The passage of Prop 36 will also lengthen the sentences of some existing felonies up to three years if the crime, like felony theft causing property damage, was committed together by three or more people. It will also require that felony convictions for selling drugs be served in state prisons, whereas currently some of those sentences are served in county jails. The measure will also create a new category of offense, a “treatment-mandated felony,” which carries a prison sentence of up to three years for people with previous drug convictions who fail to complete court-ordered treatment.

Prop 36 reverses some of the changes California voters made a decade ago when they passed Prop 47, which made some felonies misdemeanors in order to reduce severe overcrowding in the state’s prisons. The state estimates that the reduced incarceration from Prop 47 helped save $800 million over the past decade, the majority of which was reallocated to mental health and drug treatment services.

Advocates who supported those reforms a decade ago are now bracing for a reversal of those trends, as the state’s own analysis predicts that costs associated with increased punishment and prison will soar as state funds allocated to treatment services fall with the passage of Prop 36. While this year’s ballot measure was put forth as a way to make communities safer, opponents worry it will bring a drop in services that erodes community safety. 

“Rather than strip money away from resources, we should have doubled down and really fund these things that actually worked,” said Jose Bernal, Political Director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. “The safest communities are the ones that are the most resourced, and so that’s the alternative. That’s what we’ve been fighting for.”

Advocates for incarcerated people fear that Prop 36 will also exacerbate the overcrowding and dangerous conditions that still exist inside many local jails and state prisons. Sam Lewis, executive director of the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, one of the groups that opposed Prop 36, said jails are already severely overcrowded and understaffed, and sending more people to jail will prevent them from getting treatment and prevention.

“We’re going to fill them up with more people, that means people are going to die in there, it means people are going to take a longer time to be able to go to trial, that means more people in the county jail will be suffering instead of actually receiving the treatment that they need.” 

Prison overcrowding, and the dangerous and squalid conditions that it created behind bars, helped motivate California to take a step away from mass incarceration with the 2014 passage of Prop 47. 

At the time, California prisons held about 156,000 men and women in custody, almost twice their holding capacity. The prison system averaged around one death each week as overcrowding created dangerous conditions inside. Civil rights lawsuits over inadequate medical and mental health care eventually led to a 2011 Supreme Court ruling that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had violated people’s Eighth Amendment rights. The 5-4 ruling, which found that overcrowding was the primary cause for lapses in treatment, upheld a lower court’s order for the prison system to decrease its population by 46,000. 

“Prop 47 was passed because we decided that we want to change felony [charges] so people would not be incarcerated, cost us millions of dollars and human lives,” Lewis said.

From the time the measure passed in 2014 to now, the incarcerated population has fallen from about 131,200 to over 91,800. But after a decade of falling prison populations, Prop 36 is now set to rapidly grow the number of people behind bars in the state. According to an analysis by the Prison Policy Initiative, elevating penalties for theft and drug crimes could increase California’s prison population by 35 percent over the next five years, which would fully undo the reductions the state has seen over the past decade.

A state legislative analysis estimated that implementing Prop 36 would increase state spending on criminal punishment “ranging from several tens of millions of dollars to the low hundreds of millions of dollars annually.” The analysis also estimated that local criminal justice authorities like jails and police departments could see costs increase “by tens of millions of dollars annually.”

The Prop 47 reforms a decade ago funneled savings from decarceration toward community-based support services like mental health and addiction treatment, school truancy and dropout prevention, and job training and housing assistance. Since 2014, the state has allocated around half a billion dollars in savings from Prop 47 to local programs that have helped reduce recidivism for low-level offenses across California. 

As those savings dry up thanks to the passage of Prop 36, so will state funding for those local programs, according to the legislative analysis, which estimated a reduction of state spending “in the low tens of millions of dollars annually.”

Bernal with the Ella Baker Center said he would often hear people who supported Prop 36 say that they thought the measure supported programs for people who needed treatment or housing. He said that grassroots organizers who opposed the measure struggled to convince voters concerned about public safety that it could actually threaten community programs that help prevent crime. “I think the people who voted in favor of Prop 36 really want to live in safe communities and don’t want everyone locked up, particularly Black and brown folks,” Bernal added. “But I think folks were misguided.”

Prop 36 was introduced as an effort to assuage voters’ fears about surging rates of shoplifting and commercial theft, which did increase during the pandemic. This time also saw dramatic videos of so-called smash-and-grab burglaries that spread widely across social media and national news. 

But a longer-term view reveals an opposite trend: Property crime rates are at some of the lowest levels they’ve been in 40 years. More recent analysis by the California Budget and Policy Center shows that rates of shoplifting remain below pre-pandemic levels. 

