In December 2020, on the eve of taking the reins as the district attorney of Los Angeles County, George Gascón was up late trying to make a decision. He’d been elected weeks earlier on promises to change Los Angeles’ approach to criminal punishment, but he was hesitant on how much to shake up the system. “10, 11 o’clock at night, the night before I was being sworn in, I’m looking at two versions of what I’m going to say,” Gascón recalled in a recent interview at his office in Downtown LA. His first speech articulated a more incremental approach, but the more he looked at it, the more he became convinced that it would risk “business as usual.” 

He chose the second speech. 

The following day, Gascón announced a sweeping set of categorical, or ‘blanket’ policies, his office would adopt: no death penalty, no charging minors as adults, no life without parole sentences. Not rarely, or selectively—never, under any circumstances. Perhaps most consequentially, he vowed that prosecutors in his office would not seek enhancements, special circumstances that can add decades to someone’s sentence and affect tens of thousands of cases each year in Los Angeles County. 

Prosecutors are typically reluctant to delineate such clear-cut policies, preferring to protect the boundless discretion of their office. Even those who vow reform tend to merely promise to deprioritize certain practices without ruling anything out. But Gascón told me that it was important for him to draw clear lines in the sand, in part because he knew that he’d be walking into an office whose management team largely opposed his plans. “I wanted to make sure that this was going to be just not a bunch of political promises—this was going to be a real thing,” he said.

Nearly immediately, the new DA found himself under fire, including from staff in his office who bristled at being told not to use some of their regular tools. Almost as quickly, he announced a tweak to his enhancements policy, allowing exceptions for hate crimes and offenses against children and the elderly. And that was just the beginning. Many of the biggest inflection points of Gascón’s first term have revolved around the use of blanket policies: one court battle after his own deputies filed suit claiming that his directive to not seek enhancements violated the law, one protracted media storm involving a case that seemed to challenge the principle of never trying young people as adults, and two fizzled recall attempts by adversaries who said he was neglecting the duties of his office. 

Now, Gascón is defending his seat against 11 challengers, nearly all of whom are running to his right in the March primary. (The top two candidates will head to a November runoff unless someone clears 50 percent of the vote.) Many of his opponents are attacking the very idea that a DA should ever issue categorical policies. In fact, a number of them have contested his approach ever since 2020. The field includes four line prosecutors working in his office, several of whom are highly involved in the union that sued him and one who says she was demoted for questioning his directives; and a former attorney at the firm that filed the lawsuit.

At first glance, blanket policies might seem like an intuitive tool for reform prosecutors because they both embody a clear vision of change and help to enact that vision. “They’re actually very useful, smart policies to implementing what we care about, which is a less racist, more fair system where also we can put more resources into very, very serious cases,” said Jessica Brand, founder of the Wren Collective, a national organization that researches criminal legal policy and helps advise reform prosecutors. 

But Brand said she’s nonetheless hesitant about recommending such policies: “They’re latched onto in these hyper political ways.” Blanket directives like Gascón’s tend to become lightning rods for controversy, especially given that so much of criminal legal policy—and debate around that policy—in the U.S. is defined by the specter of extreme cases. 

One of the most indelible examples of this dynamic in modern American politics happened just across town from the Los Angeles DA’s office.

During a 1988 presidential debate held at UCLA, Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis, a lifelong opponent of the death penalty, was asked if he would change his mind about capital punishment if his own wife, Kitty, were raped and murdered. His immediate answer—that he wouldn’t, given his deeply felt principles on the matter—is widely considered to have harmed his presidential bid; it remains seared in the minds of a generation of political observers, a cautionary tale about the perils of ruling anything out when it comes to criminal punishment.

Over 30 years later, Gascón ran on the gamble that the politics of crime had changed enough for him to rule out quite a bit more than just the death penalty, and he won in 2020 after making blanket promises as part of his campaign pitch. But the ensuing years only raised the stakes of that gamble, leading the DA to hedge in certain ways and double down in others. As he embarks on a difficult reelection campaign, I wanted to understand what Gascón’s tenure has revealed about the politics of transforming prosecution, especially in a place as vast and complex as Los Angeles. How do you set about making big changes to an entrenched system without sparking so much resistance that your ambitions founder? What does it take, in other words, to dispense with business as usual?

To understand why a reform DA would insist on a blanket policy despite the political risks, you first have to understand the status quo they’re fighting against. “This is an arcane system, and it’s not going to go gently and quietly into the night,” Cynthia Roseberry, acting director for the ACLU’s Justice Division and a former public defender, told me. “We’ve got to be bold in our strokes to change it.”

For reform DAs like Gascón, blanket policies are an effort to disengage from practices that they consider simply unconscionable: outdated, racist, overly harsh, or morally dubious. Gascón cites data showing that the death penalty is riven with errors and racial bias. He points to the fact that young people sent into the adult system can spend decades in prison for a mistake they made as a teenager. And he has underscored that sentencing enhancements, a product of the tough-on-crime era, can add many years of incarceration onto whatever baseline punishment has been determined to fit the underlying crime. “Do we send somebody to prison for way beyond their natural life, or do we send them for a period of time where they may be able to redeem themselves and come back?” Gascón asked me.

Blanket policies can put clear guardrails around a DA’s charging decisions, instead of them telling the public: just trust me. If you believe that the state shouldn’t be in the business of taking a life or that young people’s developing brains leave them fundamentally unable to grasp consequences the way an adult can, there’s no sense in judiciously applying the death penalty or charging juveniles as adults, the thinking goes—it simply shouldn’t be done at all. 

“When we think about removing something like enhancements, what we’re also saying is we know that they’ve been used improperly and there’s not a way to correct them in isolation,” said Roseberry. Mona Sahaf, who runs the Vera Institute’s Reshaping Prosecution Initiative, thinks that “it’s a big opportunity to shrink the footprint of the system.” 

Reformers also make the case that prosecutors have had a key role in exacerbating mass incarceration. Discretion is the lifeblood of their trade, but historically, prosecutors have almost always used that freedom to move in one direction—towards harsher punishment, even above and beyond what the law requires. Over and over again, they come down on some people harder than others: 45 percent of people serving a life sentence in California under the Three Strikes law are Black, as Gascón’s enhancements directive noted. Maria Gonzalez, the legal clinic coordinator at Los Angeles’ Youth Justice Coalition, has a loved one doing 100 years on an enhancement case. “That life is done. It’s gone,” she told me flatly. 

Other prosecutors who say that they share Gascon’s opinions about the death penalty, or that sentencing enhancements are broken, still prefer to say they’ll assess each case on its own, rather than draw a clear line in the sand. But to organizers like Melina Abdullah, a leader of Black Lives Matter’s Los Angeles chapter, this is just a way “to not make any commitments.” 

“You can’t just make decisions on a case-by-case basis,” she told me. “You have to have a set of legal principles that you adhere to.”

After all, DAs aren’t running around trying cases themselves—rather, they oversee large offices of deputies responsible for the day-to-day work of prosecution, who can easily ignore vague principles from up top. In fact, given that the professional norms of prosecutors tilt towards punitive sentencing, reform prosecutors have found themselves undermined by staff resistant to carrying out their changes. 

Announcing blanket policies, then, is a way for reform DAs like Gascón to use the power they do have to limit the power of their own office, and to tie the hands of the vast bureaucracies they oversee. Prosecutors don’t have the ability to directly stop police from racially profiling young men of color, or to edit the penal code, or to rectify the socioeconomic inequalities that can lead to gang involvement. What they can do is order their own staff to stop using gang enhancements. 

Or can they? Less than one month after Gascón took office, his line prosecutors took him to court, contending that his enhancements directive was forcing them to break the law. Legislators passed the STEP act, which established sentencing enhancements for gang affiliation, and Californians approved a “three strikes and you’re out” sentencing scheme; the lawsuit argued it simply wasn’t in Gascón’s power to forbid his deputies from using those tools. Gascón replied that voters elected him to upend the status quo, and that his role allowed him to direct his own staff. 

In February 2021, a judge ruled that Gascón did not have the authority to bar his prosecutors from seeking enhancements for prior strikes, or serious felony charges. As long as California’s “three strikes” law was on the books, it wasn’t up to him whether to enforce it. But the judge’s decision did leave him free to bar his prosecutors from seeking other forms of enhancements in new cases. Gascón argues that this ruling wasn’t a major blow to his plans because it only affected a share of enhancement cases.

“Quite frankly, it’s a very small piece, not only of the policy, but of the work,” he told me. At that point in 2021, the bulk of his vision remained intact. 

The backlash to blanket policies is politically and geographically contingent. In red states, even the appearance of one has led to preemption or removal by state officials, meaning that DAs trying to do things differently are often forced to be a bit cagier about their plans, while prosecutors in blue states tend to have more leeway. 

In 2017, Orlando’s prosecutor, Aramis Ayala, was taken off some high-profile murder cases by the Florida governor after she announced she would never seek the death penalty. In San Francisco, meanwhile, former DA Chesa Boudin encountered comparatively tepid criticism for his ban on death penalty cases, in part because two predecessors—Gascón and Kamala Harris—had already paved the way. “It was well within the heartland of San Francisco politics,” Boudin, who now runs UC Berkeley’s Criminal Law and Justice Center, told me. 

In liberal Los Angeles, Gascón’s death penalty ban has also not been seriously contested, even though the county lacks the precedent that San Francisco had; his predecessor, Jackie Lacey, was notorious for her embrace of capital punishment, and helped make LA County one of the nation’s leading counties in handing out death sentences. But Gascón went further. By attempting to address lengthy sentences for people who commit violent crimes, he struck what has long been a third rail in reform debates, even among people who agree that mass incarceration is a problem: questioning very lengthy sentences for people who commit violent crimes. 

The U.S. has often fashioned its approach to punishment in direct reaction to especially heinous or high-profile crimes—California’s ‘three strikes’ law, for instance, was motivated by the abduction and murder of nine-year-old Polly Klaas—and these crimes have animated debates around sentencing policy in a more ambient way, too. We have no shortage of infamous cases to draw from—serial killers, mass murderers, bizarre cases like Charles Manson or the Unabomber—and these people tend to loom very large in the popular imagination, even as they represent a microscopic percentage of Americans who commit crimes. This has meant that extreme outcomes—sentences of decades or even hundreds of years—have become commonplace, far more so than the extreme offender they were initially designed for. 

