Just Mercy (38 page)

We filed a petition to challenge Joe’s sentence as unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment. We knew that there would be procedural objections to filing it nearly twenty years after his sentencing, but we thought the Supreme Court’s recent decision banning the death penalty for juveniles could provide a basis for relief. In 2005, the Court recognized that differences between children and adults required that kids be shielded from the death penalty under the Eighth Amendment. My staff and I discussed how we might use the constitutional reasoning that banned the execution of children as a legal basis for challenging juvenile life-without-parole sentences.

We filed similar challenges to life-without-parole sentences in several other cases involving children, including Ian Manuel’s case. Ian was still being held in solitary confinement in Florida. We filed cases in Missouri, Michigan, Iowa, Mississippi, North Carolina, Arkansas, Delaware, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and South Dakota. We filed a case in Pennsylvania to help Trina Garnett, the girl who had been convicted for arson. She was still struggling at the women’s prison but was excited about the possibility of our doing something to change her sentence. We filed a case in California for Antonio Nuñez.

We filed two cases in Alabama. Ashley Jones was a fourteen-year-old girl who had been convicted of killing two family members when her older boyfriend tried to help her escape her family. Ashley suffered from a horrific history of abuse and neglect. When she was still a teenager serving her sentence at the Tutwiler Prison for Women, she started writing to me to ask about various legal decisions she’d read about in the newspaper. She never asked for legal assistance; she simply asked about what she’d read and expressed interest in the law and our work. She started sending notes congratulating me and EJI whenever we won a death penalty appeal. When we decided to challenge
death-in-prison sentences imposed on children, I told her we might be able to finally challenge her sentence. She was thrilled.

Evan Miller was another fourteen-year-old condemned to die in prison in Alabama. Evan is from a poor white family in North Alabama. His difficult life was punctuated by suicide attempts that started at age seven when he was in elementary school. His parents were abusive and had drug addiction problems, so he was in and out of foster care, but he was living with his mother at the time of the crime. A middle-aged neighbor, Cole Cannon, had come over one night seeking to buy drugs from Evan’s mother. The fourteen-year-old Evan and his sixteen-year-old friend went to the man’s house with him to play cards. Cannon gave the teens drugs and played drinking games with them. At one point, he sent the boys out to buy more drugs. The boys returned and stayed over as it got later and later. Eventually the boys thought Cannon had passed out and tried to steal his wallet. Cannon was startled awake and jumped on Evan. The older boy responded by hitting the man in the head with a bat. Both boys started beating him and then set his trailer on fire. Cole Cannon died, and Evan and his friend were charged with capital murder. The older boy made a deal with prosecutors and got a parole-eligible life sentence, while Evan was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.

I got involved in Evan’s case right after his trial and filed a motion to reduce his sentence, even though it was the mandatory punishment for someone convicted of capital murder who was too young to be executed. At a hearing, I asked the judge to reconsider Evan’s sentence in light of his age. The prosecutor argued, “I think he should be executed. He deserves the death penalty.” He then lamented that the law no longer authorized the execution of children because he just couldn’t wait to put this fourteen-year-old boy in the electric chair and kill him. The judge denied our motion.

When I visited Evan at the jail, we would have long talks. He loved to talk about anything he could think of when we were together to extend our visits. We talked about sports and exercise, we talked about books, we talked about his family, we talked about music, we talked
about all the things he wanted to do when he grew up. He was usually animated and excited about something, although when he didn’t hear from his family for a while or had to deal with some bad incident at the prison, he would become extremely depressed. He couldn’t understand some of the hostile and violent behavior he saw from prisoners and the other people around him. He once told me that a guard had punched him in the chest just because he had asked a question about meal times. He started crying as he told me this because he just couldn’t understand why the officer had done that.

Evan was sent to the St. Clair Correctional Facility, a maximum-security adult prison. Not long after he first arrived, he was attacked by another prisoner, who stabbed him nine times. He recovered without serious physical problems but was traumatized by the experience and disoriented by the violence. When he talked about his own act of violence, he seemed deeply confused about how it was possible he could have done something so destructive.

Most of the juvenile lifer cases we handled involved clients who shared Evan’s confusion about their adolescent behavior. Many had matured into adults who were much more thoughtful and reflective; they were now capable of making responsible and appropriate decisions. Almost all of the cases involved condemned people marked by the tragic irony that they were now nothing like the confused children who had committed a violent crime; they had all changed in some significant way. This made them distinct from most of my clients who committed crimes as adults. That I was involved in the cases of teens who’d committed violent crimes was itself ironic.

I was sixteen years old, living in southern Delaware. I was headed outside one day when our phone rang. I watched my mother answer it as I strolled past her. A minute later I heard her scream inside the house. I ran back inside and saw her lying on the floor, sobbing, “Daddy, Daddy” while the phone’s receiver dangled from its base. I picked it
up; my aunt was on the line. She told me that my grandfather had been murdered.

My grandparents had been separated for many years, and my grandfather had for some time lived alone in the South Philadelphia housing projects. It was there that he was attacked and stabbed to death by several teens who had broken into his apartment to steal his black-and-white television set. He was eighty-six years old.

Our large family was devastated by his senseless murder. My grandmother, who had separated from my grandfather many years earlier, was especially unnerved by the crime and his death. I had older cousins who worked in law enforcement and sought information about the boys who committed the crime—I remember them being more astonished than vengeful about the immaturity and lack of judgment the juveniles had demonstrated. We all kept saying and thinking the same thing:
They didn’t have to kill him
. There was no way an eighty-six-year-old man could have stopped them from getting away with their paltry loot. My mother could never make sense of it. And neither could I. I knew kids at school who seemed out of control and violent, but still I wondered how someone could be so pointlessly destructive. My grandfather’s murder left us with so many questions.

