According to a statement released yesterday, the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Michigan have filed a lawsuit on behalf of nine Michigan citizens sentenced to life in prison without parole for crimes committed when they were minors. The lawsuit charges that a Michigan sentencing scheme that denies the now-adult plaintiffs an opportunity for parole and a fair hearing to demonstrate growth, maturity and rehabilitation constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, violating their constitutional rights.

Deborah Labelle, an attorney for the ACLU of Michigan’s Juvenile LWOP initiative said, “These life without parole sentences ignore the very real differences between children and adults, abandoning the concepts of redemption and second chances.”

Michigan law requires that children as young as 14 who are charged with certain felonies be tried as adults and, if convicted, sentenced without judicial discretion to life without parole. Judges and juries are not allowed to take into account the fact that children bear less responsibility for their actions and have a greater capacity for change, growth and rehabilitation than adults.

According to Labelle, the practice is simply unfair and demonstrates the same apparent hypocrisy demonstrated in states like Colorado through practices like direct file.

“As a society, we believe children do not have the capacity to handle adult responsibilities, so we don’t allow them to use alcohol, join the Army, serve on a jury or vote – yet we sentence them to the harshest punishment we have – to die in adult prisons.”

The U.S. is the only country in the world that sentences youth to life without parole. This includes many individuals who were sentenced to life without parole who were present or committed a felony when a homicide was committed by someone else.

“Sentencing children to spend the rest of their lives in prison without giving them some opportunity for parole is unfair, unconstitutional and un-American, and it completely ignores the human potential – especially in children – for rehabilitation,” said Steven Watt, staff attorney with the ACLU Human Rights Program. “In America, we should not be locking children up and throwing away the key without affording them a second chance.”

The ACLU’s complaint asks the court to declare that denying children a meaningful opportunity for parole violates the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment and Fourteenth Amendment right to due process. It also alleges violations of the plaintiffs’ rights under international law and treaties.

Michigan’s laws run afoul of the U.S. Supreme Court’s admonitions that children must be treated differently in our criminal justice system. In May, the Court ruled in Graham v. Florida that it is cruel and unusual punishment to sentence juvenile offenders who did not commit homicide to life in prison without any chance of parole. In 2005, the Court ruled similarly in Roper v. Simmons that executing juvenile offenders is unconstitutional. Both decisions recognized that juveniles bear less responsibility for their actions than adults and have a greater capacity for change, growth and rehabilitation, and that children should not be punished with the harshest sentence that can be imposed on adults.

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan against Jennifer Granholm, Governor of Michigan, Patricia Caruso, Director of the Michigan Department of Corrections and Barbara Sampson, Chair of the Michigan Parole Board.

As this moving blog demonstrates, people who have honestly and openly wrestled with the idea of Juvenile Justice and Sentencing issues must inevitable reach a point where they see that, as our justice system stands now, it is incapable of giving youthful offenders the chance at rehabilitation that they deserve while simultaneously giving them the correction that their crime demands.

It is no surprise that we as a society find ourselves in this situation.  Life can be brutal, and especially so for children.  The number of violent crimes committed by minors is direct proof that we as a society have made some enormous errors, somewhere along the way.  For example, we rightly condemn forced sterilization, but at the same time do nothing to protect innocent babies born to drug addicted prostitute mothers.  We set up a foster care system that too often takes children from one abusive situation only to place them in a worse one.

Conservatives who preach ad nauseam about “traditional family values” are among the first in line to turn their backs on the possibility of meaningful reform to the current foster care system, preferring to insist that the state has no place coming between a child and has/her parents.  I would love to whole heartedly agree with them, but for the fact that they cannot see that their ideology depends upon the parents actually being parents.  It is not enough to insist that the government stay out of peoples lives.  What has to be realized is that the government should only stay out of peoples lives when the people show that they are capable of living those lives responsibly.  On the other hand, liberals whose hearts bleed for every young person in jail are the first to turn their backs on the very real and painful plight of the victims and their families.  Yet apart from these two view points, what else is there?

As the number of broken homes and children in foster care continues to grow, as membership in violent gangs grows, and as the number of minors behind bars increases, we as a society cannot sit back and rely on our justice system, designed for adults, to adequately dispense justice.