Today the specter of the “worst of the worst” continues to haunt criminal legal debate, often putting politicians who favor major policy upheavals on the defensive, like Dukakis answering Bernard Shaw’s question in 1988 in front of tens of millions of Americans. This is particularly fraught within the juvenile justice system, where the increasingly popular slogan that we should treat children as children, in accordance with newer research showing that brain development continues into the mid-20s, exists alongside the possibility of truly extreme cases. 

In Sahaf’s time working with reform prosecutors at Vera, she has observed that “it’s very difficult to make an absolute pledge never to charge a child as an adult and then carry through on it, because you see these exceptions happen…children do sometimes commit really atrocious crimes.” And eventually just such a case would land on Gascón’s desk: Hannah Tubbs. 

Tubbs’s case seemed to span the gamut of aggravating factors: here was someone who had sexually assaulted a child in a restaurant bathroom stall less than a year before turning 18, who was 26 by the time she was caught and facing punishment, who had already racked up an extensive criminal record, and who mocked the victim and expressed no remorse. “Nothing is ever unique, but it was as close to unique as you could [get],” Gascón told me. But he added that there were mitigating circumstances, too. His commitment to keeping the case in the juvenile system led to internal clashes, and then public opprobrium after jailhouse recordings of calls between Tubbs and her father were leaked to Fox News. 

“This clearly shows you the dangerous aspect of the blanket policies of George Gascón,” Jonathan Hatami, a prosecutor in the DA’s office and frequent critic who’s now running against him, told the LA Times—which, along with other local media, covered the case extensively. 

Facing the biggest fracas of his tenure, Gascón announced in February 2022 that he would alter his directives on life without parole sentences and charging juveniles as adults: instead of total bans, he was establishing two committees to consider “extraordinary” cases that might merit such special circumstances. Each committee would be staffed by three senior advisors, including one who publicly stated she didn’t agree with his about-face.

This approach, his office said, would “create a different pathway for outlier cases, while simultaneously creating protections to prevent these exceptions from becoming the rule.”

These tweaks may seem minor, since “extraordinary” cases are by definition rare and since Gascón created a structured process to evaluate them. But to some, their vague quality signaled a worrisome retreat from the principles the DA had run and won on. 

For the ACLU’s Roseberry and local advocates like those at the Youth Justice Coalition, even one minor charged as an adult is one too many. “The idea that we would approach them in any respect as irredeemable is a frightening prospect,” said Roseberry. “These children come to us having been shaped by circumstances and environments that are beyond their control.”

Other reform DAs have tried for a similar balance as Gascón: Boudin’s sentencing directive in San Francisco, for instance, created a presumption against enhancements but left room for them in “extraordinary circumstances,” as long as he or a deputy signed off. “From a legal standpoint, we were on stronger ground by writing into the policy discretion to make exceptions,” he told me. (Boudin did maintain a blanket prohibition against charging juveniles as adults throughout his two and a half years in office.) 

Still, Youth Justice Coalition communications director Emilio Zapién stressed that using edge cases to guide criminal legal policy making is destructive to the chances of the young people the Youth Justice Coalition works with. “For every really horrific case, like the one you’re talking about, the Tubbs case, there are 15 to 20 others [that show] transformation,” he told me. 

Zapién added that he found the whole debate around Tubbs to be cynical: “The folks that are arguing for more criminalization and incarceration of young people of color after the mainstream media sensationalizes one case as a political tactic… those folks already had those beliefs before.” 

At the time of the Tubbs case, Gascón had already weathered one recall campaign motivated by aspects of his categorical policies. One of the public faces of the recall was a woman, Desiree Andrade, whose son Julian had been brutally murdered. Under Lacey, his killers faced the death penalty or life without parole; once Gascón took office, those options were off the table. The words “Gascon [sic] REFUSES to prosecute juveniles as adults under any circumstances, even rape, murder or other heinous crimes, even if days shy of turning 18” were front and center on the campaign’s website. 

That recall attempt imploded after organizers failed to garner enough money or signatures–but they swore they’d be back, and some recall proponents took up the Tubbs case as a rallying cry. The second recall campaign that resulted also fizzled out about a year later. Ironically, it’s been the intensity of the opposition to Gascón, more than anything else, that has vindicated what many of his allies have said all along: prosecution is political.

Now the energy behind those efforts has been channeled into the upcoming election, with a number of Gascón’s loudest critics and recall supporters returning to run against him.

Nathan Hochman, a former Republican candidate for California attorney general, writes on his campaign website that Gascón’s blanket directives “demonstrate distrust in his prosecutors” and promises to restore prosecutorial discretion. His website names the elimination of blanket policies as a crucial component in his “blueprint for justice.” 

John McKinney, a prosecutor in the DA’s office, said at an October debate that he’d “repeal and replace” every directive Gascón announced on his inauguration day. Hatami, the frequent critic, has said that “blanket policies should all be revoked,” telling Los Angeles Daily News “I believe in discretion.” Eric Siddall, another prosecutor in Gascón’s office and the former vice president of the deputy DA union, has also vowed to make the issues targeted by most of Gascón’s blanket policies subject to a “case-by-case analysis” instead. Maria Ramirez, yet another prosecutor in the office, has used similar language. 

I reached out to the campaigns of a handful of the candidates for their thoughts on blanket policies. None responded by the article’s deadline. Jeff Chemerinsky’s campaign reached out after publication to say that Chemerinsky, a former federal prosecutor, would never seek the death penalty as DA, but that he would eschew other blanket directives.

Siddall, who has also insisted he is not opposed to progressive reform while criticizing Gascón for taking a “defendant-centered approach,” has made the same key concession to Gascón’s model, vowing to forgo the death penalty. Other candidates, meanwhile, have not ruled it out. It may not be to his advantage, but Gascón’s blanket policies set the terms of the debate.

Gascón has made more than a few political calculations of his own over his three years in office. As he approaches his first reelection test in March, he has kept in place some of his initial blanket directives, like his commitment to never seek the death penalty. During the tenure of his predecessor Lacey, 22 people were sentenced to death in LA, all of them people of color, but Gascón has never tried. His administration has also worked to resentence people who are already on death row to life without parole; his office told me it has secured that change for 29 people as of this week.

Meanwhile, the DA has altered some directives to define a process for considering “exceptional” cases, while preserving the central presumption of the policy. He has walked farther back from others, maintaining the goal of avoiding certain enhancements but without clear guidelines. And he’s been barred by the courts from pursuing still others. 

This convoluted landscape reflects Gascón’s concessions to his critics from the right, to be sure. But his case to progressives has also evolved: His record shows, he argues, that blanket policies altered by carve-outs can also accomplish his decarceral goals. “Do I think this has made a difference?” he asked me when we spoke. “I think it’s made a tremendous difference.”

Gascón softened his blanket prohibition against charging minors as adults, for instance, but this has not opened the floodgates to adult prosecutions.

As a result of his original policy, Gascón said that hundreds of teenagers per year who might otherwise have been sent to an adult prison are now being treated in the juvenile system. To Gonzalez, who spends her days in court advocating for young people on behalf of the Youth Justice Coalition, the change has been palpable. 

“LA County has made so much progress on helping our youth,” she said. “I’ve seen young people be under diversion and continue to go to school, graduate from school. Last year, we had two graduates that could have easily just been in a cell.” (Like her colleague Zapien, Gonzalez disagrees with Gascón’s decision to modify this policy).

Since Gascón modified his blanket prohibition in February 2022, the Juvenile Alternative Charging Committee had recommended that ten cases be transferred to adult court, according to the DA’s office. In the first transfer hearing to take place, the judge, J. Christopher Smith, actually overrode the committee, ruling that the teenage defendant wasn’t beyond rehabilitation and noting that he had cognitive deficiencies and a history of childhood abuse. The ruling echoed Gascón’s initial absolute commitment to the possibility of personal transformation even in cases where a young defendant had done something heinous; in doing so, Smith brought into sharper relief Gascón’s decision to retreat from that principle. 

Gascón told me that he actually agreed with the judge’s decision. But he also defended his office’s charging committee, saying they may have been influenced by the gravity of the crime, a double murder, and invoking the value of outsourcing these evaluations to an independent body. “I gave the committees full freedom to decide,” he told me. 

Separately, he called it “affirming” that state law had nearly caught up to his December 2020 blanket policy: In 2022, the California legislature raised the bar to try minors as adults, reflecting the changing consensus on juvenile culpability. (Gascón wrote a letter in support of that effort).  

Similarly, Gascón set up a charging committee tasked with determining whether a case merits a possible sentence of life without parole, and this committee has given prosecutors the go-ahead to seek that sentence some 23 times since February 2022, according to information gathered on the DA’s website. The office has applied a “special circumstances” enhancement, which requires a sentence of life without parole in the event of a conviction, in two recent high-profile and especially gruesome cases: a man who allegedly serially targeted and killed homeless people, and the son of a famous Hollywood agent who is accused of killing and dismembering his wife and her elderly parents. 

Gascón may have gotten what he wanted out of these cases: They are being widely covered in local media, but seemingly no one has invoked them in order to criticize the DA for being soft on crime. By opening the door to some life without parole sentence in high-profile instances, the DA had perhaps freed himself up to avoid that sentence in the vast majority of cases with far less scrutiny or blowback.

But just how far can he take this approach? The judge who ruled on the deputy prosecutors’ lawsuit in 2021 gave Gascón carte blanche to maintain his initial blanket policy barring other sorts of new enhancements—special allegations that would add on extra time for gang involvement or the presence of a weapon, for example. The DA’s office says it has maintained a blanket prohibition on gang enhancements. 

But on gun enhancements, Gascón has retreated from his initial categorical policy in a murkier way. In November, he told me that his office had been adding gun enhancements on a case-by-case basis, allowing line prosecutors to seek them if they get management approval.  

“We are selectively using those enhancements but it’s being done, again, much more thoughtfully,” Gascón said. 

I later asked Gascón’s chief of staff, Tiffiny Blacknell, why Gascón retreated from this blanket policy voluntarily. “It’s reasonable that there should be some exceptions to some of these directives, with the exception of the death penalty,” she said, adding that the DA had over time erected a management structure that he trusted to carry out his vision. “We’re using a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.” The office does not have a written policy governing when it’s appropriate for prosecutors to seek these enhancements. Blacknell said bureau directors make the final decision based on factors such as the severity of the crime and past criminal history. 

