Just Mercy (22 page)

After sentencing, Trina was immediately shipped off to an adult prison for women. Now sixteen, Trina walked through the gates of the State Correctional Institution at Muncy, an adult prison for women, terrified, still suffering from trauma and mental illness, and intensely vulnerable—with the knowledge that she would never leave. Prison spared Trina the uncertainty of homelessness but presented new dangers and challenges. Not long after she arrived at Muncy, a male correctional officer pulled her into a secluded area and raped her.

The crime was discovered when Trina became pregnant. As is often
the case, the correctional officer was fired but not criminally prosecuted. Trina remained imprisoned and gave birth to a son. Like hundreds of women who give birth while in prison, Trina was completely unprepared for the stress of childbirth. She delivered her baby while handcuffed to a bed.
It wasn’t until 2008 that most states abandoned the practice of shackling or handcuffing incarcerated women during delivery.

Trina’s baby boy was taken away from her and placed in foster care. After this series of events—the fire, the imprisonment, the rape, the traumatic birth, and then the seizure of her son—Trina’s mental health deteriorated further. Over the years, she became less functional and more mentally disabled. Her body began to spasm and quiver uncontrollably, until she required a cane and then a wheelchair. By the time she had turned thirty, prison doctors diagnosed her with multiple sclerosis, intellectual disability, and mental illness related to trauma.

Trina had filed a civil suit against the officer who raped her, and the jury awarded her a judgment of $62,000.
The guard appealed, and the Court reversed the verdict because the correctional officer had not been permitted to tell the jury that Trina was in prison for murder. Consequently, Trina never received any financial aid or services from the state to compensate her for being violently raped by one of its “correctional” officers.

In 2014, Trina turned fifty-two. She has been in prison for thirty-eight years.
She is one of nearly five hundred people in Pennsylvania who have been condemned to mandatory life imprisonment without parole for crimes they were accused of committing when they were between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. It is the largest population of child offenders condemned to die in prison in any single jurisdiction in the world.

In 1990, Ian Manuel and two older boys attempted to rob a couple who were out for dinner in Tampa, Florida. Ian was thirteen years old. When Debbie Baigre resisted, Ian shot her with a handgun given to
him by the older boys. The bullet went through Baigre’s cheek, shattering several teeth and severely damaging her jaw. All three boys were arrested and charged with armed robbery and attempted homicide.

Ian’s appointed lawyer encouraged him to plead guilty, assuring him that he would be sentenced to fifteen years in prison. The lawyer didn’t realize that two of the charges against Ian were punishable with sentences of life imprisonment without parole. The judge accepted Ian’s plea and then sentenced him to life with no parole. Even though he was thirteen, the judge condemned Ian for living in the streets, for not having good parental supervision, and for his multiple prior arrests for shoplifting and minor property crimes. Ian was sent to an adult prison—the Apalachee Correctional Institution, one of the toughest prisons in Florida.
The correctional staff at the prison processing center couldn’t find any uniforms that would fit a boy Ian’s size, so they cut six inches from the bottom of their smallest pants.
Juveniles housed in adult prisons are five times more likely to be the victims of sexual assault, so the staff at Apalachee put Ian, who was small for his age, in solitary confinement.

Solitary confinement at Apalachee means living in a concrete box the size of a walk-in closet. You get your meals through a slot, you do not see other inmates, and you never touch or get near another human being. If you “act out” by saying something insubordinate or refusing to comply with an order given to you by a correctional officer, you are forced to sleep on the concrete floor of your cell without a mattress. If you shout or scream, your time in solitary is extended; if you hurt yourself by refusing to eat or mutilating your body, your time in solitary is extended; if you complain to officers or say anything menacing or inappropriate, your time in solitary is extended. You get three showers a week and are allowed forty-five minutes in a small caged area for exercise a few times a week. Otherwise you are alone, hidden away in your concrete box, week after week, month after month.