At the same time, a study of the Prop 47 reforms published in the journal Criminology & Public Policy found that its passage had no impact on homicide, rape, aggravated assault, robbery and burgalary; while motor theft and larceny rates went up, California’s rates still remained below the national average. Bradley Bartos, a professor of government and public policy at the University of Arizona who co-authored the study, said he doesn’t think that “the nitty gritty technical details of the proposition are going to address the change to the landscape of property crime.”

The authors of Prop 36 have also stated that it is aimed to reduce homelessness, but studies show that formerly incarcerated people are ten times more likely to become homeless than the general population. Accordingly, California’s leading homeless policy organizations have come out against the measure. 

Already, observers are characterizing the passage of Prop 36 as part of a larger “pendulum swing” towards harsher punishment in California politics. At the same time voters approved Prop 36, they rejected another measure—Prop 6, which would have prohibited slavery and banned forced labor in California. Los Angeles also ousted progressive District Attorney George Gascon in favor of his more conservative opponent, and in Oakland, voters recalled progressive prosecutor Pamela Price after just two years. More California counties voted red than in 2020. Bartos said “it certainly is movement in the opposite direction California had been moving” over the last decade.

But advocates point out that this swing has much more to do with public perceptions of crime than facts on the ground. Lewis attributes the measure’s success to scare tactics pushed by politicians and harmful narratives from news media that led people to believe that crime was going up, despite FBI data showing otherwise.

“The narrative has been one to scare people, to believe that if we lock people up for addiction, that’s going to help us,” Lewis said. “We did that before, and we found that it didn’t work.” 

Bartos at the University of Arizona concurs: “People’s perception of how at risk they are has changed over the last four years,” he said, in large part due to shoplifting videos that have gone viral on social media.

The Prop 36 “yes” campaign was backed by large retailers such as Walmart, Target, and Home Depot, which collectively gave more than $4 million to the campaign, as well as statewide prosecutor and prison guard organizations. Bartos fears Prop 36 will give law enforcement officials the discretion to arrest and prosecute low level offenders.

“If police and prosecutors interpret this as a broad countering crime mandate, you may start to see them act as such and be more willing to arrest, pursue,” Bartos said. “It’s going to be a question, how people view it more so than how it changes the calculus of crime.”

Ricardo Garcia, the Los Angeles County Public Defender who opposed Prop 36, said California has “gone back in time 10 years” and predicted a decline in services that will likely lead to worsening drug addiction, substance abuse and trauma.

“After this election, we may find ourselves in the most challenging landscape for the criminal legal system and reform that we’ve seen in decades,” Garcia said. “But it doesn’t mean that we stop the struggle or that the struggle is over. Elected officials need to own the solutions that bring us real safety, accountability and justice, and they need to be proud of them.” 

Lewis points out that poverty is a main driver of criminal behavior, and that addressing people’s material needs is a more lasting solution, rather than mass incarceration. He points to instances he has heard of people being arrested for selling baby formula, for example.

“When we think about people that are committing these petty crimes, do you think they’re trying to take over the world and make a million dollars from that? No, they’re trying to feed their children, but those are also the type of people that will be locking up,” Lewis said.

Numerous advocates have said that they will continue to push local and state elected officials to find ways to fund resources that are going to lose money following the passage of Prop 36. The goal, they said, is to redirect resources into proactive measures like substance treatment, schools, creating jobs, and affordable housing for individuals and families. 

“We’re not going to stop, we’re going to keep fighting,” Lewis said. We’re going to do the things that the government that’s supposed to represent us, that’s supposed to really fight for us. If they won’t do it, we’ll do it.”

The post How California’s Embrace of a Tough-on-Crime Measure May Undo a Decade of Reform appeared first on Bolts.

Cheers soon echoed through the prison as Wilkens spread the news. “There’s been lots of praising the LORD, hugging, high-fiving and crying big happy tears today,” she told Bolts on the day of the vote.

That celebration, however, quickly turned into an emotional rollercoaster for Wilkens and other incarcerated survivors of domestic abuse who had spent the past two years organizing and advocating for the sentencing reforms. The week after that final vote, Republican Governor Kevin Stitt vetoed the bill, despite it receiving nearly unanimous approval from the GOP-run legislature. Stitt, who called the bill “bad policy,” was praised by the state’s powerful district attorneys association, which has fought the resentencing bill for the past two legislative sessions and decried it as “a blueprint for violent criminals looking for yet another opportunity to lessen their sentences.” 