On this front at least, the DA’s current stance sounds a lot more like the “case-by-case” rhetoric of his challengers. This risks a return to the starting point that local progressives hoped to get away from: just trust me, I’m the one who can use this tool wisely. 

And that argument, Gonzalez said, wouldn’t slide with the people who elected him in the first place. “The community is bigger than the pushback he’s getting right now,” she told me. “The community is gonna stand up and say, ‘I don’t believe you.’”

Gascón says it’s easy to distinguish his commitment to reform from opponents who only pay lip service to it during campaign season, pointing to his record in office.

For organizers who work closely on policing, prisons, and sentencing in Los Angeles, there is a continuous need to decide whether they buy the DA’s revised case for change. Are his carve-outs a strategically savvy response to the backlash, or are they a retreat to punitive conventions? What’s the line between preserving some space for extraordinary cases and mirroring old paradigms of boundless prosecutorial discretion? In that ongoing assessment, many are balancing their frustration over Gascón’s walkbacks with an awareness of what he’s up against—what it takes to change an intractable system under the ever-present specter of Michael Dukakis. 

“I’m never a fan of a prosecutor because I think the system is fundamentally set up against Black and brown and Indigenous and poor people,” Abdullah told me. But she noted that the DA has pursued goals she sees as critical, including prosecuting law enforcement officers who engage in violence or corruption. “I think what he’s demonstrated is that chipping away at unjust systems can be helpful as we work towards transformation.” Gascón is walking a tightrope, she said: “How do you hold on to the principles that you say you believe in without losing your seat? And how do you balance the two?”

“Someone like me, I don’t believe in life without the possibility of parole. I don’t believe in ever trying a child as an adult,” Abdullah said. “But again, I’m not running for prosecutor.” 

This article has been updated with a response, received after publication, from the campaign of Jeff Chemerinsky on his policy views.

The post Under the Shadow of the Extreme Case 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.

Their goal was to end the criminal prosecution of children under age 13 in Colorado, where, The Denver Post has reported, close to 1,000 kids that young are arrested annually. Colorado children as young as 10 are liable to face criminal charges—and then, often, plunge into prolonged cycles of contact with the court system—sometimes for minor actions like snapping a classmate’s bra strap or getting into a schoolyard tussle.

Three lawmakers—all women of color representing Denver—tried last year to shield preteens from prosecution and divert them to community programs outside the carceral system. Their proposal derailed amid law enforcement opposition and what its proponents saw as an unwillingness to hear out communities of color where children are most vulnerable to arrest. Heading into 2023, the coalition amended its approach: Two of the women who sponsored last year’s version stepped back, and in their place the group recruited three new male sponsors, two of them white Republicans. 

“We kind of had this idea that we can’t have only women of color dying on these hills again,” says Representative Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez, the only lawmaker who stayed on as a prime sponsor both years. “We think that led to not being able to get it across the finish line, us having to validate our experience.”

Senator Cleave Simpson, one of the new Republican sponsors, says he was initially hesitant but was convinced to push for alternatives to criminal punishment for children that young. “To think about 10-, 11-, 12-year-old kids ending up in handcuffs,” he told Bolts, “I haven’t been touched like that by a policy conversation before.”

As the backers’ strategy changed, so did Colorado’s political landscape. Defying expectations of a red wave, voters in November instead strengthened Democrats’ control of Colorado’s state government, re-electing Governor Jared Polis in a blowout, expanding his party’s margins in both houses of the legislature, and further undercutting a diminished GOP’s ability to block progressive change. Heading into the 2023 session, the state’s Black and Latino legislative caucuses each identified the youth prosecution bill as formal priorities, more than 60 organizations signed on in support, and the coalition backing the bill held more than 100 meetings with people and groups invested in the topic, Gonzales-Gutierrez told Bolts. 

Despite these favorable conditions, HB 1249 sputtered once more. It was gutted in the last days of the session and rewritten without most of its teeth. Lawmakers again declined to raise the minimum prosecution age, this time replacing the heart of the proposal with provisions for more funding to local social service providers and more data collection on post-arrest outcomes for children. 

The neutered bill was sent to the governor’s desk, where it still sits. Even its sponsors don’t see that as much of a win. 

“We’d checked all the boxes,” Gonzales-Gutierrez told Bolts. “We made it bipartisan. We had hundreds of stakeholding meetings. We met with DAs, who weren’t willing to give us substantial feedback. They said, ‘We don’t want to do this.’ From pretty early on, the governor’s office was in opposition; they wouldn’t even provide technical feedback. Everything was just a no.”

Dafna Gozani, an attorney with the National Center for Youth Law who helped advocate for the Colorado bill, echoed the disappointment. “Everybody forgets we’re talking about fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-graders,” she said. “It’s perplexing, particularly when you have a Democratic Party that runs on a platform of social justice.” 

The record of the 2023 legislative session in Colorado, which ended May 8, has led to profound frustration—boiling into public view—from more progressive-leaning lawmakers and state advocates who regret missed opportunities to pass headlining liberal policies.

Democratic legislation to allow cities to establish safe drug-use sites or rent control programs failed, as did proposals to ban assault weapons and install new protections for gig economy workers. Earlier this month, in the session’s final days, a pro-tenant bill meant to thwart evictions in which landlords haven’t proved cause to evict withered alongside a bill to study the idea of moving Colorado to single-payer health care system. 

Even when a bill makes it past the legislature, Polis’ pen can loom as an uncertain hurdle. The governor vetoed a bill last week that would have offered more transparency to people applying for executive clemency, helping them navigate the process even without attorneys.

Liberals did have reasons to celebrate as the legislature adopted some noteworthy policies they’d championed, including bills to strengthen protections for abortion and gender-affirming care, plus four gun-control policies. Criminal justice reformers also won passage of a law intended to help protect children from being tricked by law enforcement in police interrogations. 

Still, Representative Javier Mabrey, a newly-elected progressive, faults his party for doing less with more. “I think people know what they’re getting when they’re voting for Democrats: They’re going to do things for renters, do things to help working people, to fight for communities of color,” he told Bolts. He regrets that his party chose instead to frequently preserve the status quo. 

Gonzales-Gutierrez concurs: “It’s just a lot of the same.”

For reform bills this year, the Senate was the primary graveyard. Democrats there have many votes to spare, having expanded their majority since the last session by three seats to 23-12, but some of their senators resisted progressive priorities.

The youth prosecution bill passed the House but, in the frenzy of session’s end, its sponsors learned that they had lost too many Democrats to push it through the Senate; only one Senate Republican, Simpson, was willing to cross over in support. Several Capitol sources told Bolts that the governor was quietly threatening a veto while the bill was still intact. Simpson said he believes this made several lawmakers nervous they would “stick out their necks for nothing.” 

A Polis spokesperson told Bolts that the governor is still reviewing the bill before signing it, but that his concerns “were shared during the legislative process and were largely addressed by the sponsors and proponents.” The spokesperson declined to answer questions about Polis’ specific concerns. Opponents of the bill argued that diverting to social service providers would not be appropriate for serious offenses—ahead of the session, sponsors amended it to carve out homicide cases—and that the juvenile system is already equipped to provide services to preteens.

In another instance, HB 1202, which would have allowed the opening of Colorado’s first safe drug-use site, passed the House before dying in a Senate committee. Following that vote, progressive Senator Julie Gonzales said it was “incredibly disappointing” to see a public health response to overdoses falter despite “the broadest majorities that this state has seen in a generation.” 

Most Republicans opposed those reforms, but the GOP was largely relegated to spectatorship this session, watching intra-Democratic strife settle the fate of key legislation. Republicans are just one Senate seat away from superminority status in both chambers. “It’s always darkest before the dawn, but the problem is you don’t know when the dawn is going to come,” Republican Senate Minority Leader Paul Lundeen told Bolts. 

And many progressives believe that Democratic leaders followed their November romp by building infrastructure within the legislature to thwart progressive change. They cried foul on committee design weeks before lawmaking ever began.

In one instance, Dylan Roberts, a former prosecutor with a lengthy record of siding with law enforcement and Republicans to oppose bold criminal justice reforms, was named as one of the three Democrats on the state Senate’s Judiciary committee. With no vote to spare on any legislation opposed by the panel’s two Republicans, this arrangement seemed to virtually doom key legislation that Roberts did not support and alarmed reformers from the session’s outset, as Bolts reported in January.

On that committee, Roberts helped weaken, through amendments, bills to limit local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement and to examine the cost of policing and incarcerating drug activity in Colorado, among other legislation. Roberts played a decisive role in sinking the rent control bill when he sided with Republicans in committee.

And Judiciary was not the only chokehold, Mabrey says. He complains that the design of numerous Senate committees, including Appropriations and Finance, forced Democratic lawmakers to repeatedly cut into their own bills based on the opposition of centrists.

Steve Fenberg, the Senate’s Democratic president and a close ally to Polis, told Bolts there was no concerted effort by party leaders to thwart progressive policy. 

“Nothing was done to set up roadblocks,” he said. “Why would I do that? I’m a Democrat. I consider myself a progressive. I’m the leader of my caucus. Why would I do something that inherently tries to block my members’ priorities?”

Committee design came organically, he said, adding that members requested assignments based on their own backgrounds and interests, and that leadership did its best to accommodate them.

Fenberg said it’s irresponsible to read very far into the size of Democrats’ majorities. “I think people assume there’s 23 [Democrats in the Senate] and therefore they can pass anything they want,” he said. “We forget this sometimes, but people make decisions based on policy, and some of these bills didn’t have the support from what I would call progressive members of our caucus.  

“It shouldn’t just be, ‘Oh, we have this many Democrats, therefore any Democrat bill gets passed.’ I actually think that would be bad.”

Speaker Julie McCluskie, a moderate Democrat who leads the state House, echoes Fenberg’s assessment and says Democrats must continue at least trying to work with Republicans.

“We were each elected from our districts, and while the Democrats have a supermajority [in the House], I believe to my core that if we are going to craft lasting policy for this state we have an obligation and responsibility to hear from our own caucus, our Republican colleagues and from our districts,” McCluskie told Bolts. “I know that there were many Republicans that worked in a bipartisan way.” 

Steph Vigil, a Democrat who flipped a Colorado Springs House seat in November to become the first queer lawmaker from the red bastion of El Paso County, disagrees with legislative leaders and hopes they change their approach. “I respect the love for the institution to want it to be that way, but I think we’re dealing with some truly genocidal people,” said Vigil, pointing to racist and transphobic rhetoric and legislation from the GOP. 

