualifications, such as ending the use of cash bail “for certain non-violent misdemeanor offenses and other non-violent offenses.” He also says he will “eliminate adjudications for Misdemeanor Traffic Offenses and other offenses that are remnants of poverty,” though he did not respond to the Political Report’s question on exactly how he would handle offenses that are related to poverty.

Rydell, the fundraising leader, promises on his website to tackle “mass incarceration,” but his proposals remain comparatively vague, including promises to “reevaluate who we send to jail and why” and “launch an initiative to start examining the costs and benefits for incarceration terms.” He did not reply to the Political Report’s more specific queries. His website says he would not use cash bail for nonviolent offenses, and he would end incarceration over technical parole violations. 

Kimok, by contrast, has outlined the most detailed platform. He pointed the Political Report toward a 44-page proposal explaining how he would handle everything from misdemeanor justice, to juvenile justice, to police misconduct and immigration-related offenses. 

He says he would decline to prosecute a range of offenses, a strategy used by other prosecutors intent on shrinking the scope of the criminal legal system. He says, for example, that he will not prosecute marijuana possession and behaviors related to consensual sex work. 

Many Florida politicians have used the specter of sex trafficking to crack down on consensual sex work—lawmakers created a “Soliciting for Prostitution Public Database” that was severely criticized by sex worker advocates last year—but Kimok instead told the Political Report he doesn’t “believe criminal justice should be involved in those types of cases at all.”

He also says he will not prosecute cases of loitering, trespassing, and panhandling, which are often associated with poverty and homelessness. His promise not to prosecute panhandling is remarkable in Broward County, since the Democrat-dominated Fort Lauderdale city government regularly makes national headlines for repeated crackdowns on homeless encampments. In 2014, for example, the city banned  feeding homeless people and then arrested a 90-year-old activist for distributing food.

When it comes to drugs other than marijuana, Kimok says he will keep drug possession cases within the criminal legal system, but steer them toward treatment or diversion programs. This is a more cautious approach than some other progressives who have won recent elections. In Austin, Texas, the likely next district attorney has pledged to not prosecute any cases of drug possession or sale under one gram, for instance. 

Kimok says he opposes cash bail, and the use of financial conditions for pretrial release, for any offense—a position that is less qualified than his opponents’. And he promised to never direct-file any minor into adult court. Under Florida’s direct file statute, prosecutors can unilaterally decide to charge youth as adults. Because of this unchecked power, Florida sends more youth through the adult court system than any other state. Kimok has said a grand jury should be involved if a minor is to be charged as an adult. 

In addition to Sanders’s endorsement, Kimok has earned support from some of Florida’s prominent activist organizations, including Dream Defenders, a civil rights organization that has led many of the state’s marches during the George Floyd uprisings.

Kimok told the Political Report that although his platform may seem radical now, he’s hoping to start remaking the criminal legal system so that his children can live in a drastically different world.

“My son is biracial,” he said. “I just was scared to death to wake up 10 years from now, with him being a teenager, and see us kind of still live in this same criminal legal system we have now.”

The other Democratic candidates are James Lewis, who has promised to put the “ass[es]” of heroin and fentanyl sellers “in jail,” Teresa Fanning-Williams, and David Cannady. All are current and former prosecutors. The Democratic nominee will face Republican Gregg Rossman and independent Sheila Alu in November—and will be heavily favored in a county where Donald Trump received less than  a third of the vote in 2016.

Explore our coverage of other elections for prosecutor nationwide.

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It’s been almost two decades since Mario Smith made a decision he deeply regrets. He was 17 years old and impulsive and had been raised in a home marked by poverty and domestic abuse. One day in August 2001, he was caring for a friend’s 9-month-old daughter, who was agitated and upset. He wanted her to stop crying, so he hit her in the stomach. The baby stopped breathing and died from her injuries. Smith was convicted of felony murder, which carried a mandatory sentence of life without parole. 

As he has grown into an adult in prison, he has reckoned with the pain he caused. 