Senate Pro Tem Greg Treat, a Republican and the lead sponsor of the bill, quickly moved to override the veto and issued a statement castigating the governor for blocking it. Jon Echols, the Republican House member who carried the bill in that chamber, also vowed to overcome the governor’s veto as the end of the legislative session rapidly approached. 

Treat revived the Oklahoma Survivors’ Act last week by attaching it to another bill, this time with language raising the bar to qualify for resentencing—an addition that was necessary to gain the governor’s approval. The legislation again overwhelmingly passed the state Senate and House. 

Stitt finally signed it on Tuesday, nearly a month after his initial veto, enshrining the sentencing reform into law. 

Wilkens said many of the women around her had given up hope in the days and weeks after the veto. But the cheering resumed inside Mabel Bassett once news of the governor’s signature reached her and other incarcerated survivors. “The cheers that erupted and spread throughout the prison seemed even louder and more exuberant,” Wilkens told Bolts this week, saying other incarcerated women have been approaching her to celebrate the bill’s passage and learn whether it might affect their sentences. “Our victory was even sweeter after being heartbroken by the veto.” 

The Oklahoma Survivors’ Act mandates sentencing reductions for people who are convicted and can prove that domestic violence or sexual abuse was “a substantial contributing factor in causing the defendant to commit the offense or to the defendant’s criminal behavior.” The act also allows survivors who have already been convicted and imprisoned to petition a judge for resentencing and release under the new sentencing guidelines. 

Stitt’s initial veto threatened to derail the legislation for the second time in as many years. As Bolts reported last year, a similar reform bill stalled after pressure from prosecutors resulted in a watered-down version that wouldn’t have applied retroactively and only gave judges the discretion, but not the obligation, to impose lighter sentences for people convicted of crimes against abusive partners. 

The compromise language added to the legislation earlier this month after Stitt’s veto raised the burden of proof for those convicted of violent felonies, such as assault, manslaughter, murder, and robbery. To qualify, they must provide documentation that the victim of the crime was also the perpetrator of the defendant’s abuse, the person who trafficked them, or that their action was coerced by their abuser. Treat, the Senate sponsor, told lawmakers earlier this month, “This clarification does not change the intent of the bill whatsoever.” The new sentencing guidelines and retroactivity remained in the final bill that Stitt signed.

Colleen McCarty, executive director of Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, which has advocated for the reform, told Bolts that the organization had already identified 13 survivors that it plans on representing pro-bono in resentencing petitions that result from the legislation—including Wilkens, who was sentenced to life in prison for fatally shooting an abusive ex-boyfriend who had repeatedly stalked, assaulted, and raped her.

McCarty says none of the cases that Appleseed is working on will be negatively impacted by the language added to the legislation after Stitt’s veto. “My team and the Governor’s staff, as well as Representative Echols and Pro Tem Treat worked on the new language together,” McCarty told Bolts. “I ran many scenarios through the new language and none of the cases we work on would be negatively impacted by the new subsection.”

“The bill retains retroactivity, mandatory reductions in sentences for those who can prove abuse, and prescribed ranges much less than current law,” McCarty said. “I am hopeful my client April Wilkens will get relief and get to experience freedom after 26 years in prison.” 

Wilkens’ story is hardly unique in Oklahoma, which regularly ranks among states with the highest female incarceration rate and where the criminal legal system has long been particularly harsh to women. Oklahoma has also maintained one of the country’s highest number of domestic violence homicides: Since 1996, it has been in the top ten states for women murdered by men; in recent years, it ranked second of all 50 states with an average of 114 domestic homicides between 2019 and 2022. 

“This isn’t a partisan issue,” McCarty said, noting the bill received overwhelming approval in a legislature where Republicans hold large majorities. “In Oklahoma, it transcended politics because so many Oklahomans have had experience with domestic violence in their families. We also hold this idea of self-defense so dearly. It really came to the crosshairs of those two issues.”

Amanda Ross, Wilkens’ niece and her staunchest advocate, has spent the past two years working with Oklahoma Appleseed to advocate for the law. She recalls being devastated when the legislature failed to pass the 2023 bill. “It was a terrible feeling, to not be heard by your state leaders,” she told Bolts.

Ross was elated when the legislature passed the next bill, but then the governor’s veto felt like a “gut punch.” 

Now, she’s hoping that the newly signed law will finally bring her aunt home after spending nearly half of her life behind bars. “My aunt wasn’t believed at so many points through the criminal justice system,” Ross told Bolts. “It took legislation to have hope again and this is even better, because it will help so many more criminalized survivors.”

Wilkens that says she and the prison law library clerks have already put together packets about the new law, including a survey for those seeking representation and the address to write to advocates at Oklahoma Appleseed. Even so, she remains inundated with people coming to her cell to ask about it, prompting one of the clerks to post a sign on her door directing women to the law library for answers.

