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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

“I hope that this board recognizes I am not the same person I was 23 years ago,” he said during his hearing before the Connecticut Board of Pardons and Paroles last week. He recounted mentoring young people and encouraging them to stay in school to keep them out of prison.

But members of the board questioned what made Smalls’ case extraordinary. “Participating in programs, that’s something that you’re expected to do,” said Rufaro Page, one of the board members. “Our policy is clear that there has to be something exceptional that occurred.”

“Aside from your receiving a lengthy sentence, I don’t see anything that is exceptional here,” she added. The board denied Smalls’ commutation. 

Page was echoing the wording of a new policy, unveiled on July 26, that requires people applying for a commutation in Connecticut to now show “exceptional and compelling circumstances” that merit reducing their time behind bars.

This new commutations policy replaced an earlier one rolled out in 2021 to reduce the long prison sentences that had been handed out in the 1990s and 2000s. Under the leadership of Carleton Giles, a former police officer, the board used the policy to grant 106 commutations. Almost two-thirds of the people whose sentences were reduced were Black.

But Democratic Governor Ned Lamont in April bowed to Republican furor over the commutations and paused clemency, Bolts reported in April. He removed Giles as head of the board, replacing him with Jennifer Medina Zaccagnini. Zaccagnini then put a hold on all commutations and supervised the release of the new policy in late July.

The board’s Aug. 30 hearings—held without Giles or the other two board members who’d been responsible for issuing the 106 commutations—were the first under the new policy, offering a peek into how it might change commutation decisions in Connecticut.

The three applicants heard on that day all fit the general bill of those who received commutations under the last policy. They were all Black or Hispanic, each serving decades in prison for a murder they committed when they were in their teens or early 20s, and all of them had been imprisoned for at least two decades. 

One of the applications was granted, and two were denied. Before the board was overhauled, between January and April of this year, it granted 87 percent of commutations applications once they made it to the hearings stage. 

Miriam Gohara, a professor at Yale Law School who has represented people applying for commutations, says it will take time to gauge how the revamped board will approach applications. “I think we need to give the board a chance to see what they’re going to do,” she told Bolts.

Still, the tone of these first hearings under the new policy was distinctly different from those held under Giles’ leadership, which focused more on how applicants changed in prison and on their conduct while incarcerated. Previously, board members had asked applicants about educational opportunities they’d taken advantage of, or how they’d use what they learned behind bars once they were free. Applicants’ experiences while incarcerated, by contrast, were mostly sidelined in last week’s hearings; the board appeared to pay more attention than before to what happened before the sentence, to the perspective of victims, and to the details of each crime.   

And it was clear that the rule requiring “exceptional and compelling circumstances” also set a higher bar for applicants to clear.

After denying Smalls’ commutation, the board heard from Corey Turner, who has been incarcerated for 27 years and who has maintained that he did not do the crime for which he’s imprisoned. During the hearing, Turner and his attorney recounted his own rehabilitative journey—he too has earned a G.E.D, taken parenting classes, and held jobs while incarcerated. 

Turner has also served as a law librarian inside the prison, assisting his peers as a jailhouse lawyer. Someone who was incarcerated with Turner and has since been released from prison wrote a letter of support recounting that Turner had helped fellow prisoners interpret the law and craft legal strategies.

During the 47-minute hearing devoted to Turner’s case, though, panelists only asked him one question about rehabilitation efforts during his lengthy imprisonment.

After one board member asked Turner what was exceptional about his application, he replied, “This is not an environment that’s designed for human beings to flourish,” explaining that instead of turning to despair and violence, he had tried to heal from a traumatic life and become a better father and person. “The only evidence that is compelling that I have to bring before you today, ma’am, is myself, my lived example. That’s all I have. And I hope it’s enough for you.” 

“I think what’s compelling or exceptional is me,” he said. 

“I commend Mr. Turner for his rehabilitative efforts,” Zaccagnini, the board’s new chair, said later in the hearing. “However, it does not rise to the level of compelling and exceptional that would warrant a commutation of his sentence.” 

The board denied Turner’s application. Alex Taubes, who represented him and who was a vocal critic of Lamont’s decision to fire Giles in April, told Bolts after the hearing that Turner’s experience underscores how much Connecticut’s commutation policy has changed.

“They’re no longer providing people with second chances who truly earned them and deserved them,” Taubes said. 

Between 2015 and 2019, the Board of Pardons and Paroles granted just five commutations, at which point the board froze the process for two years. This stasis was decried by advocates in the early stages of the pandemic. “There wasn’t a functioning commutations system for a number of years,” Gohara says. Then, in 2021, the board revamped its approach and began accepting applications again; under its new policy, it considered 11 criteria when determining whether to shorten a sentence. Those included an applicant’s conduct while incarcerated, how serious and recent their conviction was, how shortening a sentence could benefit society, and whether an applicant had been rehabilitated while imprisoned.

These changes made what had been a rarely used power into a progressive tool. Board members publicly touted that they were using clemency to offer an avenue of release for incarcerated people who otherwise didn’t have a way out of prison. They began reducing long sentences given to people who committed crimes when they were younger than age 25, an acknowledgment of advances in the scientific understanding of brain development that shows young adults’ brains are still maturing well into their 20s. 

But Republicans blasted the board’s approach, staging an elaborate event earlier this year with victims’ families during which they called on Lamont to make the board stop commutations. The governor’s decision to replace Giles with Zaccagnini then paved the way for the new policy, which replaced the 11 “suitability” standards that were meant to guide board members with the provision requiring “exceptional and compelling circumstances.” 

David Bothwell, an advisor for the board, told Bolts in a statement that the new rules improve the process. “This policy puts the onus on the applicant to present to the Board extraordinary and compelling reasons that warrant commutation of sentence,” he said. “It does this through a procedure that is fair, open and transparent, and where victim input is acknowledged, valued, and respected.”

Bothwell said that eliminating the suitability criteria will allow “a broader range of individuals to make their cases to the Board.” He also laid out that, “in making a decision, the board will consider exceptional personal growth and development, efforts to improve his/her surroundings and the lives of those he/she share those surroundings with, the serious nature of the offense, prior criminal history, impact on the victim and victim’s family and the total length of sentence and time served.”

Lamont’s office told Bolts in a statement that the governor is “encouraged that Chairwoman Zaccagnini and the staff at the Board of Pardons and Paroles met with all of the involved parties and developed a revised process that takes into account their concerns.”