“If I had three wishes, all three would be to take back what I’ve done,” Smith said in a recent phone call with a criminal justice reform advocate that was shared with The Appeal: Political Report. He has completed all the anger management and other educational programs offered to him by the prison, and he hasn’t had a disciplinary infraction in many years. “I did that not because I was forced to, but because it was a choice that I made in becoming a man,” he said on the call.

Smith was one of more than 350 people in Michigan who were sentenced as children to mandatory life without the possibility of parole when, in 2016, a Supreme Court decision compelled prosecutors to reconsider all such sentences on a case-by-case basis. But prosecutors in Michigan have resisted change. 

Wayne County’s Kym Worthy is one of the prosecutors who have taken a hardline approach. When faced with these juvenile lifers’ resentencing hearings, her office originally recommended that courts reaffirm the life sentence in 43 percent of 144 cases, including Smith’s. 

After running unopposed for over a decade, Worthy is facing a stiff challenge in the Aug. 4 Democratic primary from a criminal defense lawyer who opposes all juvenile life without parole sentences.

Victoria Burton-Harris, Worthy’s first primary challenger since she was appointed in 2004, is campaigning on a promise to end juvenile life in prison. She told the Political Report that she views Worthy’s handling of juvenile lifers, and her repeated claims that she is reviewing the cases, as “cruel and callous.”

In a statement, Worthy told the Political Report that her office has held 95 resentencing hearings for juvenile lifers, and 64 of them have been released.

“My office has been working diligently to ensure that each and every juvenile murderer convicted in Wayne County receives an individualized sentencing hearing,” she said. “We can only go as quickly as the defense and the courts will allow.” 

When Smith’s sentence was up for reconsideration in 2018, Worthy’s office filed a motion seeking a new sentence of life without parole. Smith’s public defender eventually negotiated with Worthy’s office, and Smith agreed to a 30-year minimum settlement, which means he will be locked up until at least 2031. At his resentencing hearing, a judge praised his efforts to rehabilitate himself and said he would be a great asset to his community. 

“My thing is, if I’m a great asset today, why must I wait another 11 years before I’m able to show that?” Smith said in his call with Jacqueline Williams, a program associate with American Friends Service Committee’s Michigan Criminal Justice Program who routinely speaks with incarcerated people and shared recordings of the calls with the Political Report.

Since Smith was sent to die behind bars, the law on the sentencing of children has changed significantly. Based on a growing understanding of children’s brains, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole for minors in 2012. (The Court left the door open for minors to receive life without parole at the discretion of judges, who often listen to prosecutors’ recommendations, in cases that reflect “irreparable corruption” rather than “transient immaturity.”) In 2016, the Court made that decision retroactive, ruling that people who automatically received life without parole sentences as children need to be given a “meaningful opportunity” for release and prompting dozens of states to hold resentencing hearings.

As of last year, nearly 200 of Michigan’s juvenile lifers are still waiting for resentencing. Together, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Louisiana now account for about two-thirds of juvenile life without parole cases, according to the Sentencing Project.

In 2016, when Michigan’s prosecutors had to submit resentencing recommendations, they requested continued life sentences for 66 percent of the state’s juvenile lifers, according to a Detroit Free Press analysis. 

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Worthy’s challenger, Burton-Harris, told the Political Report that, if she were elected prosecutor this year, she would upend the incumbent’s approach. “It is not acceptable, no longer an option, that we resentence to life,” she said.

She said she would make it a priority to bring relief to juvenile lifers and recommend that they be granted a new sentence that would allow for a release. “I’m committed to not just reviewing them but bringing them home,” she said. The only instance in which she would consider resentening to life in prison is if a person has committed new murders in prison while an adult.

Moreover, she said she would also revisit old resentencing cases and in instances where Worthy’s office objected or opposed, she would instruct her prosecutors to change the office’s position. 

“It would be a written policy,” she said. “All cases that have been previously decided need to be reopened and reviewed.” 