Still, Wilkens doesn’t mind the barrage of questions. “For so many years I was overwhelmed and caught up in the injustices in my own case,” she said. “When I was finally able to start advocating, I can’t tell you how freeing and how healing that was for me.”

Wilkens insists her fight will not end with the new law and her own freedom. “I will not give up the fight to free criminalized survivors here and everywhere,” she said this week. “I want to help get similar laws passed across the nation. Getting it done in such a tough-on-crime, law-and-order state as Oklahoma proves it can be done in any state.”

The post Oklahoma Gives Incarcerated Survivors of Domestic Violence A New Chance at Freedom appeared first on Bolts.

Lee received a ray of hope last month when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court agreed to hear his appeal.

What the justices decide might ultimately give 1,100 others a chance at freedom as well. The case, which the court will hear later this year, marks a potential turning point for a state that’s exceptionally punitive by national standards in handing out life without parole sentences.

“With the recent development at the supreme court,” Lee told Bolts in an email last week, “many ppl have been sharing with me how this possibility has restored a [sense] of hope in their life to have another chance at freedom.”

In 2014, Lee, then age 29, participated in a burglary in which his accomplice fatally shot the homeowner. Lee had not been involved in the killing and wasn’t even in the room at the time. Nonetheless, two years later, he was convicted of felony murder, a type of charge that prosecutors can bring against someone who was involved in a crime that led to a death, even if the death was unintentional or the defendant didn’t participate in the killing.

In Pennsylvania, felony murder is classified as second-degree murder, and all convictions for second-degree murder trigger an automatic sentence of life without parole. These abnormally draconian laws have made Pennsylvania home to near-record numbers of people sentenced to die in prison. The state has the second-highest number of people serving life without parole, nearly 5,100 people; approximately one in five have been convicted of felony murder. 

“There are so many other individuals who have [served] so much more time. I hope that they will finally have that opportunity to go back into society and have a positive effect,” Lee told Bolts in an earlier exchange. “It’s easy for us to throw people away. But if somebody is putting in the work to truly transform and can be useful to society, families and communities, then why not use that person? I believe in redemption if somebody has done the work.”

Lee’s appeal argues that his sentence violates the state constitution, which prohibits “cruel punishment.” This wording is different than the federal constitution’s Eighth Amendment, which bans punishment that is “cruel and unusual.” Since some 1,100 people are sentenced to life without parole for felony murder in Pennsylvania, the punishment may not be considered unusual within the state, but Lee’s appeal argues that it is nonetheless cruel to automatically condemn someone to die in prison for a killing they didn’t commit. 

Other state constitutions have similar language against “cruel” punishments; their courts have used those clauses to issue protections that go beyond those afforded by federal courts.

Still, Lee’s appeal is making the case that his sentence also violates the federal constitution. His brief states that Pennsylvania’s statutes are “out of step” with contemporary standards, making them unusually punitive in violation of the federal constitution. Pennsylvania is the only state besides Louisiana that mandates life without parole for second-degree murder. 

Pennsylvania’s superior court, the lower court that handles criminal cases, rejected Lee’s appeal in June, ruling that it was bound by precedent to reject his plea. But one of the judges, Alice Dubow, called on the supreme court to take up the case and revisit the question of whether automatic life without parole sentences for second-degree murder violate Pennsylvania’s state constitution. Dubow is a Democrat, as are five of the seven justices on the supreme court, though partisanship is often not a strong predictor of how judges settle criminal justice matters. 

Life without parole has frequently been proposed as a more humane alternative to the death penalty, but advocates for reform call it “death by incarceration.” Ashley Nellis, senior researcher with the Sentencing Project, points out that LWOP sentences allow for virtually no second chance no matter a person’s transformation or the amount of time that has elapsed. 

“The state is killing you, just slower—and for a wider range of offenses or participation in those offenses,” she said.

Nellis points out that the expansion of life without parole has far outpaced the decline in the death penalty. The number of people serving life without parole has jumped 66 percent since her organization began collecting data in 2003, reaching roughly 56,000 people as of a 2021 report by the organization. In Texas, for instance, the number of life without parole sentences has grown as the number of those sentenced to death has dropped. “When you’re looking at a death sentence, you have a capital attorney and [other] special rights given to you because of the seriousness of the sentence,” Nellis noted, but those protections are not available to those facing LWOP.

Over the past decade, courts and lawmakers have begun to slowly reassess who can face such extreme sentences. In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Miller v. Alabama that mandatory life sentences for children under age 18 were unconstitutional. Four years later, the court made its Miller decision retroactive, enabling thousands to apply for resentencing. 