In solitary, Ian became a self-described “cutter”; he would take anything sharp on his food tray to cut his wrists and arms just to watch
himself bleed. His mental health unraveled, and he attempted suicide several times. Each time he hurt himself or acted out, his time in isolation was extended.

Ian spent eighteen years in uninterrupted solitary confinement.

Once a month, Ian was allowed to make a phone call. Soon after he arrived in prison, on Christmas Eve in 1992, he used his call to reach out to Debbie Baigre, the woman he shot. When she answered the phone, Ian spilled out an emotional apology, expressing his deep regret and remorse. Ms. Baigre was stunned to hear from the boy who had shot her, but she was moved by his call. She had physically recovered from the shooting and was working to become a successful bodybuilder and had started a magazine focused on women’s health. She was a determined woman who didn’t let the shooting derail her from her goals. That first surprising phone call led to a regular correspondence. Ian had been neglected by his family before the crime took place. He’d been left to wander the streets with little parental or family support. In solitary, he met few prisoners or correctional staff.
As he sank deeper into despair, Debbie Baigre became one of the few people in Ian’s life who encouraged him to remain strong.

After communicating with Ian for several years, Baigre wrote the court and told the judge who sentenced Ian of her conviction that his sentence was too harsh and that his conditions of confinement were inhumane. She tried to talk to prison officials and gave interviews to the press to draw attention to Ian’s plight. “No one knows more than I do how destructive and reckless Ian’s crime was. But what we’re currently doing to him is mean and irresponsible,” she told one reporter. “When this crime was committed, he was a child, a thirteen-year-old boy with a lot of problems, no supervision, and no help available. We are not children.”

The courts ignored Debbie Baigre’s call for a reduced sentence.

By 2010, Florida had sentenced more than a hundred children to life imprisonment without parole for non-homicide offenses,
several of whom were thirteen years old at the time of the crime.
All of the
youngest condemned children—thirteen or fourteen years of age—were black or Latino.
Florida had the largest population in the world of children condemned to die in prison for non-homicides.

The section of South Central Los Angeles where Antonio Nuñez lived was plagued by gang violence. Antonio’s mother would force her children to the floor when shooting erupted outside their crowded home, which happened with disturbing regularity. Nearly a dozen of their neighbors were shot and killed after being caught in the crossfire of gun violence.

The difficulties outside Antonio’s home were compounded by severe domestic abuse inside the home. From the time Antonio was in diapers, he endured abusive beatings by his father, who hit him with his hand, fist, belt, and extension cords, causing bruises and cuts; he also witnessed terrifying conflicts in which his parents would violently assault each other and threaten to kill one another. The violence was so bad that on more than one occasion Antonio called the police. He began experiencing severe nightmares from which he awoke screaming. Antonio’s depressed mother neglected him; when he cried, she just left him alone. The only activity she could recall ever attending for Antonio was his graduation from a Drug Abuse Resistance Education program in elementary school.

“
He was excited to take his picture with the police officer,” she would later say. “He wanted to be a police officer when he grew up.”

In September 1999, a month after he turned thirteen, Antonio Nuñez was riding his bicycle near his home when a stranger shot him in his stomach, side, and arm. Antonio collapsed onto the street. His fourteen-year-old brother José heard him screaming and ran to his aid. José was shot in the head and killed when he responded to his little brother’s call for help. Antonio suffered serious internal injuries that hospitalized him for weeks.

When Antonio was released from the hospital, his mother sent him to live with relatives in Las Vegas, where he tried to recover from
the tragedy of José’s death. Antonio was relieved to be away from the dangers of South Central Los Angeles. He stayed out of trouble, was helpful and obedient at home, and spent evenings doing his homework with help from his cousin’s husband. He put the gangs and violence of South Central behind him and showed remarkable progress. But within a year, California probation authorities ordered him to return to Los Angeles because he was on probation following his adjudication as a ward of the court for a prior offense.