This summer, Lamont signed into law a bill that will expand parole eligibility for people convicted of crimes they committed before age 21. The law comes amid a wave of reforms nationwide meant to create more paths to release for people sentenced while young, and it targets a population that Connecticut’s prior commutations policy looked on favorably. Parole applications would be reviewed by the Board of Paroles and Pardons as well.

The Aug. 30 hearing also raised questions about whether applicants who maintain their innocence can still succeed in front of the board.

Although Turner and his lawyer emphasized his rehabilitation when they made their case to the board, his application was also rooted in his claim that he did not commit the crime he was convicted of, which seemed to bother the panel hearing his application. 

“We don’t retry cases,” Zaccagnini said. “That is for a court to decide.” At one point Joy Chance, another board member, asked Turner why he never mentioned the victims of his crime. “Ma’am, I didn’t commit this crime,” Turner said. “I’ve been in prison for 27 and a half years for a crime that I didn’t commit.” 

Chance doubled down. “Why wouldn’t you have expressed some kind of remorse for the victim, even if you say you didn’t do it?” she asked. “It’s not that I don’t care,” Turner responded. “I didn’t commit this crime.”

While the panelists were deliberating, Taubes interrupted them to say that Turner and he had focused their presentation on Turner’s mentorship, education and rehabilitation, and that it was the board that had brought up the innocence claim. “You’re using his innocence against him, and it is a travesty of injustice,” he said. 

Bothwell told Bolts that someone who maintains their innocence can apply for a commutation, and it is not a hindrance to their getting a commutation. 

Still, Taubes believes the hearing marked a change from how the previous board approached such cases. He named four clients who maintained their innocence but who received a commutation between 2021 and April of this year, including Norman Gaines, who was released from prison after his sentence was commuted in 2022 and who testified at a legislative hearing in March. “When I was talking to the panel at the Board of Pardons and Parole, that I would do my best to be a beacon of the community, I would like them to know I’ve been keeping my word,” Gaines said.

During the Aug. 30 hearing, the board did commute the sentence of Miguel Sanchez, who had received a 60-year sentence for a murder he committed when he was 17. Sanchez apologized to the family of the young man he killed, acknowledging that his reckless and violent actions profoundly altered the course of not only he and his victim’s lives, but those of their surviving family members, as well. 

“I have spent almost 60 percent of my life in prison due to my immature and irresponsible actions as a teenager,” Sanchez said. “However, I am no longer that immature youth. I remain in prison as a matured and educated middle-aged man, who at 45 years old has focused on helping transform not only myself, but others as well through education.”

The board commuted Sanchez’s sentence by 15 years; he could be eligible for a juvenile parole hearing beginning next year. Board members highlighted that he helped teach college classes to his incarcerated peers early in the pandemic, when outside volunteers weren’t allowed in prisons. They noted that his brother, a correctional officer at another state prison, offered to help him navigate a new life outside of prison, should he get released early.

The board did not explicitly ask Sanchez about “compelling and exceptional circumstances,” as they did with Smalls and Turner. They commended his rehabilitative efforts and the programs he has completed in the past 26 years.

“He has done everything possible, and then some,” Zaccagnini said. “He has gone above and beyond to assist others throughout his incarceration and give back.”

The post Connecticut’s New Commutation Policy Raises the Bar for Second Chances appeared first on Bolts.

April Wilkens was 28 years old in 1998, when police arrested and charged her with first-degree murder for fatally shooting a man who had repeatedly stalked, harassed, assaulted and raped her. 

Wilkens had called police multiple times on her ex-boyfriend, Terry Carlton, and had obtained two protective orders against him. But he came from an influential Tulsa family, and police seemed to rarely get in his way. She says she shot him one night in self-defense, after he had already raped, handcuffed, and threatened to sodomize and kill her, at one point holding a gun to her head. When Wilkens went to trial, her lawyer failed to obtain or introduce several pieces of evidence of the ongoing abuse, according to her clemency application, including an audio tape recording where Carlton admitted to beating and strangling her. She was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Wilkens, now 53, has spent nearly half of her life behind bars. 

Troubled by Wilkens’ story, last year Oklahoma state Representative Toni Hasenbeck helped lead a legislative study of sentencing reforms for survivors of domestic violence whose abuse played a role in their conviction. This year Hasenbeck, a Republican, filed House Bill 1639, the Domestic Abuse Survivorship Act, to give criminalized survivors like Wilkens a chance at release. As introduced, the act capped prison terms at 10 years for people convicted of crimes against an abusive partner, and allowed survivors already serving lengthy or life sentences like Wilkens to retroactively seek resentencing and release.

Wilkens said the bill felt like a ray of hope. “It could mean a life sentence won’t mean death by incarceration for me,” she told Bolts. “It could mean I won’t die in a cage. I could start making up for lost time with my family and friends. He had to grow up without his mom. My son was seven when I was locked up. He’s 32 now and has a four-year-old daughter.”  

As the bill wound through the Oklahoma legislature this year, Wilkens helped spread the word about the bill inside the Mabel Bassett Correctional Center, Oklahoma’s largest women’s prison, urging other women there to tell their families and friends to advocate for the legislation. She also generated and distributed a survey, asking women inside about the role of abuse in their convictions; 156 women responded identifying as survivors of trauma and violence.

But in March, Hasenbeck significantly amended the bill ahead of its vote in the Oklahoma House, Mother Jones reported, effectively gutting it. According to the Oklahoman, the state’s influential District Attorneys Council pushed for a watered-down version that would not have helped Wilkens or any other survivors currently in prison, simply giving judges discretion to impose lighter sentences for people convicted of crimes against abusive partners in the future. 

Even that weakened bill did not make it through the session. After the House unanimously passed it in March and the Senate approved an amended version in April, advocates, including family members of survivors, pleaded with lawmakers to put retroactivity back in. But lawmakers did not budge in preparing a final version, and then they did not even schedule a final vote on it by the end of the session last week.  

Wilkens told Bolts she had mixed feelings about the whittled-down bill. “If what I’ve gone through can help keep future domestic violence survivors from languishing in prison, it will be worth it,” Wilkens said. “On the other hand, it felt like a kick in the gut. Those of us who are already in prison want to feel like our lives—and our families’ lives—matter, too.”