Since then, more than two dozen states have since outright banned sentences of life without parole for children. Some have also restricted life without parole for “emerging adults”, an acknowledgement of emerging research in neuroscience that shows people’s brains continue developing well into their mid-twenties. Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., have gone the furthest so far, effectively banning such sentences for people under age 21 and 25, respectively; in Massachusetts, the change came through a decision of the state supreme court earlier this year. Some lawmakers have also introduced legislation that would eliminate life without parole altogether, regardless of age. 

In Pennsylvania, the provision to automatically sentence people to life without parole for second-degree murder already is a contentious issue. U.S. Senator John Fetterman tried to expand clemency for that population while he was lieutenant governor, and then faced attacks over that work when he ran for Senate in 2022. Last fall, Democratic lawmaker Tim Briggs announced legislation to end these automatic sentences, though he has yet to file it —the same demand that Lee is making through the legal route.

Lee remains determined not to die in prison. In 2016, the court assigned him an attorney to assist with his post-conviction appeal. In Pennsylvania, a person must file a notice for appeal within 30 days. That attorney filed nothing, leaving Lee barred from making any further appeals for the next five years. By 2020, when Lee successfully petitioned to reinstate his appeal rights, he had connected with attorneys from the Abolitionist Law Center, an organization that had already mounted several challenges to life without parole in the state. The center, along with the Amistad Law Project and the Center for Constitutional Rights, agreed to take on Lee’s appeal and, with it, mount another challenge to the state’s inclination for “death by incarceration.” 

For Bret Grote, the lead attorney on Lee’s challenge and the Abolitionist Law Center’s legal director, a favorable ruling for Lee could have substantial implications for other states. “It could create momentum for legislative and judicial reform,” he told Bolts. “It could [also] provide a persuasive precedent of a state using its own constitution to provide greater protections than the federal constitution.” 

Nellis agrees. These types of challenges on the state level could not only provide relief both retroactively and in future cases, but, she said, “continue to shed more and more light on the fact that this sentence is applied in arbitrary and very unfair ways.” A clear majority of people who serve life without parole sentences in Pennsylvania are Black, according to data compiled by the Sentencing Project.

Lee says he reconnected with his Christian faith behind bars, which gave him the strength to keep fighting his extreme sentence. He says he only has to glance around his cellblock to know that the court’s decision on his case could affect many more than just him. 

“A lot of guys on the block are lifers with twenty, thirty years on their sentence,” he told Bolts. When they heard that the court would consider his appeal, hope rippled through the prison. 

“This is the greatest news I’ve gotten in so long,” he recalled one man, who had been imprisoned for over 30 years, telling him. 

“Your case is going to affect mine immediately,” another man, who had already served 26 years, told him.

The post Pennsylvania Reckons with Its Draconian Laws on Life Imprisonment appeared first on Bolts.

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.

And then, just as quickly, it slammed shut: Louisiana’s attorney general and the leading candidate in the race for governor, Jeff Landry, filed a lawsuit against the Board of Pardons and Parole, seeking to disqualify the petitions; he then fired the lawyer the Board hired to represent it in the suit, and instead installed an attorney who has represented him in the past. What followed over the next few months, as Edwards’s days in office dwindled to zero, has amounted to an agonizing bureaucratic back-and-forth: the Board, following Landry’s suit, has repeatedly declined to grant the prisoners full clemency hearings, instead scheduling brief administrative reviews for fewer than half of them. 

One of the prisoners, Henri Broadway, has maintained his innocence in the 1993 murder of police officer Betty Smothers. During his review, his defense team was cut off early, while the opposition received 10 extra minutes to speak. “It’s very, very discouraging,” Broadway’s lawyer, Sarah Ottinger, told Bolts. “Henri Broadway is innocent.” 

“It was headed towards fair and full consideration of these cases,” said Cecelia Kappel, whose organization, the Capital Appeals Project, coordinated the petitions. “It took, I think, a huge effort by Jeff Landry and the DAs association to stop this.” Ultimately, not a single person was granted clemency—or even a full hearing. 

In November, after a dismal voter turnout, Landry won the election. His inauguration as governor earlier this week marked a stark transition for the state.

For the people who fight to change Louisiana’s penal system—historically brutal, harsh, and deadly even compared to the rest of the US—the past eight years under Edwards were a time of cautious optimism. A rare Democratic leader in the Deep South, he worked to pass landmark, bipartisan criminal justice reform legislation in 2017, expanded Medicaid to prisoners, vetoed harsh criminal justice laws passed by the Republican-dominated legislature, and ramped up commutations, especially over the last year. With Edwards as a “backstop,” Promise of Justice Initiative organizer Katie Hunter-Lowrey told Bolts, “it felt for a while that Louisiana had been protected from some of the more extreme actions being taken across the country.”