Yet the question remains, what else is there?  It is a heinous idea to argue that the government take some sort of active role in preventing the birth of a child into a certain set of circumstances.  It is an impossible idea to argue that any governmental, or private, entity can provide for the thousands of children trapped in our deeply flawed foster care system.  Yet again, what else is there?

Until that question is answered, miscarriages of justice in the name of being “tough on crime” will continue, young people will continue to be ineptly dealt with by a justice system not equipped or intended to deal with them, and violence and social decay will continue to advance in our national statistical studies.

It is time we looked at ourselves in the mirror and for once honestly asked ourselves to answer the question, what else is there?.

After visiting the Limon Correctional Facility in July, StopDirectFile.org began corresponding with Erik Jensen. Though Jensen only participated peripherally in the crime, he was convicted of murder at the age of 17 in 1999. He is currently serving life without the possibility of parole. StopDirectFile.org will continue to correspond with Jensen over the coming months to ask him about his experiences with life in prison and a justice system that abandoned him before he was even old enough to influence it.

Dear StopDirectFile.org:

Hey there. Sorry it took me so long to get back to you. I was waiting for you to send the questions you wanted answered, but when I was told you already had, I went back and looked and it was so.

As to the answers:

1. The only access to computers we have is in an academic situation for typing or select programs. The Internet terrifies [Department of Corrections], and just about every appliance is seen as a gateway to it. So much of the population can’t even use a a computer at all.

2. Direct File takes all of the power originally meant to reside in state, judiciary and with individuals and assigns it to one person, who, with the aid of mandatory sentencing now dictates not only that the youth will be charged as an adult, but will face a certain sentence regardless of what a judge thinks. The justice system was always meant to provide a fair balance, but now it is tipped heavily. The advice I would give juveniles currently facing direct file is to A) hire a lawyer versed in juvenile and adult law, transfer proceedings and who will attack the right of the DA, appeal to the judge and demand proof after proof. The more knowledgeable you are, the better. Ignorance was my worst enemy.

3. The biggest difference now, as opposed to when I was a child, is my ability to reason consequences and to logic out other people’s motivations and empathize with their realities. As a kid, it was always me, me, me, and who cares what happens. As an adult, I am cognizant of the world and the small role I play in it, rather than the egocentric, careless viewpoint I had prior.

Yours,
Erik Jensen

A recent article by Elizabeth Renter at Change.org profiles 16-year-old William Murphy who is facing a stiff sentence for killing his 15-year-old friend, Otilio Rubio. The problem is that Murphy, who is facing 50 years in prison didn’t actually kill Rubio and no one is claiming that he did.

One night Murphy and Rubio, along with another friend, decided to break into the home of Jose Oyola-Aponte. Oyola-Aponte heard his bedroom window break and defended himself by firing his .40 caliber Glock at the intruders. One bullet hit Murphy in the stomach and another hit Rubio in the head. Rubio died and because Murphy was involved in the commission of a felony at the time of the death, he was charged with murder under the felony murder rule.

There are many examples of juveniles who are charged under felony murder statutes across the United States. Shortly after the 1999 Columbine massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado a young man named Nathan Ybanez killed his mother after a dispute in their home. Ybanez’s friend Erik Jensen was there and tried to help Ybanez run away after the incident. Both boys were charged with murder and eventually sentenced as adults to life without parole.

The point is that this kind of circumstantial treatment of juveniles is common and juveniles charged as adults tend to suffer disproportionate sentences to adults as a result of their crimes. In fact, a recent study found that kids who kill their parents will probably be sentenced to double the time that parents who kill their kids would be. According to the study conducted by Pendulum Juvenile Justice, kids who kill their parents are likely to receive a sentence upwards of 50 years. By contrast, parents who kill their kids receive an average sentence of just under 23 years.

The fact is that felony murder is just one more tool that prosecutors use to unfairly punish children and feed the corrections system. Whether you believe that kids should be held responsible for their crimes as adults or not, it is undeniable that the way kids are punished is beyond unfair and costs taxpayers millions of dollars every year. A recent Supreme Court decision found that life sentences for kids who did not commit murder was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court did not distinguish between first degree murder, manslaughter and felony murder, but they should have.

Felony murder isn’t murder at all and kids like Erik Jensen and William Murphy, while they deserve to be punished, don’t deserve to serve 50 years to life in prison for the mistakes they made.