Amanda Ross was seven years old when Wilkens was arrested. Her mother, Wilkens’ sister, had always encouraged her to write letters to her imprisoned aunt, but as a child, Ross only had a dim understanding of why she was behind bars. 

Wilkens, who was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole, first became eligible for parole in 2013, after serving 15 years in prison. That year, at her parole hearing, Carlton’s father protested her release and she was denied parole. In 2016, the parole board didn’t even grant her a hearing. That was when Ross, by then in her twenties, became involved. 

“I started a blog to post her commutation application,” she told Bolts. From there, she began gathering other court documents, including Wilkens’ numerous appeals and court transcripts. “I was scanning the documents trying to get her an attorney,” she recalled. 

At first, Ross didn’t fully understand what she was looking at, but reading and scanning gave her a crash course in what had happened to Wilkens. She turned the records into a chronology so others could understand her aunt’s decades-long ordeal through the legal system. 

In 2019, the board granted Wilkens a hearing only to again deny her parole. By 2022, Wilkens had spent 24 years in prison and was once again up for parole. This time, Ross enlisted the help of Project Commutation, which provides free legal representation to people serving excessive sentences, but the board again denied Wilkens a hearing. 

Wilkins’ story is far from unique. The nexus between domestic violence and incarceration is so common that advocates have coined a term for people who have endured it, calling them criminalized survivors. And Oklahoma’s criminal legal system has long been particularly harsh to women. For decades, it had the nation’s highest female incarceration rate; as of 2021, the state trails only Idaho and Montana for this dubious distinction.

Through other activists, Ross connected with Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, and eventually lawyers with the organization launched a 12-episode podcast detailing Wilkens’ case. They named it Panic Button, after an actual panic button that Wilkens wore around her neck in an attempt to stop Carlton’s attacks. 

Oklahoma Appleseed lawyers also worked with Hasenbeck on her legislative study, putting together the research and speakers for a September 2022 presentation to the justice and judiciary committee of the Oklahoma House, where they also outlined Wilkens’ story of abuse, survival and incarceration. Other presenters highlighted the outsized impact of criminal punishment on women of color in the state; according to state and federal data, Black and Indigenous women each accounted for 18 percent of Oklahoma’s women’s prison population in 2021, despite accounting for just 7 and 8 percent of the general population in the state, respectively.  

The following year, Hasenbeck introduced the Oklahoma Domestic Abuse Survivorship Act. Colleen McCarty, one of the Oklahoma Appleseed lawyers pushing for the bill, begged lawmakers to reconsider after they stripped the provision letting it apply to previous convictions, pointing them again to the cases of Wilkens and other survivors. In an open letter she posted in March, McCarty said Oklahomans have proven supportive of retroactive sentencing reforms. In 2016, voters approved two ballot initiatives aimed at reducing prison sentences for people with certain non-violent convictions, which eventually led to one of the largest mass commutations in the nation’s history. (Hasenbeck didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story.)

“Those cases were for low-level drug and property crimes. These survivors’ crimes that could be impacted by HB 1639 are crimes of ‘it was him or me,’” McCarty wrote. “They are crimes of people who resorted to violence when the system gave them no other choice. These survivors deserve the safety and freedom they couldn’t get anywhere else in Oklahoma—not at home, not at church, not at the police station, and not in the courthouse.”

Renetta Boyd had never engaged in any type of political organizing until she learned about the Oklahoma Domestic Abuse Survivorship Act. 

Renetta’s daughter, Keabreauna Boyd, is serving a 20-year prison sentence for the 2020 death of her boyfriend, which followed years of her being abused by him. Keabreauna was eight months pregnant and had tried moving to get away from him, but that didn’t stop the abuse. She says he charged at her with a knife during a fight before she wrestled it away and killed him with it in self-defense. After her arrest for murder, Keaubreauna gave birth handcuffed to a bed without family present, despite 2018 legislation prohibiting restraints and allowing family during labor and delivery. That was the last time she saw or touched her baby.

Renetta distinctly remembers attending her daughter’s 2021 sentencing hearing because it was the last time she saw her; because Renetta is currently on parole, she must receive special approval to visit her daughter and she hasn’t yet been allowed visits. The mother and daughter have kept in touch for the past two years through weekly phone calls and biweekly letters.

Renetta and nine of her family members attended a rally at the Oklahoma capitol last month, where she was joined by other relatives of incarcerated survivors of domestic abuse, asking lawmakers to restore the retroactive parts of the Domestic Abuse Survivorship Act. 

Renetta says she feels lucky she didn’t lose her daughter or the baby during the assault. But she says her grandchildren need their mother home; Keabreauna has four other children in addition to the baby born in jail. “I feel like this law should pass so that my daughter could get back home with my grandchildren because they’ve never been away from her a day [before her arrest],” Renetta told Bolts. “She needs a chance to raise her children.”

“If you’re fighting for your life, you shouldn’t be punished,” Keabreauna told Bolts in a call from prison. “Everybody has the right to fight for their lives.” 

Oklahoma’s bill wasn’t the first to address the intersection of abuse and incarceration. New York passed the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act in 2019, and since then 40 incarcerated people have been resentenced . In Louisiana, a similar bill filed this year faced intense opposition from the district attorneys’ association, Bolts reported in April; it too was amended earlier this month to exclude resentencing for survivors currently behind bars. 

After Oklahoma lawmakers removed retroactivity from this year’s reform bill, advocates ratcheted up efforts to rally around survivors and tell their stories to lawmakers in hopes of passing reforms that could help them. In March, Oklahoma Appleseed held an art and advocacy day at the state capitol building, where artists created pieces based on survivors’ stories while advocates engaged passersby about the issue. The following day, advocates brought the pieces to Mabel Bassett Correctional Center, holding them up outside so that incarcerated women could see them. Both Wilkens and Boyd saw the pieces from their window; Boyd excitedly told her mother later that she had seen the art and noticed her portrait within one of the pieces.

Ross says she visited the state capitol four times over the past two months to meet with lawmakers. While she had previously participated in marches and rallies for other causes, this was the first time she had joined a coalition working towards a specific outcome, and the first time she had advocated for a change that was so personal. 

“It’s affirming,” she told Bolts. “All this time, I was struggling to get someone to listen.” Now, after so many years, advocates, other domestic violence survivors and even lawmakers are doing so.