Landry, meanwhile, has signaled that he will be a very different sort of leader—a return to Louisiana’s harsh status quo on criminal justice, but with a heightened level of bombast. A Trump ally and product of the Tea Party, he embodies the new Republican party’s commitment to the culture war and antipathy toward compromise. He has repeatedly targeted the state’s majority Black cities, supported harsher criminal laws, and indicated his intention to roll back Edwards’ landmark reforms. Empowered with a GOP supermajority in both houses of the legislature, Landry is likely to be able to carry out his agenda without much resistance. “Louisiana will continue to stay at the top of the prison incarceration list, and we will not be any safer or any more prosperous for it,” said Sarah Omojola, the director of Vera Institute of Justice’s New Orleans office.

But advocates are refusing despair, opting instead to view this as a signal to redouble their organizing efforts, especially to communities that aren’t already mobilized but might recoil from the hard-line policies that Landry is poised to enact. “These [low voter] turnouts were a wake up call,” said Reverend Alexis Anderson, the co-founder of the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison Reform Coalition, which works to shed light on the local jail death crisis. 

Anderson told Bolts she views this moment as an opportunity—nowhere to go but up. “If we don’t, and we basically go hide in a corner somewhere, then we’re ceding something that doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “We are always one election away from changing things.”

A moderate operating amidst a sea of red, outgoing governor Edwards at times moved too carefully for some onlookers, a frustration recently on display after his refusal to use his power to unilaterally direct the Board of Pardons to hold full hearings for the death row petitioners. But his reforms have made a difference: Louisiana may still be the “prison capital of the world,” with the highest per capita rate of incarceration on the entire planet, but its incarcerated population has gone down some 24 percent during Edwards’s time in office. 

These improvements are largely owing to the Justice Reinvestment Initiative, a landmark package of 10 criminal justice bills that Edwards and the legislature worked to pass in 2017. In the six years since its passage, the reforms have reduced the number of people convicted of nonviolent crimes in prison, funded victims’ support and reentry services that reduce recidivism, and shrunk the parole and probation population. But advocates now worry this progress could be undone under the new governor. Last year, Landry supported the creation of a task force on violent crime designed to review the effects of the reform package, as well as another 2016 law that moved 17 year olds back into the juvenile justice system. He has already announced a special legislative session on crime, where it is widely assumed he will support repealing the laws that made up the justice initiative. The special session could convene as soon as February.

Anderson said she’s especially troubled by the thought that Landry might roll back Louisiana’s scant juvenile justice reforms. (Last year, he vigorously supported a bill that would have made teenagers’ criminal records public, but only for teenagers who lived in three of the state’s majority-Black parishes, including East Baton Rouge.) “Primarily African American boys are going to be put into harm’s way in the worst kind of way,” Anderson said. “You just can’t unring that bell, the harm that’s going to be done.” 

Meanwhile, Landry has already assembled a special committee on New Orleans, an unusual move. It’s an indication that he might seek to use his new office to preempt local control and try to ramp up law enforcement presence in the city, both things he also did as Attorney General. 

In response to Landry’s proposals, Omojola told Bolts that Vera will be going back to the coalition that succeeded in winning those landmark 2017 reforms in the first place— “reconvening that dream team of people to figure out, how do we both protect the progress we’ve made and also continue to move forward?” she said. “Those reforms were just a first step. Much, much more needs to be done.” 

While Louisiana’s GOP trifecta and a Republican supermajority in the legislature will make it difficult for organizers to stop new bills from becoming law, they hope that they can get people into the streets and continue to organize on the local level as well. “The race to the bottom isn’t just at the governor’s mansion. It’s in the legislature but it’s also in some of these localized policymakers,” said Anderson, highlighting the need for advocates in Louisiana’s cities to organize with rural populations as well. 

Omojola stressed the importance of national organizations like Vera partnering with local membership groups like Louisiana Survivors for Reform, which Hunter-Lowrey coordinates. The coalition’s work organizing with people who might not already be inclined towards criminal justice transformation could be a useful strategic template. This year, for example, they’ve worked with family members of victims in two of the death row cases. “So often, this tough-on-crime legislation is passed in the name of victims and survivors. But for the past few years, [the Louisiana Survivors for Reform coalition] has showed that there are survivors who are saying, ‘Actually, that’s not for me,’” Hunter-Lowrey told Bolts. “The work that we’re doing to provide a non-judgmental space for survivors and victims’ families where advocacy is explicitly part of our healing—it has made a difference.” 