“People asked us for something, they asked for us to be bold,” Vigil added. “You’re not here to make friends with people who wish you harm.”

But Fenberg cautions against his party going too far, too quickly. “Don’t underestimate what infighting and controversies within our own party can do,” he said. “If the Republicans want to get control, they have to get their shit together. … If we don’t get our shit together and we go down a path of polarization in our own party, that speeds up the process for Republicans.”

As lawmakers tried to keep the youth prosecution bill intact in the session’s final weeks, they were also pushing for HB 1042, a related bill meant to prevent police from lying to children during interrogations in order to secure information or guilty pleas. Deceitful interrogations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions across the country, including in Colorado, the National Registry of Exonerations has found. 

When a previous version of HB 1042 derailed last year, Roberts was a rare Democrat to oppose it. So when he was promoted ahead of the session to being the swing vote on the Senate’s Judiciary Committee, reformers immediately sweated their proposal, and Roberts confirmed their fears in January when he told Bolts that he would oppose it again barring substantial amendments. From January to April, its sponsors agreed to a slew of changes that loosened the bill; they reluctantly signed off an amendment allowing for information or confessions obtained through deceitful interrogations to still be used against children in certain court settings, like hearings to determine bond or whether a child should be removed from their home. 

The bill’s backers also tried to make their effort seem less adversarial toward law enforcement, no longer using words like “lying” or “deception” in their marketing of the bill.

The changes were ultimately sufficient for the District Attorneys’ Council, a historically influential body that lobbies on behalf of state prosecutors, to drop its opposition, and for Roberts to support the bill. HB 1042 passed the legislature in April, and Polis—who, lawmakers say, was earlier quietly threatening a veto—signed it into law last week.

Progressive lawmakers have cheered passage of this bill, as the amended version remains closer to their original intent, in contrast to the youth prosecution bill. Still, they say even this victory came with more concessions than it should have, given the nature of the issue and Democrats’ enormous structural advantage, weakening the bill’s potential to shield kids from duplicitous tactics. 

Gozani, the youth justice attorney, was incarcerated in Colorado as a child. She says the experience was “traumatizing and incredibly damaging” and regrets that in the two decades since then, Colorado’s approach to youth has remained largely similar, and punitive. 

She hoped that HB 1249, the preteen prosecution bill, would chip into that system. After its clipping, Gozani isn’t sure if the coalition behind it will run their proposal again next year. With no legislative election this fall and the same Capitol leadership structure expected in 2024, it’s hard for reformers in this and other policy spaces to envision how exactly they achieve victory. 

Gozani has found that, regardless of partisanship, it’s difficult to convince people who never have experienced the juvenile system, or whose children never have, of the need to make that system less punishing. 

“A lot of folks have the luxury of never having to interact with the justice system,” she said. “For them, it’s very comfortable to continue a status quo that is extremely damaging.”

The post ‘Everything Was Just a No’: Progressives Frustrated After Colorado Legislative Session appeared first on Bolts.

Allegheny County hasn’t operated a facility dedicated to youth incarceration since then, and instead has shipped kids to detention centers in other counties and sometimes even outside the state, while also implementing more at-home supervision like ankle monitors. 

Heading into Tuesday’s election for county executive, which could determine the future of youth detention in the Pittsburgh region, social workers and reform advocates who’ve worked closely with Allegheny County kids are imploring the leading candidates to reject any new youth jail and to support alternatives that keep kids in their homes and communities. 

“We want as few young people out of their homes as possible,” Sara Goodkind, a professor of social work at the University of Pittsburgh who co-authored a broad report about Shuman last year, told Bolts. “We know through decades of research that youth detention is associated with increases in recidivism, decreased chances of graduating high school and an increased chance of being arrested as an adult.”

The outgoing county executive, Rich Fitzgerald, cannot run for re-election. In February he announced his intent to “re-establish a county-run facility, or to create a public-private partnership” for juvenile detention in Allegheny County, but has not revealed any plan or proposed timeline since then. Fitzgerald’s successor will have a four-year term and will be instrumental in whatever happens next, as they will inherit broad power over contracts, administrative appointments, and capital budgeting for any potential new or repurposed facility.

The candidates looking to replace him have signaled they’d take the county in different directions. Two of the Democrats who lead in polling, John Weinstein and Michael Lamb, say Shuman should be reopened, though with structural improvements to the building, either for the long term or until the county can replace it with a better facility. 

A third frontrunner in the Democratic primary, Sara Innamorato, a progressive lawmaker who led the field in one public survey last week, has taken a more open stance, questioning whether the county really needs a juvenile lockup.

The Democratic primary victor will face Republican Joe Rockey, who declined to be interviewed for this story but who, according to the Pittsburgh radio station WESA, also believes the county must reopen a youth detention facility. He faces steep odds in this strongly Democratic area in the November general election, polling far behind his potential opponents.

Like the ongoing debates over the adult criminal legal system’s disproportionate impact on Black neighborhoods in this highly segregated area, the varying proposals for youth incarceration carry particularly high stakes for Black children and families in Allegheny County. The ACLU of Pennsylvania found that Black students grades 5-12 in Allegheny County were arrested at nearly nine times the rate of white students during the 2018-2019 school year, and that Allegheny County arrested students at more than double the statewide rate and nearly four times the rate in Philadelphia. 

As of Wednesday, 31 kids 17 or younger were incarcerated in the Allegheny County Jail, the adult facility, according to county reports. Twenty-eight of them were Black.

Weinstein, the Allegheny County Treasurer and one of the leading candidates in the Democratic primary for county executive, believes that closing Shuman sent a signal that children can commit crimes without threat of punishment. Youth gun violence has increased dramatically since 2020 in the area, and local police have pointed to examples of children sent home after being arrested and accused of violent acts.

“Kids are not stupid. They know there’s no Shuman Center and they’ll push the envelope,” Weinstein told Bolts. “There’s no fear now.” 

He continued, “The police officers know this. I’ve talked to judges, and they’re unbelievably frustrated by it. Even if they’re putting ankle bracelets on, the kids go out and commit the crimes with the bracelet on.”

Weinstein called for reopening Shuman with more mental health staff and workforce training than previously existed there.

“We’re gonna rebrand it, totally revamp it,” he said.

Lamb, the Pittsburgh City Controller and another leader in Democratic primary polling, says that Shuman likely needs to reopen, albeit maybe only in the near-term until Allegheny County can find a better facility to house children accused of violent crimes, like assault. 

“First and foremost, I do believe we need a center for juvenile detention,” Lamb told Bolts. He said it’s important that any new center not look or feel like a traditional jail—like Shuman, with its sally port entry, intake station, and cells with concrete floors, metal toilets, and skinny windows. 

Lamb criticized the current practice of shipping kids to other detention centers up to a three-hour drive away from Pittsburgh, but also said he wanted Allegheny County to make space to house children accused of crimes in some of the 55 out of 67 Pennsylvania counties that currently don’t have their own youth detention centers. According to a state report, the percentage of children detained more than 100 miles from home increased tenfold between 2012 and 2021, from 2 percent to 19 percent. 

Goodkind said she worries some county officials are too focused on how the next center should be designed.

“My concern is these proposals to build a fancy, new, kinder, gentler youth detention center,” she said. “I think we need a vision of a world where youth incarceration is obsolete. And to get there, we can’t be focusing on our efforts to have a better detention center.” 

Tammy Hughes, a school psychologist and professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, said officials don’t have to strain to imagine a world in which kids who break the law aren’t incarcerated. As in other states, many Pennsylvania counties have recently gotten rid of juvenile detention centers in favor of more home confinement or other in-the-community options. Fifteen juvenile detention centers around the state closed between 2006 and 2021, the state reported.

Hughes pointed out that non-white kids are referred to the juvenile justice system more often even though white youth often commit crimes at similar rates.

“This place really leans into punishing Black and brown kids,” Hughes said. “This starts in preschool. We see three-year-olds in our clinic, expelled for ripping papers off the wall, for noncompliance, talking back, not listening. That’s an application of rules gone awry. That’s ‘zero tolerance.’ But with white kids we give a lot of grace, like, ‘I know I made mistakes when I was 14.’”

Innamorato, a state Representative, is the only leading candidate in the Democratic primary for county executive who isn’t convinced Allegheny County needs to re-open Shuman or replace it with another detention center. She hasn’t committed to opening any particular facility, but says if the county does re-establish one under her watch, it would need to be non-carceral. She told Bolts that even children accused of violent crimes should not be held in traditional jail cells.

“I’m really trying to separate the two conversations,” she said. “We tend to talk about Shuman Center as a building that is there and should be repurposed and so what is it going to be? I want to flip that conversation and say, ‘What do our young people need so they don’t end up in a detention facility?’”

Innamorato told Bolts that the University of Pittsburgh research project Goodkind co-authored, titled “Post-Shuman Visioning,” was foundational to her current views on juvenile crime and detention in the county. In the absence of any firm plan for the future of youth detention in the county, Goodkind said, her team saw an opportunity to center the experiences of children who had been previously jailed inside Shuman. When asked about their time at Shuman, they overwhelmingly said they wished for more counseling and therapy, with specific resources for those who had experienced sexual violence and other forms of trauma. They asked for more structured activities, training in financial literacy and education on their own legal rights, and more opportunities to connect with their families. One child told the researchers that Shuman was a place that “grooms kids for crime, not healing.”

Innamorato told Bolts, “If we aren’t intentional about the way that we’re architecting this system moving forward, we’re going to continue to put kids through a system that hurts them further, and then put them out in the world where they don’t have access to resources. And we expect them to thrive?”

If Innamorato wins and charts a new path that doesn’t involve replacing Shuman with another youth lockup, it would build on other victories for criminal justice reformers in western Pennsylvania. In 2021, voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative to ban solitary confinement in Allegheny County, although the county’s adult jail has continued the practice. That same year, Pittsburgh elected Ed Gainey mayor after he ran on a platform of racial justice; local police accountability advocates say they have confidence in him. Other elections next week could change the course of the criminal legal system in Allegheny County: in addition to key county council races, the county’s longtime and punitive district attorney faces a public defender who has secured key endorsements and appears viable.