A recent story posted at Solitary Watch details the story of George. George is a 15-year-old jail inmate accused of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in Texas. George has been found competent to stand trial as an adult so he’s being held in an adult facility, but because he’s a child he’s being held there “for his protection” in 23-hour a day lock down.

You might think “well that’s a good thing, Texas is protecting its kids in jail which, as criminals, is far more than they deserve.” Okay. Let’s start from the beginning. George is accused of a crime. How do we know that he committed a crime? The simple answer is that we don’t. That’s the reason we have trials in this country.

Alrighty, on to the next point. George is 15. Every state in this country says that a 15-year-old is a child. So why is George being held as an adult pending trial? In their infinite wisdom, elected prosecutors in every state have lobbied their state legislature to let them try kids as adults. How on earth that makes sense, we’ll probably never figure out. On the one hand we’re perfectly comfortable with the idea that kids have no rights until they’re 18, but on the other hand we want to punish them as adults when they “commit adult crimes.” There is NO SUCH THING as an “adult crime” under the law.

Ready for the final contradiction? Me too. George is a child, but he can be tried as adult. There’s no denying that George is smaller, weaker, less developed mentally and more vulnerable than the other prisoners in his county jail. Let’s review. So while we admit that George is a child, we want to punish him as an adult (apparently for the fun of it–sadomasochism  brought to you by your local District Attorney), but gee whiz he’s still a child so we have to punish him more than other prisoners “for his own safety.”

According to youth justice advocates, kids kept in solitary confinement are 36 times more likely to commit suicide than adult counterparts. Aggravated assault with a deadly weapon is a serious charge with serious consequences. Depending on previous offenses, George could be looking at more than a decade in prison. But since when did being a kid in prison warrant a death sentence?

At StopDirectFile.org we encourage you to pose that question to state legislators and local District Attorneys. The justice system is supposed to be reasonable. There is nothing reasonable about George’s treatment or the treatment of thousands of other juveniles across the country every year.

A new video documentary titled “Your Neighbor’s Child” was recently aired on Wyoming PBS and discusses shocking shortcomings in Wyoming’s juvenile criminal justice system.

According to Wyoming Kids Count, Wyoming has no separate juvenile justice system, so a juvenile can accumulate a criminal record in adult courts for minor offenses like smoking in school or skateboarding on a public sidewalk. The film features interviews with Wyoming lawmakers including former U.S. Senator, turned juvenile justice reform advocate, Alan Simpson. Simpson was briefly jailed when he was teenager for shooting mail boxes and punching a cop and seeks a return to policies that focus on rehabilitating kids like him.

Next to Wyoming, Colorado has one of the toughest juvenile trial and sentencing structures in the United States. While there is no formal juvenile justice system in Wyoming, most juvenile trials in Colorado are handled by District Courts and District Attorneys get to decide whether kids will be tried as juveniles or adults. In many cases, an adult trial means an adult sentence.

Reaction to your “Your Neighbor’s Child” is typical. One comment at the the Laramie Boomerang, read, ” Why do we not hold children and parents accountable. It is not societies fault but parents who think it ‘takes a village to raise a child’. It takes parents and if children are held accountable for actions at a young age we would see less problems. Just like the person who gets 7 DUI’s in 5 years. Prosecute them and punish them the first time and maybe they will think twice. ”

The problem is that when kids are punished for minor offenses they don’t learn “to think twice” about what they did. They learn to “think twice” about how they got caught. In other cases, kids get caught up in bad situations. A friend commits a serious crime like aggravated assault. Rather than turn on their friend, they try to help him or her and become a party to the crime.

The bible says, “Judge not lest ye be judged.” Whether you’re a Christian or not, that’s good advice. As a society we have a responsibility to educate both youth and parents. The fact is that the law entraps young people and rather than trying to sort out what happened, we just throw kids away. That isn’t right. People like Alan Simpson and the makers of “Your Neighbor’s Child” deserve a great deal of credit for working to make things better for children and their parents.

The greatest miscarriage of justice happens when a supposedly self-correcting system fails to correct itself. Alan Sudduth was convicted as a juvenile for murder in 1995 and sentenced to 70 years in prison on a plea deal.  The problem is that Sudduth didn’t actually kill anyone and someone else has repeatedly confessed to the murder.