“It really made me feel less alone,” she added.

Ross continues to advocate for reforms that apply retroactively, pushing for a pathway out of prison for her aunt and others incarcerated because of the abuse they endured. “We’ve carried the bill on the backs of these women who are incarcerated, on their stories,” she said. “I don’t think legislators realize that the bill has gotten this far because we’ve pushed their stories.” 

From prison, Wilkens continues to share her story, publishing op-eds in local newspapers to urge lawmakers to pass sentencing reforms that apply retroactively to cases like hers. 

McCarty with Oklahoma Appleseed told Bolts she was “extremely disappointed in the failure to advance HB 1639” but also said the final version of the bill “didn’t accomplish any of the goals that the coalition set out to accomplish when we embarked on this survivor justice journey.”

At the same time, she said that advocacy and educational efforts around the bill engaged many Oklahomans who had never before been part of the political process before—and that they intend to continue building the campaign before the next legislative session begins.

“I hope that criminalized survivors know that we’re not giving up,” McCarty said. “This is a much bigger issue than we even realized when we started this.”

The post Sentencing Reforms for Domestic Abuse Survivors Derail in Oklahoma appeared first on Bolts.

The GOP had staged the event to protest a rise in clemency in the state. After years of a near-total freeze in commutations—a rare path out of prison for hundreds of people who are serving decadeslong or life sentences in the state—the board granted several dozens in 2022. That fell short of reformers’ demands but the GOP still took issue. “I am calling on Governor Lamont to stop this right now,” said John Kissel, the highest-ranking Republican senator on the Judiciary Committee, who was accompanied at the event by families of violent crime victims.

Governor Ned Lamont, a Democrat, followed Kissel’s call on April 10, removing Carleton Giles, a former police officer, as chair of the board. Giles, who is Black, had authority as chair to decide which board members would hear commutations, and Republicans painted him as the architect of the rise in releases. 

Lamont appointed Jennifer Medina Zaccagnini to replace him as chair. Within days Zaccagnini put a hold on all commutation hearings until further notice. 

Lamont’s move dismayed state advocates who have pushed Connecticut to reduce its prison population and address persistent racial disparities in incarceration.

“For a parole chairman—who is a police officer, who was doing his job according to the law—to be removed for such a small number of releases, it sends a chilling effect that could set us backward in criminal justice reform for years, if not decades,” said Alex Taubes, an attorney who has represented dozens of people who received commutations from the board. 

Connecticut drastically lengthened prison terms starting in the late 1980s. This led many people who committed violent crimes as teenagers or young adults to receive prison terms that makes it likely they’ll die behind bars unless they receive clemency. 

“The longest sentences have not generally gone in Connecticut to the worst criminals. They go to the people with the worst lawyers,” Taubes told Bolts. “That’s why the group of people who are eligible for commutations is disproportionately Black and brown people, who don’t have the kinds of networks and connections that allow them to get the lesser sentences in the first place.” 

Roughly 700 people are serving life sentences in the state and can expect to die in prison without clemency, according to a study by the Sentencing Project. The majority of them are Black. (Only 13 percent of Connecticut’s overall population is Black.)

Those disparities meant clemency has overwhelmingly benefited people of color. The board identified that nearly two-thirds of the people who received commutations in 2022 are Black, and a quarter as Hispanic. “Stopping the commutations is a racist policy,” Taubes said.

Taubes and like-minded advocates have pressured the board to give people growing old behind bars a second chance but they’ve been frustrated by what they see as a dysfunctional system. Connecticut is one of six states where the power to commute a prison sentence is vested entirely in an independent body with no direct role for the governor. The board has “unfettered discretion” in how it uses its commutation powers, an unusually broad mandate that has at times proved paralyzing. During the early pandemic, as other states acted to relieve prisons, the board was accepting no applications and issuing no commutations. 

Even over the past year, under Giles, the board kept the pathway to clemency very narrow. In 2021 and 2022, it restricted the criteria to be eligible to even ask for a commutation, for instance forcing people to wait two additional years to apply. It also decided that people who are serving sentences of life without parole are ineligible to receive a commutation. Miriam Gohara, a professor at Yale Law School who has represented two people applying for commutations, insists that state statute says they should be. “That was something that they should not have done, but I think they did it as an opportunity to try to assuage their critics,” Gohara said.

The board is denying most applications. Its statistics show that, in 2022, more than three-fourth of applicants were rejected. 

But the board also took steps to flex its clemency powers. In 2021, it began taking applications after a two-year hiatus. Its first commutation in two years shortened a sick man’s 75-year sentence so he would be eligible for compassionate parole, a program meant for people with long sentences and serious medical conditions. 

They also took a new look at people who were sentenced to long terms as kids or young adults, a population that makes up the bulk of those granted commutations in 2022. In recent sessions, some legislators proposed expanding release opportunities for people who committed crimes before age 25, pointing to scientific research that shows the brain keeps developing until the mid-20s; while their bill proved unsuccessful, the board soon appeared to heed their arguments. 

“You’re talking about younger individuals who were sentenced in the ‘90s for sentences that we would not give out as a state anymore,” said Representative Steven Stafstrom, a Democrat who co-chairs the Judiciary Committee. “We are living in a very different era, I think in the nation but certainly in Connecticut, in terms of how long folks should be sentenced for certain crimes, particularly crimes that were committed at a very young age.”

“What these commutations did is modernize or correct the sentence, based on what today’s sentencing guidelines would be,” he said. 

Julio Rodriguez is among the people who benefited from this second look. After more than 22 years in prison after being convicted as an accessory to murder, he was sent to a halfway house in July after the board commuted over two decades off his 50-year sentence. 

“When we was younger, some of us don’t even know what the heck we was doing. We was just doing it under peer pressure, under the gangs, under drugs’ influence,” he said. “It’s kind of like hard for somebody that came really young like that and grew up in jail and never had a chance to become somebody.” He added, “We became men in there, grandfathers. We was kids.”

Rodriguez was 19 when he went to prison. Now, he has a job detailing cars, and he says he wishes the public knew about all the people he left behind in prison who, like him, bettered themselves even though they had years left on their sentences. 

“There’s people in there that deserve a chance,” he says.

The decisions made by Lamont and his new appointee, Zaccagnini, have put their hopes on hold.