People who have worked with kids in Shuman and in similar settings told Bolts that next week’s election could signal another turning point for youth detention in Allegheny County. Jeff Shook, a professor of social work at the University of Pittsburgh, said that he’s urging whoever wins to prioritize community investments that aren’t based in punishment and incarceration.

“If you invest in health care, people do better, and you have less crime,” Shook said. “If you invest in education, young people do better, and there’s less crime. We need to raise wages. We need to think about what the pathway is to good jobs, to jobs that are sustainable and promote wellbeing. I think those are the conversations we should be having, as opposed to asking, ‘What kind of center should we build?’”

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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.

The Democratic leadership appointed Dylan Roberts, an incoming state senator who built a voting record that was often hostile to reform legislation while a state representative, to the Senate Judiciary Committee, a powerful body that reviews and can kill bills that touch on the criminal legal system.

The committee will have three Democrats and two Republicans this session, putting Roberts in the likely position of a deciding swing vote on legislation that would reshape law enforcement, prosecution and incarceration. The panel, little-watched by the public and typically known for its long, esoteric legal debates, could become the graveyard of Democrats’ reform agenda.

Roberts told Bolts that he will approach criminal justice issues much like he did in the House. Last year, he was the only Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee to vote against Senate Bill 23 to stop police from lying to children during interrogations in order to obtain information or secure guilty pleas, and House Bill 1131, which would have raised the minimum age for children to face criminal prosecution from 10 to 13. The former bill passed the Senate but fizzled dramatically on the House floor at the end of the session; the latter was gutted, replaced with a task force meant to explore the change.

The proposals were part of a years-long effort by advocates and some Democratic lawmakers to make Colorado law less punishing of young people, and the legislators who championed those bills say they’ll try again in 2023. But Roberts told Bolts that he stands by his votes. Barring substantial amendments, he said, he would not vote for either if and when they are reintroduced, which would be enough to doom them in committee in their intended forms. 

Colorado’s session opens Jan. 9 and runs until May. After gaining seven seats in November, Democrats now enjoy majorities of 23 to 12 in the Senate and 46 to 19 in the House, and so they will have many votes to spare when bills make it to the chamber floors. But they would have much less room for error in the Senate Judiciary Committee, as currently designed. Roberts’s opposition, for instance, would block the version of SB 23 that passed the Senate last year. (The other two Democrats on the committee are generally reliable progressives, while the two Republicans have seldom been open to progressive legislation.)

House Assistant Majority Leader Jennifer Bacon, who sponsored SB 23 and HB 1131 last session, told Bolts that she is frustrated by the Judiciary Committee’s upcoming make-up. She said she and like-minded lawmakers supported Roberts in his election to ensure Democrats held the Senate, but that feel should not have an effective veto over criminal justice legislation.

“I do think the Democrats need to have a conversation about what it means to be a Democrat, what it means that all these progressive people were just elected, and we still put all this power in the hands of a single white man,” said Bacon, a Black lawmaker from Denver.

Roberts was also the only Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee to oppose a bill meant to raise arrest standards and lower jail populations, and the only one to not support indefinitely postponing a Republican bill to limit clemency applications, HB 1164, though he voted against passage. Last year, he was among a crowd of Democrats behind a successful push for the legislature to make simple possession of small amounts of fentanyl a felony.

Some at the Colorado Capitol say they do not believe that Roberts is inclined to behave as a one-man kill committee of progressive aspirations, but that they are unsure what to expect from him. He is clearly more conservative than most Democrats on criminal-legal issues but he has also voted for plenty of reform legislation in the past, they note. Roberts stood with his party in supporting a 2019 bill lowering criminal penalties for simple drug possession and a 2020 bill repealing the death penalty. 

Roberts told Bolts that his foremost mission is to represent the interests of Senate District 8, which covers mountain and rural communities in northwest Colorado. The district leans blue, though slightly less so than the state at large; it has a higher percentage of white residents than the state as a whole and a much lower incarceration rate than more urban, diverse parts of Colorado.

“I knocked on thousands of doors,” Roberts told Bolts, “and criminal justice reform did not come up, but public safety did. That’s something I’ll bring to mind when I approach these bills down in Denver.” He added, “We all represent our districts first, not our caucus first.”

Roberts told Bolts that, as of Jan. 2, zero Democratic lawmakers had approached him to discuss coming legislation on criminal-legal issues. “I think it’s pretty clear, when you have a three-to-two committee, that one vote either way is going to be the deciding vote,” he said. “I understand and recognize that’ll be a consequential place to be in, but I hope my colleagues use it as an opportunity to engage me and the communities I represent on those policies.”

Senate Majority Leader Dominick Moreno, a Democrat who represents Denver’s north and west suburbs, told Bolts that Roberts, the only attorney in the Senate Democratic caucus, was a natural choice for the Judiciary Committee—but that he did not mean to build the committee such that the fate of legislation hinges on the vote of a single Democrat.

He said that Judiciary could have been expanded to a nine-member committee with six Democrats, which would have created breathing room around Roberts, but that “we couldn’t find another member of the caucus that was willing to serve in that capacity.” 

The legislature’s Judiciary Committees are known for taking on intense topics and deliberating at great length, which, Moreno said, makes them unappealing to many members who may already be quite busy. He added that he approached Senator James Coleman and Senator-elect Tony Exum about joining Judiciary, “but it didn’t really go anywhere.”

Moreno insisted that Senate leadership does not want the chamber’s Judiciary Committee to be a roadblock to progressive policy. “No one member by themselves will stand in the way of making meaningful criminal justice reform,” he said. 

Still, Moreno did not specify what the leadership may do for the committee to not sink progressive legislation. Committee assignments can change mid-session, either permanently or on short-term bases, but Moreno gave no indication of a Senate Judiciary personnel shakeup; he also stressed that expanding the size of a committee would be difficult at this stage. He did not say whether leadership may route certain bills that fit in the scope of Judiciary to other committees more likely to pass them.

Republican State Senator Bob Gardner, the ranking member of Senate Judiciary, told Bolts that committee placements aren’t made by mistake.

“I think the subtext of this one is that we will see criminal justice legislation come out of the committee that is moved more to the center, if it does come out of committee,” he said. “Or, we will see things that do not come out of the committee because they’re a bridge too far. That’s my hope.”

Progressive lawmakers say they won’t amend their 2023 agendas, even as they are keenly aware of the committee’s new power dynamics. 

Julie Gonzales, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee and frequently sponsors anti-carceral legislation, said the Roberts assignment “changes nothing of the bills I’m planning to be a lead sponsor on.” Those include reruns of last year’s proposals to prevent cops from lying to kids in interrogations and to raise the minimum age of prosecution; currently, eight states have set that age above Colorado’s line of age 10.

Gonzales, a Democrat who represents parts of Denver and is the Senate majority whip, told Bolts, “Senator-elect Roberts’s record speaks for itself. I look forward to working with him.”

Roberts said he stands by his votes against those two bills. “I was hearing serious objection from my community,” including law enforcement and some advocates for crime victims, he said. Police groups and state prosecutors fought the changes last year because they said it would be harder for them to gather information to solve crimes or to use prosecution to steer children to treatments. 

Tristan Gorman, a lobbyist for the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar, said stopping police from lying to children remains a high priority for reform advocates. 

“It’s still just as important as it was last year to protect kids, who are way more vulnerable to deception than adults, from making false confessions, and, in turn, reduce wrongful convictions,” she told Bolts. 

The Senate Judiciary Committee is but one example of Democrats shying from leftward policy, despite deepened majorities that leave the party in control of 69 of 100 seats in the legislature. Colorado’s Joint Budget Committee and its House speakership, among other spots of major influence, are both controlled by Democrats notably more moderate than the Democratic caucuses overall. Democrat Jared Polis, a regular impediment to progressive legislation in Colorado on issues ranging from tax policy to immigrant protections, remains governor.

Progressives like Bacon find this all clarifying. 

“Last session, we over-relied on this excuse of the election, to temper ourselves,” Bacon said, referring to some Democrats’ worry that championing ambitious criminal justice reforms in an election year could backfire at the polls. “This year, that won’t be an excuse anymore, but already we have set ourselves up to extend the beliefs of last session, and that tells me where people are really at. We’ve set up actual infrastructure to keep us from these issues.”

The article has been corrected to note that Roberts voted against passage of HB 1164, the GOP-proposed clemency bill, while joining the GOP to oppose indefinitely postponing it.

The post Committee Appointment Threatens to Derail Criminal Justice Reforms in Colorado appeared first on Bolts.

Three of the court’s four rulings came down in narrow 4-3 decisions, all along party lines with the four Democratic justices banding together and the three Republicans dissenting. (One Republican crossed over in the final case.) Each of the Democrats wrote for the majority in one of the four rulings, signaling their broad agreement that state practices are in need of change.

This shake up highlighted the importance of Michigan’s upcoming Supreme Court elections, which could flip the court’s partisan balance. Democrats currently enjoy a 4-3 advantage on the court, but one justice from each party is running for re-election in November. The Republican justice on the ballot, Brian Zahra, dissented in all four cases and made it clear in his opinions the lengths to which he would go to make punishment harsher in Michigan.

The decisions come as some progressives look to state courts as one possible workaround for the conservative control of the federal bench. On matters ranging from abortion to criminal justice, state courts can provide greater protections than those the U.S. Supreme Court finds in the federal constitution by turning to state statutes or state constitutional provisions.

Michigan’s court decided the four cases by building on U.S. Supreme Court decisions, but they relied on the Michigan Constitution and Michigan laws to go further than the U.S. Supreme Court has gone—and has signaled it will go with its current membership. 

The U.S. Supreme Court restricted harsh sentences against children in a series of major rulings between 2005 and 2016. The court first banned imposing the death penalty on minors and life sentences without the possibility of parole (called LWOP) for non-homicide cases. Then, in a 2012 ruling (Miller v. Alabama), the court barred mandatory LWOP sentences for any crimes, including first-degree murder, committed by people under 18; four years later, in Montgomery v. Louisiana the court held that Miller decision applied retroactively, and that people already sentenced under a mandatory LWOP law should have an opportunity for a different outcome.

Under a mandatory sentencing scheme, any minor who is convicted of certain acts is automatically handed an LWOP sentence, with no additional consideration. The U.S. Supreme Court, in these rulings, held that LWOP is so extreme that, before subjecting a child to it, a court has to at least consider whether the acts reflect “permanent incorrigibility” rather than “transient immaturity.” The court did not bar sentencing minors to LWOP, but it opened a door for many who expected to die in prison and limited future LWOP sentences.