“It’s going to continue to take some time, but I think that path that we’re laying brick by brick is still the right one,” she added.

Hunter-Lowrey’s colleague at Promise of Justice Initiative, Michael Cahoon, has been organizing with faith leaders across the state for several years, most recently around the campaign to ask for mercy for those on death row. “We activated a lot of folks who hadn’t been active,” he said. “We’re definitely hoping to continue that sense of urgency and that sense of moral imperative in the next year.” 

“As we move forward into a new political reality,” Cahoon went on, “It’s also about presenting an affirmative vision for what safety looks like, beyond our over-reliance on mass incarceration. “And I think that’s going to be the work of the next year, four years, eight years, 10 years.” 

For Anderson, it all comes down to voter mobilization. “There are things that any governor can do that can be problematic,” she told Bolts. “When the voters simply do not show up, do not flood the legislature, do not call, there’s no accountability.” She pointed to the raft of elections coming up this year. In 2024, Louisiana will select a new state supreme court justice and nine intermediate appellate court judges, send six representatives to the U.S. House, and choose a public services commissioner. The state’s three biggest parishes will hold school board elections. Even party elections can make a difference: Norris Henderson, a formerly incarcerated organizer, is running for Democratic State Central Committee. 

The Louisiana Parole Project has a practice of posting to social media each time a client’s sentence is commuted. Most of the photos depict older Black men, smiling broadly, with Angola’s gates blurred in the background. This year, the images have proliferated: despite his reluctance to move on the death row clemency petitions, Edwards did commute the sentences of at least 123 prisoners, the vast majority of them lifers. Though that’s just a small percentage of those serving life sentences in the state, it’s still the highest number of commutations of any governor since the 1980s. “For a lot of those families, the only way they would have seen their loved one was in a box when they sent him home,” Anderson said. 

But if Landry is anything like his Republican predecessor, relief will be scarce in the coming years: Bobby Jindal commuted just three people’s sentences during his entire eight years in office.

Landry’s election has not only dashed hopes of commutation for prisoners on death row or anywhere else—it has also raised the very real possibility that executions will resume in the state. Louisiana last put a man to death in 2010, only after he waived his right to keep fighting his case and asked the state to end his life; there have been no contested executions in the state since 2002. But Landry has long defended capital punishment. In 2018, he criticized Edwards for not doing more to resume executions and argued that the state should consider older methods of execution, like hanging and firing squads.

Cecelia Kappel, the capital defense lawyer, is worried that the new governor might try to do what he can to jumpstart executions. But she’s also motivated by how the clemency battle exposed deep flaws in the way Louisiana doles out death sentences and by how much the public’s support for capital punishment has eroded in recent years. In August, she succeeded in getting one of her clients an entirely new trial. “We’re just going to keep moving forward,” she told Bolts. “And we shall see what the future brings, but I think that we will see more exonerations and we will certainly see more reversals in the next few years.”

The post Louisiana Organizers Brace for Landry appeared first on Bolts.

Every night one of his neighbors was scheduled to be executed by the state of North Carolina, Glen Edward “Ed” Chapman would look up at the window slit in his cell and say to the black sky, “I’ll see you again.”

Saying goodbye was hard. Chapman and his peers who were also condemned to die formed a small community within the prison system. And whenever the state executed someone, that community would shrink by one member.

“I was close to those guys on death row,” Chapman said. “They were like family.”

One of the people killed while Chapman was on death row was Ernest Basden, sentenced to death in 1993 in a murder-for-hire scheme. After he got to prison, Basden stopped using alcohol and drugs and found God. His family had traveled around the state to build public pressure to convince then-Governor Mike Easley to grant Basden clemency and spare his life.

They failed. One cold winter evening, Basden’s family huddled in the mailroom of Central Prison in Raleigh to say goodbye, able to freely talk with and touch him in the last hours of his life.

“My mom had not hugged him in 10 years,” said Kristin Stapleford, Basden’s niece.

Basden was executed in the early morning of Dec. 6, 2002.

More than 20 years later, Chapman is on the other side of the bars, having been exonerated and released from prison, and is now joining Basden’s family in again urging a North Carolina governor to spare the lives of the men and women sentenced to death.

“We promised him that we would not give up the fight, that we would fight to see the death penalty abolished in North Carolina,” Stapleford said.

Stapleford and Chapman are members of a coalition of more than 20 social and criminal justice organizations and religious leaders calling on Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, to commute the sentences of the people on North Carolina’s death row to prison terms before he leaves office at the end of 2024. A Bolts and NC Newsline analysis shows there are currently 136 people on this death row—the fifth-largest number in the U.S.—whose lives would be spared if Cooper were to act. 