“Maybe it’s time to take a pause and let the legislature weigh in on what they think the rules of the road ought to be and make sure the advocates on both sides are at the table so we have a full discussion,” Lamont told The CT Mirror. After the board held a meeting with state officials and lawmakers last week, Lamont’s spokesperson said there would be no new commutations until “an expeditious review” of the board’s policies.

The governor’s office did not respond to requests for comment. 

Lamont has generally taken a different tack on criminal justice than his predecessor, Democrat Dan Malloy. Malloy promoted initiatives that reduced punishment for drug possession offenses and expediting pardon and parole processes, advocating for what he called a “second chance society.” Malloy also pressured the board to grant more parole applications.

Lamont largely ignored calls by criminal justice reformers to use his soft powers—that includes the authority to fire and appoint the board’s members—to push for more releases during the pandemic. When the GOP made the inverse argument this year, he acted to force a pause.

Connecticut Republicans have mounted tough-on-crime attacks for years, including targeting Lamont and other Democrats in the run-up to the 2022 midterms. In 2021, they convened multiple press conferences about car thefts. But Republicans did poorly last fall. Lamont won re-election by double digits and Democrats expanded their legislative majorities. 

“Voters in Connecticut sent a clear message in the fall that they were not buying whatever narrative the Republicans were trying to sell on crime,” said Gohara.

Despite these defeats, Republicans kept up their attacks on the board for being too willing to approve applications. At the press conference last month, they warned that “serious criminals” and “violent offenders” were being let out of prison decades before the end of their sentences. 

The board granted zero commutations in 2020, then only one in 2021. In 2022, it granted 71, a surge but still a small share of Connecticut’s incarcerated population. As of April 1, 2023, there were 10,010 people in the state’s unified system of prisons and jails. 

“This is why this whole thing is kind of absurd: the board has been relatively conservative in its approach to its power,” says Democratic Senator Gary Winfield, co-chair of the Judiciary Committee. “People saw a spike, recognized an opportunity to put victims in front of everybody and say, ‘We’re doing the wrong thing,’” he added.

Michael Lawlor, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of New Haven and under secretary of criminal justice policy and planning under Malloy, champions commutations as an important tool for rehabilitation.

“Should we have some type of avenue to consider some of these folks for a shot at release before they die?” he asks. “Without this option, there’s no hope at all that they will ever get out, and there’s no incentive to behave yourself, and there’s also no incentive to do anything constructive: take courses, express remorse, demonstrate that you’re a different person.”

Despite losing the chairmanship, Giles will remain on the Board of Pardons and Paroles as a regular member. Both legislative chambers voted to reappoint him to that position in April, even though some Democrats joined Republicans in opposing him. Two other board members who decided on commutations with Giles also survived legislative votes.

But Giles will no longer be in charge of the commutation process and he lost the prerogative of shaping the rules and deciding who gets to hear commutation applications.

Taubes says Giles’s demotion is a blow to reformers’ hope of using clemency to lessen incarceration. “If parole boards become subject to the political whims of the moment, let alone the least common denominator of some Republican misinformation campaign, then we will never be able to realize the potential value of parole boards in criminal justice reform,” he said.

Similar dynamics have percolated in other states like New York or Virginia, where reformers hope that state officials will staff the boards responsible for commutations or parole with people who are more open to second chances, while Republicans have sought to block changes. In Pennsylvania, which has near-record numbers of people serving life sentences, then-Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman worked to make the state’s Board of Pardons much more amenable to clemency and faced heavy GOP attacks over it in 2022, only to win his U.S. Senate race. 

Fetterman appointed formerly incarcerated Pennsylvanians and decarceral activists to work for the board. “We’ve all been in need of mercy and forgiveness at some point,” Celeste Trusty told Bolts last year after she became secretary of the board. (Trusty left the board this year after Fetterman went to Washington.) “But that’s not applied at all to how we sentence people.”

Gohara is dismayed that Connecticut, a former leader in criminal justice reform, now seems to be turning its back to that perspective.

“If it’s happening in Connecticut,” she said, “then you can only imagine, ‘Where else would be vulnerable to this?’”

The post Connecticut Governor Scrambles Pardons Board and Halts Clemency appeared first on Bolts.

Nailah Starks doesn’t recall when her father began taking his frustrations with life out on her mother. He would apologize later and promise not to hurt her anymore, only to abuse her again and again—a pattern so common that advocates call it the cycle of violence.  

Her mother, Tamika, split with her father when Nailah was in third grade, moving her and her three siblings from New Orleans to Atlanta, but that didn’t stop the violence. She remembers her mom calling the police and begging for help when he assaulted her during one visit, pointing to bruises he had left when the officers arrived and saying, “Look at my face.” 

When she was in fourth grade, Nailah and her siblings moved back to Louisiana, but were then abruptly uprooted from their new home in Avondale, across the river from New Orleans, and moved in with an uncle who lived in the small town of Independence, about an hour’s drive north. At first, they were told it was just for a few days, but days turned into months, then years without seeing their parents. Nailah says she assumed that her mother was on a business trip, and that’s what she started telling people until an older cousin corrected her. “Your mom isn’t on a business trip,” he told her. “She’s in jail.”

Nailah later learned that her mother had been charged with the second-degree murder of her father. After a jury deadlocked at her trial, Tamika Starks pled guilty to manslaughter in exchange for a 20-year prison sentence, avoiding a possible sentence of life without parole. “I spent the majority of my childhood angry at her,” Nailah said. She was also angry at her father for putting the family in those circumstances. As the oldest, Nailah felt like she had to parent her four siblings. “I feel like my childhood was taken from me,” she said.  

Now a senior in college and a mother herself, Nailah says she has forgiven both parents. And every other week, she drives with her three-year-old son nearly 100 miles to visit her mother in Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women. Tamika always insists on cooking them a pizza she buys at the vending machine, one of the few ways she can still mother her daughter. Each time the visit ends, Tamika’s grandson cries.

Nailah is part of a coalition of Louisiana activists, called Louisiana Survivors for Reform, who have experienced violence, including the murders of their loved ones, and who are pushing for sentencing reforms for domestic violence survivors. They are urging state lawmakers to pass what they are calling the Justice for Survivors Act, filed on March 31 in the state legislature by Senator Regina Barrow, which would enable domestic violence and trafficking survivors behind bars to apply for reduced sentences if their convictions stemmed from their abuse. 