According to Westword, the Colorado State Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that Sudduth waited too long before filing his appeal based on ineffective counsel. Sudduth’s attorney, Alison Ruttenberg, is appealing to the state supreme court. While the Court of Appeals may be technically correct according to the law, they have utterly failed to recognize the injustice that has been done.

As a general rule, there is no statute of limitations on filing murder charges and there should be no statute of limitations on overturning a wrongful conviction. The Arapahoe County District Attorney in 1995 knowingly filed adult charges against Sudduth when the preponderance of evidence pointed to someone else.  Sudduth was too young and too naive to understand the gravity of the decisions his attorneys were making on his behalf. The reason we have court appointed attorneys is to protect defendants against their own ignorance of the law. If they fail to effectively and faithfully represent the interests of their client, the system fails. No judge should ever condone that–whether it fits on their calendar or not.

Sudduth deserves parole.

There are many types of crimes, and there are many types of criminals.  Some criminals are murders, some are rapists, some rob from little old ladies in a make money online scheme, and some make the headlines of the NYTimes.  However, without a doubt, the lowest form of criminals are the pimps.  These bottom of the human barrel criminals manipulate, abuse, rape, and profit from the suffering of young girls day in and day out.  Young girls, just like Sara Kruzan, who grow up in broken homes, are forced by these people to give up their most precious human right, the right to self respect and dignity.  Pimps manipulate these young girls, tell them they are “special,” treat them like celebrities, such as an Audrina Patridge or a Jennifer Love Hewitt, and then turn around and rape them, beat them, and force them to sell their underage bodies to decrepit pedophiles.  If there was ever a prime candidate for the term “lowest of the low,” pimps are it.

When it comes to prosecuting these human refuse, however,  one might as well try to get rid of stink bugs.  The simple fact is that Pandering, the legal term for what pimps do, is a very difficult thing to prove to a jury.  To say nothing of the fact that the girls a pimp “owns” are often times so abused and confused that they will try and protect the very man that makes his living off of their daily degradation.  Given that reality, what choice does a young girl like Sara Kruzan have?  She knows that if she goes to the police, and they cannot make a case against her pimp, she will get hit, kicked, raped, and hit some more as soon as her pimp finds her.  For girls like this there is no escape, there is no protection from the law, and there are no maps to a better life.

Sara Kruzan chose to kill her pimp, a man who had manipulated and raped her from the age of 11.  This girl now sits behind bars, hoping that the California justice system will show her some mercy.  What Stop Direct File wants to know is how could it not?  Born to a home life deprived of parental love, raised by a drug addicted mother, manipulated by a pimp, who promised to be the father she so desperately wanted, and then raped and abused into a life of prostitution — how could any justice system blame her for killing her abuser when she was 16?

There is no question that murder is wrong.  However, there are many many times when extenuating circumstances make a person less guilty, or not guilty at all, of a crime.  Kill a man in self-defense, for example.  A woman who manages to kill a man who is raping her would never be convicted of murder by a jury.  Why is it different for Sara Kruzan?  The only difference I see is that she lacked the social network necessary to gain access to a decent lawyer.

At an age when more fortunate children are playing Nintendo 3DS, taking guitar lessons at the Guitar Center, or scheming ways of finding the hidden files on their Dads iPad, this poor girl was being raped, manipulated, and sold as a sex toy by a piece of human filth.  The fact that she was even prosecuted for killing such a piece of slime is bad enough, but the fact that she was given life without parole is even worse.  If there was ever a person who deserved mercy, or a situation where the demands of mercy and justice were the same, it is this one.  Free Sara Kruzan.

In 2006 there were a total of 892 incarcerated juveniles being held in Colorado. The total number of families with children living in Colorado was approximately 580,286. To put that in perspective: If you identified 650 families with children in the White Pages and called them all, at least one of them would have a child who is currently incarcerated. If you just called 1,500 phone numbers in the White Pages and asked if they knew anyone who was incarcerated, you’d find at least one who would respond “yes.”

On the face of it, that might not seem so bad, but when you look at it from a cost-effectiveness standpoint, the numbers are horrific. Every year the state of Colorado spends $28,000 on each inmate. It spends even more on juvenile inmates, but if we use the $28,000 number Colorado spends at least $25 million a year just to hold juvenile offenders. That doesn’t count the cost of trying, sentencing, convicting, paroling and eventually re-incarcerating them.