In poor urban neighborhoods across the United States, black and brown boys routinely have multiple encounters with the police. Even though many of these children have done nothing wrong, they are targeted by police, presumed guilty, and suspected by law enforcement of being dangerous or engaged in criminal activity. The random stops, questioning, and harassment dramatically increase the risk of arrest for petty crimes. Many of these children develop criminal records for behavior that more affluent children engage in with impunity.

Forced back to South Central, blocks from where his brother was murdered, Antonio struggled. A court later found that “[l]iving just blocks from where he was shot and his brother was killed, Nuñez suffered trauma symptoms, including flashbacks, an urgent need to avoid the area, a heightened awareness of potential threats, and an intensified need to protect himself from real or perceived threats.”
He got his hands on a gun for self-defense but was quickly arrested for it and placed in a juvenile camp where supervisors reported that he eagerly participated in and positively responded to the structured environment and guidance of staff members.

After returning from the camp, Antonio was invited to a party where two men twice Antonio’s age told him that they were planning to fake a kidnapping to get money from a relative who would pay the ransom. They insisted that Antonio join them. Fourteen-year-old Antonio got in a car with the men to pick up the ransom money. The pretend victim sat in the backseat, while Juan Perez drove and Antonio sat in the passenger seat. Before they arrived at their Orange County destination to retrieve the money, they found themselves being
followed—and then chased—by two Latino men in a gray van. At some point, Perez and the other man gave Antonio a gun and told him to shoot at the van, and a dangerous high-speed shoot-out unfolded. The men chasing them were undercover police officers—but Antonio didn’t know that when he fired. When a marked police car joined the pursuit, Antonio dropped the gun just before the car crashed into some trees. No one was injured, but Antonio and Perez were charged with aggravated kidnapping and attempted murder of the police officers.

Antonio and his twenty-seven-year-old co-defendant were tried together in a joint trial, and both were found guilty. Under California law, a juvenile has to be at least sixteen to be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for murder. But there is no minimum age for kidnapping, so the Orange County judge sentenced Antonio to imprisonment until death, asserting that he was a dangerous gang member who could never change or be rehabilitated, despite his difficult background and the absence of any significant criminal history. The judge sent him to California’s dangerous, overcrowded adult prisons. At fourteen, Antonio became the youngest person in the United States condemned to die in prison for a crime in which no one was physically injured.

Most adults convicted of the kinds of crimes with which Trina, Ian, and Antonio were charged are not sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. In the federal system, adults who unintentionally commit arson-murder where more than one person is killed usually receive sentences that permit release in less than twenty-five years.
Many adults convicted of attempted murder in Florida serve less than ten years in prison. Gun violence with no reported injuries frequently result in sentences of less than ten years for adult defendants, even in this era of harsh punishments.

Children who commit serious crimes long have been vulnerable to
adult prosecution and punishment in many states, but the development of juvenile justice systems has meant that most child offenders were sent to juvenile detention facilities. Juvenile justice systems vary across the United States, but most states would have kept Trina, Ian, or Antonio in juvenile custody until they turned eighteen or twenty-one. At most, they might have stayed in custody until age twenty-five or older, if their institutional history or juvenile detention record suggested that they were still a threat to public safety.

In an earlier era, if you were thirteen or fourteen when you committed a crime, you would find yourself in the adult system with a lengthy sentence only if the crime was unusually high-profile—or committed by a black child against a white person in the South.
For instance, in the infamous Scottsboro Boys case in the 1930s, two of the defendants, Roy Wright and Eugene Williams, were just thirteen years old when they were wrongfully convicted of rape and sentenced to death in Alabama.

In another signature case of juvenile prosecution, George Stinney, a fourteen-year-old black boy, was executed by the State of South Carolina on June 16, 1944. Three months earlier, two young white girls who lived nearby in Alcolu, a small mill town where the races were separated by railroad tracks, had gone out to pick flowers and never returned home. Scores of people across the community went searching for the missing girls. Young George and his siblings joined the search party. At some point, George mentioned to one of the white adult searchers that he and his sister had seen the girls earlier in the day. The girls had approached them while they were playing outside and asked where they could find flowers.