The bill would also allow judges to sentence survivors to less time than those dictated by the state’s sentencing guidelines. Barrow says she was moved to introduce the bill after meeting with survivors incarcerated at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women. She listened to story after story about women’s attempts to stop or escape domestic violence and, in court, the barriers they faced in presenting evidence of that abuse in their defense. 

“It’s very apparent that there’s a gap in our law that does not allow that,” she told Bolts. The Act, she hoped, will provide domestic violence survivors the opportunity to have a fair trial in which all of their circumstances, including abuse, is taken into consideration. 

Harsh sentencing isn’t the only way the state of Louisiana fails victims of domestic violence, says Mariah Wineski, executive director of Louisiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence (LCADV). For years, Louisiana has ranked among the top five states for homicides of women murdered by men. In Louisiana, over 90 percent of those killings were by men who knew them and over 50 percent were by intimate partners. “That represents a massive systemic failure,” Wineski said. “We struggle with our systemic responses to domestic violence. In some ways, it’s completely insufficient,” she said, referring to the lack of shelter beds and other resources throughout the state. The scarcity creates a barrier that prevents many survivors from safely escaping abusive relationships. In 2020, the state had only 386 beds in 16 domestic violence shelters. That year, these shelters took in 2,212 people but each year between 2015 and 2020, turned away an average of 2,659 abuse victims.

In other ways, Wineski says, the response—which directs police to make arrests during domestic violence calls and does not take abuse into consideration during prosecution—can be “heavy-handed.”

“When we say survivors are criminalized and incarcerated for killing their abusers, no one [among domestic violence advocates] disagrees with us because everyone knows at least one survivor incarcerated for killing their abuser,” she reflected.

Katie Hunter-Lowrey, herself a crime survivor and an organizer with Louisiana Survivors for Reform, says harsh prison sentences against domestic violence survivors highlights how detached the victim-versus-offender binary painted by politicians and prosecutors is from reality. 

“Those of us who have interacted with law enforcement and have been criminalized or victim blamed or denied resources, we know that the system, as it exists, isn’t making us safer,” Hunter-Lowrey told Bolts, “and that those experiences with the system have been further traumatizing when we’re just trying to get and stay safe.”

Like many of the women advocating for Louisiana’s Justice for Survivors Act, Beatrice Taylor spent decades in prison for defending herself and wants to make sure others aren’t similarly punished for it.

In 1997, a jury sentenced Taylor to life without parole for the death of her abusive ex-boyfriend. The pair hadn’t been together long, Taylor recalled but, during their first month, she was already calling police about his violence. Each time she did, he would flee before officers arrived. Even after they split, he continued to harass and assault her. Once, he attempted to rape her, stopping only when she burned his ear with a lit cigarette. Taylor changed the locks, the window panes and even the entire door frame, but he continued to break in. “It wasn’t that I kept letting him come back into my life,” Taylor told Bolts. “He kept breaking into my house.”

The morning of December 2, 1996, after Taylor walked to the corner store to buy a pack of cigarettes, he ambushed her when she got home—first shoving her to the ground, and then pushing her into the kitchen of her small shotgun house. Blocking the front door, he threatened to kill her. 

Taylor says she grabbed a kitchen knife—a small one, she clarified—and raised it, yelling “Let me out!” She got halfway across the living room floor when he grabbed the hood of her coat, spun her around, and then started to lunge at her.

Taylor still remembers that moment: His full body weight came crashing down on her left foot, breaking her toes and leaving her in excruciating pain. “Then I saw his fist coming towards my nose as he yelled, ‘I will kill you now,’ and I raised my forearm so he wouldn’t hit my nose,” she recalled. “And I still have a knife in my hand.”

Taylor maintains that she didn’t realize that he had lunged into the knife. Instead, she focused on escaping—hobbling down the stairs and across the parking lot to a pay phone to call 911 yet again. This time when police arrived, he was dead.

The prosecutor didn’t see it as an accident or self-defense, charging her with second-degree murder. While preparing for trial, Taylor learned that her former boyfriend had a history of domestic violence, a history that was never introduced in court. The jury found her guilty. Taylor was sentenced to life without parole or, as she puts it, “death by incarceration.” She was one of 1,868 women imprisoned in Louisiana that year (and, anomalously, one of 590 white women compared to 1,275 Black women). 

By 2016, Taylor had long exhausted all of her legal appeals. The laws around domestic violence and self-defense remained unchanged. Her only hope was clemency, or a shortening of her sentence, and she already knew that Republican Governor Bobby Jindal had signaled that he was reluctant to grant clemency. But John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, had replaced him earlier that year.

One morning, Taylor picked up two bundles of a Catholic newspaper to bring to the prison chapel, where she worked and saw that Edwards, who is Catholic, had taken office. Instead of reporting to work, Taylor, who is also Catholic, sat on the chapel steps, opened the newspaper and read a speech they had reprinted from the new governor.

“I could feel the compassion in his words and I said to myself, ‘It is time,’” Taylor recalled. But after she began preparing her clemency petition, the prison flooded, destroying all documents and displacing the women to a shuttered and deteriorating juvenile prison. Taylor started over again. Three years later, the Domestic Violence Clinic at Tulane Law School picked up her case and presented it to the state’s parole and pardon board. They unanimously approved her petition and sent it on to the governor, who granted her clemency in summer 2020. She was released in October 2020.

Regardless of their conviction, Taylor says every woman she met in prison had similar experiences of violence and abuse. She has been determined to fight for them since getting out. She has thrown herself into advocating for the Justice for Survivors Act since learning about the bill.  

In January 2023, members of the state’s Human Trafficking Prevention Commission invited Taylor to speak and introduce the man who had granted her clemency. She accepted, not only to personally thank him, but to seize the opportunity to ask him to sign the Justice for Survivors Act into law. 

Taylor shared her story with the commission members, then introduced the governor. When she said his name, he flew from the back of the room to the podium, wrapped his arms around her and gave her a big hug as cameras flashed around them.

But Taylor wants more than just a photo opp with the governor. She wants to see him use his powers to grant clemency to help others still languishing at LCIW and to pass the Act to enable future survivors to avoid her fate. Edwards drew attention early in his first term with a spree of commutations and then picked-up the pace again after securing a second term in 2019, but state advocates have pushed him to do more. 

“No one should die of incarceration because she had to choose—instantly—her life over someone else’s,” Taylor recalls telling Edwards when they met. 