At the 2008 rate of national re-incarceration,  142 of those juvenile prisoners will be released and eventually return to Colorado’s prisons or jails. That means that over a period of approximately 6 to 7 years, all juvenile offenders in Colorado will most likely return to prison as adults. Here’s the point: An incarcerated prisoner makes no money and, therefore, pays no taxes to help cover the expense of their incarceration. Prisoners aren’t even allowed to access the Internet so they can make money online. That means that, as taxpayers, you and I foot most of the bill.

According to a paper discussed in the September 2008 Edition of The Monthly Labor Review entitled Effect of Employer Access to Criminal History Data on the Labor Market Outcomes of Ex-Offenders and Non-Offenders (Keith Finlay, Tulane University) Males under the age of 24 who have been previously incarcerated “are less likely to be employed, have lower wages, and have lower earnings.”  Former juvenile prisoners get out of jail, can’t get work because of mandatory reporting requirements or lack of education and end up going back to prison. In fact, a lack of employment opportunities is the number one reason ex-offenders return to prison. Nationally, that fact costs us $68 Billion per year.

In a nutshell–we don’t just foot the bill for a juvenile prisoner’s incarceration. We foot the bill for as long as he can’t find a job and keeps going back to prison. That might be his entire life. Employers’ perceptions about former felons are the real reason juvenile offenders can’t get back to work. In theory, incarcerated juveniles have paid their debt to society, but you can’t blame employers for being skeptical.   The only way to nip this problem in the bud and get the kid a job so he’ll stop draining the public coffers is to restore employers’ confidence in each individual offender. To do that, the state needs to institute comprehensive community corrections programs that retrain, reform and certify juvenile offenders re-entering society.

Felony reporting, in many states, is mandatory and it should be. Employers who don’t know if someone has a felony conviction are more likely to discriminate based on racial and demographic biases when making a hiring decision. The only way to restore employer confidence and stop the cycle of recidivism is to balance felony reporting with ex-offender certification.

The story, from this USA Today Article, basically goes like this: a Miami man was wrongfully accused, tried, and convicted of crimes he did not commit.  He was convicted based upon faulty evidence which had been manipulated by the local prosecutor who was looking to score a win.  By the time the truth came to light the life of an innocent man, and that of his wife and children, was ruined beyond repair.  How could this happen?

Sadly, the case outlined in the article is far from the only example of this.  As our technology advances, DNA testing has freed many people from prison, and from the convictions they were wrongly given.  In all of these cases, no matter what the differences are, you will fine one common thread: somewhere, at some point, the prosecuting attorney chose to pursue a conviction at all costs, rather than justice at all costs.  Pandemonium around events such as the recent UT shooting (University of Texas) help us understand why prosecutors, as elected officials, get carried away with the pursuit of conviction rather than the pursuit of justice.

The reality of America today is that law enforcement, like all other public functions, has limited resources.  Investigating crimes, chasing criminals, and legal prosecutions cost money — lots of it.  Resources are scarce, and the waste that would incur from admitting a wrongful arrest, releasing the former suspect, and beginning the investigation all over again, would be enough to make any prosecutor look bad to his bosses.  Essentially, there is a great deal of pressure on law enforcement personnel to get the job done, quickly, efficiently, and correctly; the first time around.  When the uncertainties inherent in human life intervene, and for whatever reason an innocent person is accused of a crime, that pressure all too often prevents justice from being done.  Rather, the prosecutors push ahead with the case, despite faulty evidence and flawed witnesses, because they need to look good to the public that elects them.  Unless they want to be out of a job.

It is exactly this pressure that makes prosecutors biased attorneys, and should prevent them from having the power to choose to charge child offenders as adults.  Despite the best intentions, despite the desire to see justice done, prosecutors simply do not have the requisite distance to enable them to examine cases objectively.  Judges do, and for that reason, Colorado needs to change its current justice system.  Let the sad stories of destroyed lives show us all that it does not take a willful decision to wrongfully imprison someone, it only takes one overworked and underpaid prosecutor choosing to take the easy road.  This should never happen, but when it happens to young people, it is even more sickening in the eyes of justice.