Michigan was heavily impacted by the Miller and Montgomery rulings, due to the large number of minors handed mandatory LWOP sentences in the state. As of 2015, when Montgomery was heard, Michigan had 368 incarcerated people in that category. Only Pennsylvania, a state known for very aggressive life sentences, had more.

In implementing the decisions, the Michigan legislature eliminated mandatory LWOP sentences for acts a person committed while a minor. It also allowed for anyone sentenced to a mandatory LWOP sentence as a child to be resentenced under the new rules. 

Still, many other states have gone much further over the past decade by entirely abolishing LWOP sentences for minors. Michigan has not. Incarcerated Michiganders who get a new day in court are entitled to have their sentence reconsidered, but they can end up with a new LWOP sentence—and many local prosecutors have fought to ensure that they do.

In the years since, reform advocates have kept fighting to reduce the scope of these sentences, including by electing prosecutors who promise to not fight resentencing hearings and filing new lawsuits to chip away at the sentences. And they scored successes in court last month.

In its first 4-3 case, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that it is unconstitutional under Michigan’s constitution to sentence a minor to life without parole for second-degree murder. Chief Justice Bridget Mary McCormack explained that the Michigan Constitution’s bar on “cruel or unusual punishments” provides “slightly broader protection” than the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment bar on “cruel and unusual punishments”—“not surprisingly given the plain meaning of conjunctions.” 

The notion that this distinction—between “or” and “and”—makes Michigan’s constitution more protective was not a new argument; it is the court’s longstanding position, fleshed out into a test for the court to apply decades ago and established even earlier. In People v. Lorentzen, a 1972 decision, the court held that a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years for the sale of marijuana is unconstitutional due to Michigan’s “cruel or unusual” provision: “The prohibition of punishment that is unusual but not necessarily cruel carries an implication that unusually excessive imprisonment is included in that prohibition.”

The court has since adhered to this critical holding. But Zahra, the Republican justice who wrote the primary dissenting opinion in the case, made it clear he wants to change this. The court should “revisit whether the textual difference between [the Michigan Constitution] and the Eighth Amendment translates into a greater protection under the Michigan Constitution,” he wrote. Zahra’s move prompted McCormack to write a separate opinion detailing the history of the court’s approach.  And that in turn prompted Zahra to lambast McCormack. “Chief Justice McCormack embraces a cafeteria-style approach to constitutional interpretation,” he wrote at one point.

In a second decision, written by Justice Megan Cavanagh, the court increased the burden on prosecutors who are looking to sentence a minor to LWOP. The court ruled 4-3 that a prosecutor must prove that they are not seeking a disproportionate sentence. In plain English, the court held that Michigan’s legislature had made it clear that it was the prosecutor’s decision to seek LWOP, and, as such, it was up to the prosecutor to prove that it’s justified and not the defendant to prove it’s not justified. (Here again, the court’s three Republican justices dissented.)

The court’s third and fourth decisions, issued on the same day, brought the logic of shielding children from mandatory LWOP into new spaces—in one case to protect slightly older teenagers, and in another to question other types of harsh sentences.

In the third case, the court considered the mandatory LWOP sentence that was imposed on a teenager who was already 18 at the time of his crime, and so was no longer covered by the protections afforded under the Miller and Montgomery rulings. Even so, the court ruled in another 4-3 opinion that the mandatory LWOP sentence that he received violated the Michigan constitution’s “proportionality” requirement and was cruel under the state’s constitution. 

The majority opinion, written by Justice Elizabeth Welch, took issue with an arbitrary cutoff age of 18 for protections for youth. “Because of the dynamic neurological changes that late adolescents undergo as their brains develop over time and essentially rewire themselves, automatic condemnation to die in prison at 18 was cruel,” she wrote. “The logic articulated in Miller about why children are different from adults for purposes of sentencing applied in equal force to 18-year-olds.“ 

The court ruled that other 18-year old defendants should also be entitled to an “individualized sentencing procedure,” rather than a mandatory sentence, when they face LWOP. But Zahra wrote in dissent to again say that he would have the court revisit its longstanding interpretation of the state constitution’s “cruel or unusual” clause.

In the fourth and final case, the court looked beyond life without parole.  It provided new protections for some Michigan youth facing other sentences that are technically lower but still very harsh.

The 5-2 decision, written by Justice Richard Bernstein, applies only to the sentencing of people convicted of the high-level crimes that are eligible for LWOP.  In those cases, the court ruled, judges must consider youth as a mitigating factor in sentencing even when LWOP isn’t being sought, and even the prosecutor is instead seeking a set number of years of prison time. (The court also ruled, though, that the sentencing court does not need to explicitly detail how it considered youth as a mitigating factor. Justice Elizabeth Clement, the one Republican to join the majority, split on one of the two cases under consideration, saying that a brief mention of the defendant’s youth at sentencing was enough. The four-justice Democratic majority disagreed and still sent it back to the lower court for further review.)

Zahra, again, wrote the dissenting opinion, arguing that the court should not “extend” Miller to cases where prosecutors are not seeking LWOP sentences. He concluded that he therefore would have upheld both of the sentences—of 40 to 60 years in prison—without any further inquiry. Clement, one of Zahra’s two fellow Republicans on the court, wrote separately, in part to counter Zahra’s claim, writing that “the majority opinion in this case” is not “extending” Miller. “Accordingly, I concur with its holding that the mitigating effects of youth must be considered during term-of-years juvenile sentencing,” she wrote.

Zahra and Bernstein are each seeking new eight-year terms this fall. Michigan’s supreme court races follow a hybrid system; partisan nomination processes are followed by general elections where candidates for all seats share a single ballot that does not note their party ID. In 2022, this means that Bernstein and Zahra will be on one ballot alongside other candidates, and the top two vote-getters will win.

Neither party has yet held its convention to nominate candidates, but Kyra Harris Bolden, a state lawmaker, will likely be the Democratic nominee and Paul Hudson, an appellate lawyer, will likely be the GOP nominee.

Democrats need only to win one of the two seats to maintain the majority, while Republicans must sweep both to flip the court. Hundreds of court cases involving minors are working their way through Michigan courts, and the high court signaled its interest in bringing new scrutiny to how youth are being treated. But whether that interest lasts beyond 2022, and perhaps pushes into new directions, now hangs in the balance.

The post Michigan Supreme Court Restricts “Cruel” Treatment of Youth in Run of Major Decisions appeared first on Bolts.

Shelby County has been notorious for punitive practices that leave people languishing in jail for years without a conviction and fuel harsh youth prosecution, largely against Black residents. Local advocates have fought for years to change the system. The county was under federal monitoring by the U.S. Department of Justice for violating the rights of Black children between 2012 and 2018. In 2018, a DOJ report found continued violations and discrimination in juvenile courts, and characterized the policies of the district attorney’s office as a “toxic combination for African-American youth.”

The local officials who oversaw that system, District Attorney Amy Weirich and Juvenile Court Judge Dan Michael, were both ousted on Thursday. The winners, Steve Mulroy in the DA race and Tarik Sugarmon in the juvenile judge race, ran on reform agendas and secured eight-year terms.

Mark Ward, a local criminal court judge, also appears to have lost his re-election bid. Ward sparked an outcry earlier this year for sentencing Pamela Moses, a Black activist who was erroneously told by a state agency that she was eligible to register to vote, to six years in prison. That case was prosecuted by Weirich’s office, and Moses decried the aggressive charges as a scare tactic.

“I’m very excited,” Raumesh Akbari, a Democratic state senator from Memphis who champions criminal justice reform, told Bolts as she was leaving Mulroy’s victory party. “I think it’s a new day in Shelby County, with a new district attorney and new juvenile court judge, and it’s gonna be a totally different approach to how we handle the criminal justice system in Shelby County.” 

Weirich, a Republican, won her last DA race, in 2014, by a nearly two to one margin. While Shelby is a blue-leaning county, Tennessee holds general elections for local offices over the summer, and the resulting lower turnout can scramble expectations. But on Thursday, Mulroy, a Democrat, defeated Weirich by a margin of 56 to 44 percent. In the nonpartisan race for juvenile judge, Sugarmon won by 10 percentage points, in a rematch of the race he lost in 2014.

The DA race is one of the first elections to take place in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning federal protections for abortion rights. A ban on abortions is now in effect in Tennessee, which Mulroy pointed to as a critical issue for the campaign. He attacked Weirich for lobbying on behalf of a “fetal assault” bill in the past, and vowed that prosecuting abortion cases would be a “very low priority” for his office. He has not outright ruled out such charges, saying in part that taking a blanket stance may trigger retaliation by GOP politicians; on the same day as Mulroy’s win, the governor of Florida indefinitely suspended a local prosecutor who said he would not prosecute abortions.

Akbari told Bolts that she thinks abortion “definitely made a difference” in the race, noting that Tennesseans voted just two days after Kansas rejected an effort to erode abortion rights. “This is a big deal that impacts women and families across this country.”

The DA race also unfolded in the wake of the prosecution against Moses. Faced with the state’s extremely strict and complicated felony disenfranchisement laws, Moses had received written guidance from a state agency that she was eligible to get her voting rights restored, but when she acted on that guidance that turned out to be erroneous, Weirich’s office threw the book at her andWard sentenced her to six years in prison after accusing her of “tricking” the probation’s office. After The Guardian’s Sam Levine revealed holes in the case, Ward overturned the conviction and Weirich dropped the charges.

“I think the goal was to scare people, but it could boomerang,” Moses told Bolts in March after being released from prison. Ward and Weirich both lost their races on Thursday.

In voiding Moses’s conviction in February, Ward faulted Weirich for failing to disclose evidence that Moses had been told by a probation officer she was eligible to vote. Weirich’s office has drawn attention from the Tennessee Board of Professional Responsibility and from the media for withholding evidence in the past, including in a New York Times Magazine investigation in 2017.

Local and national advocates told Bolts that the case against Moses was a window into other patterns of harsh and unequal treatment in Shelby County as well. They fault the DA’s office and local judges for overcharging defendants, imposing a harsh “trial penalty,” and for ramping up pretrial detention. Human rights organizations have denounced local bail practices as discriminatory and unconstitutional, and a report released last year by a court-appointed inspector documented that people are held pretrial in the county jail “for months or years.”