Time is running out since Edwards’s tenure ends in January. He is barred from running again this fall, and one of the frontrunners to replace him, Republican Attorney General Jeff Landry, is an outspoken foe of decarceral measures, adding pressure for a legislative solution this year.

In 2021, Republican state Senator Patrick McMath filed a resolution to create a Survivor Informed Taskforce to study the link between trauma, abuse, and subsequent incarceration and to make recommendations to Louisiana’s legislature. The task force—which included staff from legislators and the governor as well as prison officials, Wineski, Hunter-Lowrey and advocates for domestic violence victims—found that approximately 75 percent of the people imprisoned at Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women had identified as survivors of violence. The task force recommended several legislative pathways, including adapting affirmative defense statutes to consider self-defense and compulsion or duress, allowing judges to deviate from mandatory sentencing when presented with evidence of interpersonal violence or trafficking, and creating opportunities for resentencing for abuse and trafficking survivors.    

The Justice for Survivors Act incorporates these recommendations.  

The bill is not the first to address the intersections of abuse and incarceration. In 2019, New York passed the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act, which allows a sentencing judge to consider whether abuse was directly related to the person’s conviction, granting them the flexibility to deviate from mandatory sentencing guidelines. The Act also allows incarcerated survivors to apply for resentencing. The Act faced opposition from the state’s district attorneys’ association, which repeatedly claimed that such a law would flood the courts with applications for resentencing.

The predicted flood never materialized. The Survivors Justice Project at Brooklyn Law School has been tracking resentencing applications. Since the Act’s resentencing portion took effect in August 2019, the Project estimates that 100 incarcerated people have filed for resentencing under the Act. Three-quarters are in women’s prisons. Of those 100 people, 40 have been resentenced. Another 31 applications were denied and 28 applications are still pending. As of March 2023, New York prisons incarcerated 31,616 people. 

Last year, survivors and advocates testified before the Louisiana Senate about the need for a similar protection. During sessions, it’s not unusual for legislators to be on their phones, chatting with one another or walking in or out of the room. But when Taylor and another survivor shared their stories, senators snapped to attention. “You could see the true perplexity on several of the senators’ faces,” Hunter-Lowrey recalled. “You could see them wondering how a person who called the police, filed restraining orders, [or] legally owned her gun in a state that is very pro gun rights could be sentenced to life in prison for killing an abuser in self-defense.” Despite the hearing, the bill did not make it to the floor for a vote. Advocates are hopeful that it will do so, and pass, this year.

Taylor, who had knee surgery this month, is determined to testify when the hearing is scheduled. She cannot walk, but she plans to borrow a wheelchair from her church and members of the Promise of Justice Initiative have offered to push her across the Senate floor. She knows that, without the law, those she left at LCIW will die behind bars. 

From prison, Tamika Starks is allowing herself hope. “After suffering many years of all types of abuse and numerous phone calls to local authorities, I reacted in a manner I will regret all the days of my life,” she wrote from prison. “However, I am not sure which is worse. Given the revictimization i have experienced through my incarceration and in light of the trauma and loss my children have endured, I would rather ball up in the fetal position, cover my face and abdomen, then take a shower in my own bathroom instead of being confined to a facility which feeds the statement my [husband] told me, ‘No one will believe you.’ The Justice for Survivors Act will provide healing to souls which have suffered quietly from the epidemic of Domestic Violence. Additionally, the Justice for Survivors Act will correct a long standing social problem that has divided families and crowded prisons.”

As for her daughter Nailah, advocating for the Justice for Survivors Act is the first she’s publicly speaking about her family’s history with violence. In late February, she appeared on a panel at Louisiana State University to talk about her family’s experiences. All of her siblings came to support her, but she was still nervous. 

She hadn’t known that the other panelists all knew her mother. Three were formerly incarcerated survivors themselves; the fourth was a supervisor at the women’s prison. They welcomed and encouraged her, telling her how much they loved her mother. 

Starks shared her perspective of being the child of an incarcerated survivor. The attendees—a mixture of college students and community members—were receptive and engaged and she felt that she allowed them to see the ways in which incarceration affected not only her mother, but their entire family. 

She plans to continue sharing her experience and hopes that her college schedule will allow her to testify at the yet-to-be-scheduled legislative hearing about the bill. Meanwhile, she plans to attend the annual Survivors of Violence lobby day at the capitol in late April, the first time she will ever engage in direct advocacy.

“As a child of a domestic violence survivor, you don’t want to talk too much or say too much,” Nailah reflected. “You’re told that what you have to say isn’t important, so you stay quiet and hope for the best. But eventually you learn you’re not the only one so you have to say something.”

The post Domestic Violence Survivors Seek a Pathway Out of Louisiana Prisons appeared first on Bolts.

In recent years, prosecutors on a mission to challenge mass incarceration have been using their power to keep people out of prison, but now they’re beginning to turn their attention to those who are already locked up. Few have pursued this as promptly and publicly as Jason Williams, the new district attorney of New Orleans, who may be setting the bar for DAs nationwide. And this focus could be transformative in New Orleans, the largest city in a state known as the nation’s incarceration capital.

Since he entered office in January, Williams has rolled out sweeping changes. He has granted new trials to nearly two dozen people convicted by split juries, announced he would no longer oppose parole applications, dropped his predecessor’s efforts to maintain life without parole sentences for people convicted when they were minors, and moved to secure the release of multiple wrongfully convicted people.

“There are innocent people in jail,” said Williams, who was elected in 2020 on a progressive platform. “There are people in jail for sentences that are far longer than they should be. … There are people who got convicted without a fair trial.”

This retrospective approach to addressing injustice is taking shape beyond Louisiana too; prosecutors like George Gascón in Los Angeles County and Marilyn Mosby in Baltimore have established resentencing units that have reviewed lengthy sentences and released those serving them. 

This is a big departure from what has been the norm for decades. The traditional focal point of conviction integrity units has been innocence claims. But the post-conviction reviews that are springing up, in certain places thanks to legislative changes in state law, are taking a broader look at redressing excessive sentencing and other drivers of mass incarceration. 

“[Prosecutors] can have an enormous impact for post-conviction review because it’s not limited to people who are factually innocent,” said Lara Bazelon, a law professor and the director of the criminal juvenile justice and racial justice clinical programs at the University of San Francisco School of Law. “They can work backward and try to rectify really draconian sentences, and I feel like Orleans Parish is kind of ground zero for that.”