Now, decades later, I was starting to understand. In preparing litigation on behalf of the children we were representing, it was clear that these shocking and senseless crimes couldn’t be evaluated honestly without understanding the lives these children had been forced to endure. And, in banning the death penalty for juveniles, the Supreme Court had paid great attention to the emerging body of medical research about adolescent development and brain science and its relevance to juvenile crime and culpability.

Contemporary neurological, psychological, and sociological evidence has established that children are impaired by immature judgment, an underdeveloped capacity for self-regulation and responsibility,
vulnerability to negative influences and outside pressures, and a lack of control over their own impulses and their environment. Generally considered to encompass ages twelve to eighteen, adolescence is defined by radical transformation, including the obvious and often distressing physical changes associated with puberty (increases in height and weight and sex-related changes) as well as progressive gains in the capacity for reasoned and mature judgment, impulse control, and autonomy. As we later explained to the Court, experts had come to the following conclusion:

These biological and psychosocial developments explain what is obvious to parents, teachers, and any adult who reflects on his or her own teenage years: Young teens lack the maturity, independence, and future orientation that adults have acquired. It seemed odd to have to explain in a court of law something so fundamental about childhood, but the commitment to harsh punishments for children was so intense and reactionary that we had to articulate these basic facts.

We argued in court that, relative to that of adults, young teenage judgment is handicapped in nearly every conceivable way: Young adolescents lack life experience and background knowledge to inform their choices; they struggle to generate options and to imagine consequences;
and, perhaps for good reason, they lack the necessary self-confidence to make reasoned judgments and stick by them. We argued that neuroscience and new information about brain chemistry help explain the impaired judgment that teens often display. When these basic deficits that burden all children are combined with the environments that some poor children experience—environments marked by abuse, violence, dysfunction, neglect, and the absence of loving caretakers—adolescence can leave kids vulnerable to the sort of extremely poor decision making that results in tragic violence.

We were able to make persuasive arguments about the differences between children and adults, but that wasn’t the only obstacle to relief. The Supreme Court’s Eighth Amendment precedent requires not only that a particular sentence offend “evolving standards of decency” but also that it be “unusual.” In the cases where the Supreme Court had previously granted relief under the Eighth Amendment, the number of sentences challenged usually totaled fewer than a hundred or so nationwide. In 2002, there were about a hundred people with mental retardation facing execution when the Court banned the death penalty for people with intellectual disability. In 2005, there were fewer than seventy-five juvenile offenders on death row when the Court banned the death penalty for kids. Even smaller numbers accompanied the Court’s decisions banning the death penalty for non-homicide offenses.

Our litigation strategy was complicated by the fact that more than 2,500 children in the United States had been sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. We decided to focus on two subsets of kids to help the Court grant relief if it wasn’t ready to ban all life sentences without parole for juveniles. We focused on the youngest kids, who were thirteen and fourteen. There were fewer than a hundred children under the age of fifteen who had been sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. We also focused on the children who, like Joe Sullivan, Ian Manuel, and Antonio Nuñez, had been convicted of non-homicide offenses. Most juveniles sentenced to life imprisonment without parole had been convicted of homicide crimes. We estimated there were
fewer than two hundred juvenile offenders serving life without parole for non-homicide offenses.

We argued that the ban on the death penalty had implications because a death-in-prison sentence is also a terminal, unchangeable, once-and-for-all judgment on the whole life of a human being that declares him or her forever unfit to be part of civil society. We asked courts to recognize that such a judgment cannot rationally be passed on children below a certain age because they are unfinished products, human works in progress. They stand at a peculiarly vulnerable moment in their lives. Their potential for growth and change is enormous. Almost all of them will outgrow criminal behavior, and it is practically impossible to detect the few who will not. They are “
the products of an environment over which they have no real control—passengers through narrow pathways in a world they never made,” as we wrote in our brief.

We emphasized the incongruity of not allowing children to smoke, drink, vote, drive without restrictions, give blood, buy guns, and a range of other behaviors because of their well-recognized lack of maturity and judgment while simultaneously treating some of the most at-risk, neglected, and impaired children exactly the same as full-grown adults in the criminal justice system.

Initially, we had little success with these arguments. Joe Sullivan’s judge ruled that our claims were “meritless.” In other states, we were met with similar skepticism and resistance. Eventually we exhausted options provided by the state of Florida in Joe Sullivan’s case and filed an appeal in the U.S. Supreme Court. In May 2009, the Supreme Court agreed to review the case. It felt like a miracle. Review in the Supreme Court is rare enough, but the possibility that the Court might create constitutional relief for children sentenced to die in prison made this opportunity even more thrilling. It was a chance to change the rules across the country.

The Court granted review in Joe’s case and in another Florida case that involved a sixteen-year-old teen convicted of a non-homicide and sentenced to life with no parole. Terrance Graham was from Jacksonville,
Florida, and had been on probation when he was accused of trying to rob a store. As a result of his new arrest, the judge revoked Terrance’s probation and sentenced him to die in prison. Because both Joe’s case and the Graham case involved non-homicides, it was likely that if we won a favorable ruling from the Court, it would only apply to life-without-parole sentences imposed on juveniles convicted of non-homicides, but that was an exciting possibility.