Mulroy ran for DA on planks associated with criminal justice reform, including working to reduce pretrial detention and decreasing  the volume of prosecutions for lower-level charges like drug possession. He told Bolts in a phone interview this spring that the DA’s office should not have prosecuted Moses and that, as DA, he would try to counter any chilling effect felt by residents who are unsure about their voter eligibility.

Mulroy said that he wanted to confront the “demonstrated recent history of racial discrimination in our justice system,” telling Bolts that, “I think any district attorney should make it a high priority to try to reduce the obvious and blatant racial disproportionality in our criminal justice system. That goes double for somebody in Shelby County.”

“Excessive bail and excessive seeking of pretrial detention, along with adult transfer of juvenile cases, have a hugely disproportionate minority contact rate,” he added.

The disparities in prosecution and sentencing extend into the electoral realm due to felony disenfranchisement rules. 21 percent of Black Tennesseans were stripped of the right to vote in 2020, compared to 7 percent of other adults, which barred thousands of Shelby County residents from voting on Thursday. 

Weirich seized on her opponent’s commitments to say he would endanger safety in Shelby County, and she ran a campaign centered on promises of law and order. “I believe violent offenders should go to prison,” she wrote on Facebook last week. “If you do too, please vote for me.”

“The most dangerous words in Shelby County would be ‘DA Steve Mulroy,’” that statement also said.

But Weirich’s critics scoffed at the implication that her policies were more effective to bring public safety, and point out that violent crime and murders have increased since she came into office. “If what they’re doing, this tough on crime stance was working, then there wouldn’t be a need to have reform,” Akbari said. “It’s not. It’s costing states, cities and counties an exceptional amount of money. Lives are destroyed by it, communities are destroyed by it.” 

The county’s treatment of Black children was a central theme in Mulroy and Sugarmon’s campaigns. Besides the DOJ’s 2018 report on systemic rights violations, local advocates from organizations such as Memphis for All and Just City have assailed continued disparate treatment, and earlier this year they demanded a racial equity audit of local decisions. Data released by the county shows, for instance, that Black youths were held in pretrial detention nearly three times as often as white youths in 2021. And nearly every single minor who gets prosecuted as an adult, facing far tougher sentences, is Black; the raw numbers are high, too, as Shelby County prosecutes far more children as adults than other counties.

In Tennessee, the DA seeks a child’s transfer into adult courts, and the juvenile court judge then decides on the transfer. This judge also gets to appoint the magistrates who hear the cases.

Michael, the juvenile court judge who lost his re-election bid on Thursday, resisted the federal monitoring, calling for it to end until Trump administration officials granted his wish and ended the oversight in 2018. He defended his record against critics during the campaign. “It’s a very, very difficult decision to make,” he said of his decisions to transfer children into adult court. 

Sugarmon, the victorious candidate against Michael, has called for the DOJ to resume its monitoring. He told MLK50 that he would allow fewer children to be transferred into adult court, and that he wants fewer children to be prosecuted in the first place. Black children were nearly five times more likely than white children to have cases referred to the juvenile court in 2021.

Mulroy echoes Sugarmon on the issue. “I think we also need to call for the U.S. Justice Department to resume its monitoring of our juvenile court,” he told Bolts. 

The incoming DA has not ruled out seeking adult prosecutions of minors, though he told the Daily Memphian, “we would create a strong presumption against transfer. Absent some very, very severe circumstances, adult transfer needs to be a last resort.” 

To Akbari, the election results prove that local residents are looking for a change from the status quo. “It’s easy to just throw somebody in jail. It’s hard work to actually do reform and get to the root of what causes crime, and to make sure that juvenile offenders do not become adult offenders,” she said. “And I think this vote proves that people are ready for something different. You can’t keep doing the same thing and expecting different results.”

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Colie Long has lived behind bars longer than he did on the outside. Long, 44, was sentenced to life in prison for murder when he was just 18 years old. He used to think he’d die in lockup until last year, when the District of Columbia passed a law that could provide him with a pathway out. “I didn’t really have no realistic chances of looking to go home,” Long told Bolts from prison. “But then, lo and behold, they pass this bill.”

Long and hundreds of others are now eligible for resentencing under Washington, D.C.’s Second Look Amendment Act (SLAA), which D.C. adopted in April 2021. One of the more sweeping sentencing reforms in the country, the law allows people who have served at least 15 years of their sentence and were younger than 25 at the time of their offense to apply for resentencing and potential release. 

Now a year removed, advocates for the law say it has led to the release of at least half a dozen people who would have otherwise remained in prison. But obstacles and applications are also piling up, raising questions of how much the SLAA will deliver on its unique promise. The law made D.C. into the first jurisdiction to effectively end sentences of life without the possibility of parole for youth up to age 25—the culmination of a wave of reforms that have transformed approaches to youth sentencing over the past decade. 

A series of U.S. Supreme court decisions starting in 2005 compelled many states to revisit harsh sentencing laws and give people who have been incarcerated since they were children a shot at release. Those reforms typically only applied to people who were under the age of 18 at the time of their offense, but that cutoff point has blurred in recent years due to advances in neuroscience. 

Research showing that the brain is still developing into early adulthood has brought new momentum to the push for second chances. So have the human and fiscal realities of a bloated and aging prison system; the number of people serving life sentences in American prisons has more than quadrupled since the 1980s, with the cost of keeping them behind bars growing as they continue to age. 

A growing list of states are now clawing back life sentences imposed on young adults. The Washington State Supreme Court barred mandatory life without parole sentences for anyone under the age of 21 last year. Connecticut’s parole board recently reduced the sentences of 11 men who committed crimes when they were 25 or under to acknowledge “increased understanding in the science of brain development.” South Dakota’s GOP-run Senate passed a bill last year that would have barred life without parole for anyone under 25, though it eventually died. D.C.’s law is also part of a larger “second look” movement that is driving reforms beyond youth sentences and generating hope behind bars for others sentenced to extreme terms.

Advocates in D.C. have now turned their attention to putting the new second look reform into practice. While hundreds of incarcerated people have begun the process of applying for resentencing since last year, release isn’t guaranteed. They face major hurdles, including prosecutors who have opposed most petitions and COVID-19, which has exacerbated crisis conditions inside the notoriously dysfunctional and violent federal prison system.

People convicted of serious crimes in D.C. are typically incarcerated inside federal prisons because the district has no prison of its own. Those applying for sentencing review were usually sent to a local jail run by the D.C. Department of Corrections, but transfers to the D.C. lockup effectively stopped during the pandemic, according to lawyers who assist with resentencing petitions. Destiny Fullwood, a lawyer and deputy director of the Second Look Project, says resentencing applications are difficult to complete with clients in far-flung federal prisons for reasons that go beyond just struggling to arrange calls. 

“It’s really difficult to talk to people about trauma and abuse and neglect over the phone,” Fullwood told Bolts. “It’s especially difficult if maybe your client isn’t as high functioning as other clients are.”

Michael Boone, 50, who recently became eligible to apply for resentencing under D.C.’s new law, is currently incarcerated at USP Coleman I, a high security federal prison in Florida, while he completes the process for review. He told Bolts that the lockdowns are frequent and without warning, which sometimes complicates the application process. Still Boone, who was sentenced to 55 years in prison for murder at age 20, considers the mere chance for release to be a blessing, which he says balances out the harshness of his current surroundings. 

“I look at the Second Look Act as one of my greatest blessings,” Boone said. “So all the hardship that’s coming with it, the COVID, the lockdowns… We’re basically in limbo.”

D.C.’s initial big jump into sentencing reform came in the form of the Incarceration Reduction Amendment Act (IRAA), which allowed people convicted of serious crimes committed before their 18th birthday to apply for resentencing. The original IRAA, passed in 2016, required that applicants serve at least 20 years of their sentence before applying, but a later amendment cut that down to 15 years served and allowed even those who had been denied parole to apply for resentencing. The new law D.C. council members passed last year, SLAA, was another amendment that further extended eligibility to people who were up to age 25 when their crimes were committed. 

Prosecutors testified against the SLAA, and the Washington Post editorialized against it when it was being considered by the council last year. But lawyers, academics and the friends and families of incarcerated people wrote to the council supporting the reforms, including Latoya Briggs, who told council members about Edward Williams, a loved one who she hoped might be resentenced under SLAA. Briggs insisted Williams had changed since his conviction. She described Williams as being “sucked into the cowboy phase of life” when he committed the crime he was incarcerated for.  

James Zeigler, a D.C. lawyer and the director of the Second Look Project, said that while only about 100 people were made eligible for resentencing through the original IRAA, last year’s amendment expanded that to at least 600 people. Zeigler estimated that, between the public defender’s service, lawyers appointed by the court and pro-bono counsel, between 200 and 300 people now have attorneys working on resentencing petitions. 

“Many who did not believe they would ever have a kind of viable opportunity for release all of a sudden did,” Zeigler told Bolts. “It became clear pretty quickly that this actually was pretty consequential.” 

People petitioning for resentencing under SLAA have their entire life put under a microscope during the application process. A court reviews the petitioner’s disciplinary records from the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). Petitioners also have to be reviewed by a forensic psychologist, and their family members are interviewed.

Anthony Petty, who was released from prison in December 2020 under IRAA, said he learned things about himself and his family that he had never realized until putting his application together. Petty, who went to prison for killing a man during a fight that got out of hand when he was just 16 years old, said the process helped him better understand the trauma that paved his path to prison. 

“You’re going over your neighborhood you lived in, your household you come from, your schooling, you’re going over everything—your early incarceration as a youth, your incarceration as an adult,” Petty said. “It gives the courts a better understanding of who we are as individuals. … the violence we grew up in, the households we grew up in.” 

Petty said that transferring from federal prison in Kentucky to the D.C. jail during his resentencing process greatly helped his eventual transition back into society. People who transfer to the local jail can be there for more than a year during their application for resentencing. He described federal penitentiaries as being violent, abusive and “focused solely on warehousing individuals,” which can make it more difficult for petitioners to keep a clean BOP record. “If a person goes to stab you and you’re fighting back, fighting for your life, they’re going to put a disciplinary report saying you were in an altercation,” he said. “In the court’s eye, you haven’t changed.” 

Transferring to the D.C. jail, Petty said, “was one of the best things that happened for me.” According to Petty, the jail offered more support services for incarcerated people and also tended to house people with resentencing petitions together. Petty recalled how people with strong incentives to keep their records clean helped set a more positive tone and culture inside the jail. “It’s a respectful place,” Petty said. “You’re not inmate 7 now. You’re a resident.” 