Williams has also taken steps to prevent people from going to jail in the first place by directing his staff not to prosecute for possession of personal amounts of most drugs.

One driver of mass incarceration in Louisiana is the “multiple-bill” statute, an “habitual offender” sentence enhancement. The statute enables prosecutors to use prior convictions as leverage to force longer sentences.

While campaigning last year, Williams pledged never to use the multi-bill statute. That commitment has expanded as his office now also reviews multi-bill cases handled by previous DAs. In Louisiana, nearly 40 percent of those imprisoned are serving maximum sentences that exceed 20 years.

“The fact that they are looking at these cases is really unprecedented,” said Norris Henderson, founder and executive director of VOTE, an organization of formerly incarcerated people who work to end mass incarceration. “The ‘long-timers’ are there [in prison] because they got these habitual sentences … And what we found out during our research was that it wasn’t really but three or four parishes using the multi-bill exclusively, [including] Orleans Parish.”

Emily Maw, the Civil Rights Division chief under Williams, estimates that nearly 700 people are in prison from Orleans Parish because of excessive sentences imposed by  prosecutors who used the multi-bill statute. 

In her first weeks on the job, Maw joined with a group of defense attorneys to motion for a “negotiated settlement” in court which enabled Herbert Estes, a New Orleans man with leukemia, to be released from prison. Estes had been serving a life without parole sentence after former DA Harry Connick Sr. used the multi-bill statute to compel the sentence. This month, the office supported the release of Guy Frank, who received a multi-bill sentence during Connick’s tenure and was in prison for 20 years for stealing two shirts.

“We know that Orleans Parish is mass producing often-inaccurate convictions and certainly excessive sentences,” Maw said. “We have to try to remedy those cases by category, because there’s just so many of them—more so than any other district attorney’s office in the country.”

Maw, a former director of the Innocence Project New Orleans, which advocated for Frank’s release, says that in addition to tackling multi-bill cases, her division is identifying who is in prison because of nonunanimous juries. 

In Louisiana, nonunanimous, or split, jury convictions were written into the state constitution in 1898 as a defense by white lawmakers eager to quell the influence of Black jurors. This law disadvantaged Black people, according to The New Orleans Advocate, by acting “as a capstone to trial system that becomes more titled against black defendants at each stage: when jurors are summoned, when they’re picked for juries, and in deliberation rooms, where voices of dissent can be ignored.” 

According to Maw, approximately 340 New Orleanians are in state prison based on a conviction by a split jury.

The Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that guilty verdicts for criminal trials must be unanimous. The Court’s decision in Ramos vs. Louisiana affected cases still in the appeals process, but doesn’t apply to old cases. However, Williams’s office has decided to waive objections to new trials for those convicted by split juries even if those cases are no longer pending appeal. Already, two dozen new trials are underway.

Ben Cohen, one of the lawyers who led the Ramos lawsuit, now serves as chief of the Appeals Division under Williams.  

“Our job is to do justice, not to defend convictions or secure convictions,” Cohen said. “We would be avoiding our legal and moral responsibility if we didn’t look backward, and we only looked forward.”

There are numerous ways to do that, Cohen told the Appeal: Political Report. Prosecutors have the discretion to permit opportunities for commutations, clemency, or parole. These can be avenues to remedy cases where the factors working against defendants aren’t as cut and dry. “[Nonunanimous juries and the habitual offender statute] are the most obvious catalysts for injustice, but they are not the only ones,” Cohen said. He noted that shoddy police work, speedy courtroom trials, and broader conditions of poverty have also stacked the deck against people accused of crimes.

Cohen added that the office will no longer use procedural barriers to slow down appeals or motions for post-conviction relief. This is part of a broader policy of the office to stop creating obstacles to release by default.

“One of the first policies that [Williams’s office] produced was that they were no longer going to send [prosecutors] to parole hearings and contest everything,” Henderson said. “That was the first thing that gave me an indicator that promises made were going to be promises kept.”

Williams announced in January that his office would no longer oppose any parole or pardon application. This is a major departure from his predecessor’s policy of routinely opposing applications.

Williams’s office has also withdrawn his predecessor’s bids to maintain life without parole sentences for people convicted as children, enabling them to apply for parole. 

In 2012 and 2016, the Supreme Court ended mandatory juvenile life without parole sentences, and applied this ruling retroactively. In response, Louisiana made people sentenced while minors automatically eligible for parole unless DAs filed notices in court objecting to this. Williams’s predecessor Leon Cannizaro was doing just that in many cases. But Williams’s decision to withdraw those motions means that a dozen people will now be newly eligible to apply for parole.

Throughout the state, approximately 300 people are serving life without parole sentences for crimes that they committed while children. 

“I know all 300 of them,” Henderson said. “Other people just see something abstract. But I see an individual who I know personally who is serving life without parole because he was a kid. … To see, one day, there’s no hope of you ever getting out of prison, and the next day you’re walking out the gate—that speaks volumes.”

Besides expanding the scope of post-conviction review, Williams’s office is still intent on rooting out wrongful convictions and freeing innocent people. In March, prosecutors worked with Bazelon to secure the release of one of her clients, Yutico Briley, who was serving a 60-year sentence for an armed robbery he didn’t commit.

Bazelon said the weighty sentence was handed down in a process that “probably lasted five minutes. It took less than five minutes to just throw him away. And I don’t think people understand that that is routine.”

Williams and his team have faced obstacles to their efforts: Not only is the new approach a vast culture change for many of the staff, but the processes for post-conviction review also have to be developed in an office with limited capacities and poor paperwork. 

“This is extremely painstaking and difficult work,” Williams told the Political Report. “Our file clerks literally had to find these records that are all over the place and not in good working order. … They’re not well organized. They’re not electronically available. So, this review involves moving boxes in and out of the office.”

Williams hopes that all of these changes will improve the reputation of the office and encourage community members to want to work with prosecutors when they experience crime.

“We are repairing that breach of trust with our community,” said Williams. “I believe that we will find more robust participation in the process going forward in terms of new and existing cases if we can show that we are willing to do the hard work of confronting the sins of past administrations.”

The post In Nation’s Incarceration Capital, a New D.A. Is Freeing People From Prison appeared first on Bolts.