If she were at the helm of the DA’s office, her prosecutors would never seek life without the possibility of parole sentences against minors in future cases. “THERE IS NOTHING A CHILD CAN DO TO JUSTIFY DEATH BY INCARCERATION!” she told the Political Report in an email. “We are not the worst thing we’ve ever done, and people age out of crime. Prosecutors have a responsibility to protect our children, ALL children. All people have value.” 

She says she looks forward to advocating for a state law that rules out life without the possibility of parole sentences for children, as 23 states and the District of Columbia have already done.

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When Worthy assumed office in 2004, she became the first Black female county prosecutor in Michigan. Early in her tenure, she gained national recognition as an advocate for justice when she led the prosecution of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. Since then, she has been praised for clearing Wayne County’s backlog of rape kits and securing murder convictions for instances of police brutality. This year, she was endorsed for re-election by prominent figures like Governor Gretchen Whitmer. 

But criminal justice reform advocates have long criticized her stance on locking children up for life. Before the Supreme Court made its decision on mandatory juvenile life sentences retroactive, Worthy argued against it, saying it would force families of crime victims to relive the tragedies. After it became retroactive, she continued to seek life sentences. Even her predecessor, former Wayne County prosecutor John O’Hair, who led the office during a time when 90 minors were locked up for life, has said that after the Supreme Court rulings, “it’s hard to imagine that a prosecutor would blithely seek life sentences again.”

Worthy’s continued desire for life sentences comes despite the known racial disparities in her county’s juvenile lifer population. Although Black people make up roughly 40 percent of Wayne County’s population, more than 90 percent of the people serving juvenile life without parole sentences were Black, according to data from 2016.

Even in cases where her office is seeking resentencing to a term of years, Worthy has been slow to file the motions, saying that the office needed time to review all of the case files, be thorough, and contact the victims. And when questioned, she won’t address the delay, said Rai LaNier, Wayne County director with Michigan Liberation Action Fund, a Michigan Liberation Action Fund, a PAC that advocates for criminal justice reform and has endorsed Burton-Harris

“She does what I like to call crime porn,” Lanier said of Worthy. “As soon as you get her up against the ropes, she wants to tell you about how a 7-year-old laid an iron on somebody. It’s always the details of the case. She hasn’t been willing to address the fact that we have the largest caseload of these LWOP cases [in Michigan].”

“It’s a blatant disregard for the highest court in the land,” Lanier added. 

Machelle Pearson is a juvenile lifer from Washtenaw County who was resentenced and released on parole in 2018 and is now an advocate for reform. She says she worries for others who will not get a fair chance at justice because of prosecutors like Worthy. 

“We want her out of office,” Pearson said. “She feels like she’s been in office so long that she’s untouchable by law, she’s untouchable by the citizens that actually vote her in there.”

As someone who is prevented from voting because he is incarcerated, Smith said Worthy feels even more untouchable.

“Once you are a convicted felon and are serving time in prison, I can no longer vote for Kym Worthy, meaning I’m no longer useful to her,” Smith said in the recording. 

His anger at the legal system is even higher now, as the coronavirus spreads rapidly through prisons across the country. In April, 60-year-old William Garrison, a juvenile lifer who was resentenced and was scheduled to come home from prison in May after nearly 44 years, died of COVID-19 in a state prison. His sister had prepared a room for him in her home and was eagerly awaiting his return.  

“He died during the pandemic because [Worthy] took too long to let him out,” Burton-Harris said. “He died waiting to come home after a decision had been made in his favor.” 

Tina Olson, the Juvenile Lifer Unit manager at the State Appellate Defender Office, said the pandemic has made her office’s representation of juvenile lifers more important than ever. “We feel an added urgency to achieve results for our clients,” she said. 

Smith, who has asthma, said he worries that he will also fall victim to the disease.

“Hopefully we all make it through this,” Smith said. “Unfortunately that’s wishful thinking because there are going to be casualties of this pandemic. Hopefully I have my second chance. I was a former juvenile and they gave me a second chance, but possibly I won’t see it.”

Explore our coverage of 2020 prosecutorial elections throughout the country.

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