For Long, transferring to the D.C. jail has helped him transition and prepare for life after prison. He said the prospect of being turned back to federal prison now is nightmarish and spoke of an incarcerated friend who had his petition denied after spending two years inside the D.C. jail. The friend was devastated upon learning that he was going back to federal prison.

“Just imagine,” Long said. “You’re looking forward to having a job, you’re looking forward to being able to pay rent, to having meaningful relationships with people outside, and then they take you back to an environment where you’re around guys who don’t have nothing to live for.” 

Boone, who remains in federal prison while his application for resentencing is pending with the court in D.C., says the Second Look reforms have generated excitement, even among people who won’t directly be helped by the new law. He says people incarcerated with him sometimes ask him about the reforms that have made him eligible for resentencing. 

“If you go to the federal system in other states, they be asking questions about it… ‘How did D.C. become the leader of it? How did D.C. become the groundbreaking people?’” Boone said. “There’s more positivity in the institutions, even with guys it doesn’t apply to right now, because they feel like even within a year or two or somewhere down the line, it could be part of the federal system.”

People released under D.C.’s sentencing reforms have self-published books, earned college degrees and have become violence interrupters after returning to their communities. Since being released in 2020, Petty has worked as a “Credible Messenger” for the D.C. government, helping reduce violence among local youth. Petty is also active in Neighbors For Justice, a community organization that connects the D.C. Jail to the neighboring community. 

But Zeigler says the frequent resistance from local prosecutors has limited the reach of D.C.’s landmark sentencing reforms.

“Their treatment of these cases since day one has been aggressive and rigid and oppositional in a way that is not contemplated by or justifiable under the statute,” Zeigler said of D.C. prosecutors, who work in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. 

According to the office, 95 resentencing motions filed under SLAA and its predecessors have been decided so far, 84 of which were granted. The office told Bolts that it had opposed or objected to the timing of release in all but 12 of those motions. 

The office, now headed by U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves, declined a request for an interview on their approach to the law. Prosecutors have said 15-year sentences are too short, and that the people applying for release may re-offend. A man who was freed in 2020 through the original “Second Look” reform, after being originally incarcerated over a crime he committed when he was 16, was arrested last year for murder. At the time, federal prosecutors said he was the fourth person released under resentencing reforms arrested for a new crime, such as unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, but the first to be accused of a new violent offense.

Zeigler cautions that the arrest has not yet resulted in a conviction, and that the broader recidivism rate for all people released from prison is often higher. “No system is going to be able to offer a 100 percent guarantee that no one will commit crimes, and the fact a very small number of people have recidivated seems to be a poor justification for incarcerating people into old age with no opportunity to demonstrate rehabilitation and be released,” he said.

Advocates for Second Look petitioners say that the way cases are distributed across D.C.’s Superior Court judges also presents a challenge. While in the past resentencing petitions were assigned primarily to judges with criminal calendars, according to Zeigler, they are spread across the bench to judges with less experience in relevant criminal matters. 

Zeigler also says he worries about compassion fatigue among judges, telling Bolts, “The excitement and momentum that kind of benefited a lot of earlier IRAA cases has kind of dissipated.” 

Long, who’s now midway through the process of petitioning for resentencing under SLAA, says he wants a chance to show that he’s changed since entering prison as a teenager. “It should be acknowledged the steps that we’ve taken to correct the behaviors that we did,” he told Bolts. “Give us a second chance.”

“The bad things we did to get things in prison were acknowledged and we ultimately suffered the consequences,” he told Bolts. “I think equally important, (are) the steps that we’ve taken to correct the behaviors…  There’s so much untapped potential in here.”

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Maryland has banned life without the possibility of parole for people convicted of crimes that occurred when they were children. On Saturday, the Democratic-run legislature overrode Republican Governor Larry Hogan’s veto of the legislation.

Maryland is the 25th state, in addition to Washington, D.C., to bar these sentences. With the vote, hundreds of people will have an opportunity for earlier release. 

“I had anticipated that Governor Larry Hogan would veto the bill but had full confidence that the Maryland General Assembly would do the right thing,” said Fatima Razi, co-founder and executive director of the Maryland Juvenile Justice Coalition. “This body of legislators has brought me closer to restoring my faith in Maryland’s justice system.”

The legislation, Senate Bill 494, known as the Juvenile Restoration Act, applies retroactively. It allows anyone who has served at least 20 years for a crime that occured when they were a minor to petition the court for a sentence reduction, including if they were sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. The court then must hold a hearing where a judge should consider a number of factors, including the offense, evidence of rehabilitation, childhood trauma, and victim statements. A person whose petition is denied can request a hearing two more times, three years apart.

In Maryland, nearly 50 people were serving a juvenile life without the possibility of parole sentence as of December, but the law’s impact extends to hundreds of others who were sentenced to lengthy prison terms or life with parole. More than 300 people, who were not sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, will be immediately eligible for resentencing because they have already served more than 20 years for offenses that occurred when they were children, according to the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth. 

Of the more than 400 people immediately eligible for resentencing, over 85 percent are Black, according to the campaign. 

In Maryland, the overwhelming majority of children tried as adults are Black, according to the state’s racial impact analysis of SB 494. From July to December 2019, more than 80 percent of the 459 children charged as adults were Black. 

The growing movement against police violence and white supremacy in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis helped spur the passing of SB 494, say its supporters.

“As instances of police brutality have come to the fore of mainstream consciousness, the nation is reckoning with a reality that impacted communities have known all along—there is a throughline from slavery to our current-day criminal justice system,” said Erica Suter, a post-conviction appellate attorney and first vice president of the Maryland Criminal Defense Attorneys’ Association. “I think we have reached a boiling point where none of us have the luxury of looking away any longer.”

A diverse coalition, including victims’ family members and State’s Attorneys Marilyn Mosby and Aisha Braveboy, supported SB 494, which passed with bipartisan support. But their colleagues were some of its most vocal opponents. Hogan’s veto message listed 14 state’s attorneys, including Baltimore County State’s Attorney Scott Shellenberger, who urged him to veto SB 494. He did not mention Mosby or Braveboy, who represent two of the state’s most populous regions, Baltimore City and Prince George’s County. 

But those who petition for sentence reductions could still spend the rest of their lives in prison, said Suter. The bill does not guarantee release for people convicted of crimes that occurred when they were under the age of 18. 

“[SB 494] gives hope and an opportunity to a huge population in our prisons,” said Suter. The bill, she said, does not go far enough. 

“Unfortunately there are some judges in some jurisdictions who are not, who I’m afraid will not, be persuaded,” she said, “no matter how many good things someone has done.”  

—

The United States is the only known country that sentences children to life without the possibility of parole, according to the Sentencing Project. At the start of 2020, approximately 1,400 people were serving life without the possibility of parole for crimes that occurred when they were children. But more states are rejecting this practice. 

“We’ve fortunately seen this dramatic national trend away from life without the possibility of parole for kids and other very extreme sentences,” said Preston Shipp, a former prosecutor who is now senior policy counsel with the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth. “This is not a partisan issue, it’s a moral issue.” 

In 2012, the Supreme Court banned mandatory juvenile life without the possibility of parole sentences. About four years later, the court made that decision apply retroactively, which meant about 2,000 people who had been automatically sentenced to life without the possibility of parole could receive resentencing or parole hearings.

Since then, many states have chosen to abolish these sentences altogether. In January, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, signed legislation that provides an opportunity for parole after a certain number of years served for those convicted of crimes that occurred when they were children. Similar legislation passed last year in Democratic-run Virginia. 

On Thursday, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, issued an executive order that establishes a clemency board to review petitions from those who have served at least 20 years for crimes committed when they were minors. 

But more work is needed to ensure children, as well as young adults, do not spend decades in prison, say youth justice advocates. 

The Supreme Court’s 2012 decision was based, in part, on research that shows the adolescent brain is “not yet fully mature in regions and systems related to … impulse control, planning ahead, and risk avoidance,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the majority, quoting from an amicus brief filed by the American Psychological Association.

These traits do not end on a person’s 18th birthday. Research has shown the brain keeps developing until a person is in their mid-20s. Recognizing this, Washington, D.C., approved a law in January that will allow people serving life sentences to file for a sentence reduction for offenses that occurred before they were 25. Previously, this consideration was only extended to people convicted as minors. (Congress has the power to block laws passed by D.C., so the law will not be enacted until later this spring after a waiting period passes; Congress is not expected to intervene.) 

Other states, including Illinois and Washington, have also created pathways for the early release of people who were convicted as young adults. The Maryland Court of Appeals is now considering a rules change to permit some people who were under 25 at the time of the crime to petition for a sentence modification after serving 15 years. 

“There’s really no reason to draw the line arbitrarily at 18,” said Riya Saha Shah, managing director of Juvenile Law Center.

Warren Hynson, who spent more than 25 years incarcerated in Maryland, told The Appeal he was held with other men who, like him, arrived in prison in their mid to late teens. They should be given a chance, like he was, to return home and succeed, he said. “It’s devastating for a human being to feel that he or she has no hope,” said Hynson. Suter represented Hynson during his parole process. 

In 1992, when Hynson was 17, he was sentenced to natural life, with the possibility of parole, for felony murder. When the judge sentenced him, he assumed he would be home in five years. Hynson only began to understand his sentence when he got to prison. 

“I felt, man, this is where I’m going to die.” he said. “I started meeting dudes, that’s older, with gray hair, gray in their beards. And they said they’ve been locked up since they were 15, 16 years old.”

While incarcerated, Hynson said he was a youth mentor, attended classes, and worked on his art, even having his pieces exhibited at a local college. In 2001, he was resentenced to life suspended and 43 years. In 2016, the parole commission recommended him for parole, but Governor Hogan denied it. Hynson went home in 2019, when he was 45 years old. 

Hynson and his fiance now live minutes from his mother’s home in Maryland. After he gets home from work, he creates art, and intends to exhibit at future shows. 

“People do change, people do grow, people do evolve into better human beings,” said Hynson. “Don’t throw us in prison and throw away the key. Don’t throw us in prison and not give us any tools to grow.”

Disclosure: Juvenile Law Center and the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth were sponsors of Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg’s interview-based play on juvenile life without parole, “Life, Death, Life Again: Children Sentenced to Die in Prison.”

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