Commutation is one form of clemency, a broad power most U.S. governors have to change a person’s criminal conviction or prison sentence, most often due to individual circumstances of a person’s incarceration; whether they were convicted as a youth, for example. Former North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford, who held the office from 1961 to 1965, saw his clemency power as a form of grace.

“It falls to the governor to blend mercy with justice, as best he can, involving human as well as legal considerations, in the light of all circumstances after the passage of time, but before justice is allowed to overrun mercy in the name of the power of the state,” Sanford wrote in 1961, after shortening the sentences of 29 prisoners through executive clemency.

But what Cooper is being asked to do now is much broader.

This coalition of activists is calling on him to commute death sentences as an act of racial justice. In North Carolina—a state where people were legally enslaved for more than 100 years—just over 22 percent of residents are Black, but over half of those on death row are Black or African American, according to figures provided to Bolts and NC Newsline through a public records request. Of the dozen people who have been sentenced to death in North Carolina and later found innocent, 11 are people of color.

Advocates are now hoping Cooper will offer clemency for the 136 people on death row en masse, regardless of the circumstances of the crimes of which they are convicted, because of the injustices of the death penalty and North Carolina’s criminal legal system at large.

Granting clemency would not mean that the people on death row would be released from prison, nor would it mean the abolition of the death penalty going forward. The state constitution only grants the governor discretion to shorten a sentence as he sees fit. Cooper could, for instance, commute the sentences to life without the possibility of parole. Or, he could sentence them to life and leave the possibility of parole open. 

It’s similar to a petition made by advocates in Louisiana, who earlier this year asked Governor John Bel Edwards to commute the sentences of more than 50 people on that state’s death row. So far this mass request has been blocked by the Louisiana Board of Pardons. 

While North Carolina governors frequently granted clemency in the late 1970s until 2000, commutations became rare starting in 2001.

Executions have slowed as well—North Carolina hasn’t executed anyone since 2006, and North Carolina’s district attorneys pursue the death penalty at a much lower rate than in years past. But with Republicans controlling the state supreme court and holding supermajorities in the House and Senate, many anti-death penalty advocates are concerned that they could restart, especially if a Republican moves into the executive mansion.

The death penalty has been raised as a talking point in early debates among Republican gubernatorial candidates and has been an issue in previous elections as well. In 2017, top Republican legislators demanded Cooper and Attorney General Josh Stein, a Democrat now running for governor, resume executions after four prisoners at Pasquotank Correctional Institution were charged with killing four employees in a failed escape attempt. 

Two of those four men have since been sentenced to death.

A new governor couldn’t simply sign a slip of paper and reopen the execution chamber since the courts are the reason for the pause in executions. There are ongoing legal battles over the application of the Racial Justice Act, landmark legislation that gave people an opportunity to get off death row if they could prove racial discrimination had played a role in their death sentence. Democrats passed that bill in 2009, Republicans repealed it in 2013. Then, when Democrats controlled the state supreme court in 2020, it struck down the retroactive repeal of the law, allowing the claims that had already been filed to continue to play out through the present day. 

But conservatives now control the state supreme court, and advocates worry they could revisit that ruling, clearing a path to resume executions. There are also still legal questions about North Carolina’s protocols for using lethal injection drugs to carry out executions, though advocates worry North Carolina Republicans could find a way around that, as they have tried to in South Carolina and Alabama. 

Republican control of the other branches of state government has given those opposed to the death penalty a sense of urgency. At a recent rally, Kristie Puckett, the senior project manager of Forward Justice, told a crowd of around 200 supporters that Cooper was their last hope because of North Carolina’s current political climate.

“We can’t trust our legislature. We can’t trust the courts,” she said. “And so we are forced to rely on Governor Cooper.”

The coalition has staged marches, written letters and met with the governor’s staff. They’ve held film screenings on the “Racist Roots” of North Carolina’s death penalty and handed out postcards so residents can write Cooper directly. Soon, they’ll post billboards and travel to communities across the state to build support for the campaign as it enters its final year before Cooper leaves office.

“Our commutations campaign is very focused on 2024 because we have a sense of urgency that executions could resume, as they did in the federal system,” said Noel Nickle, executive director of the North Carolina Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. “I am concerned that the political climate of our state has become more entrenched in policies and practices that would lead to executions resuming.”

Cooper, who has had a mixed record on commutations, has been pressured for years by criminal justice reformers, many of whom have gathered outside the governor’s mansion annually calling on him to use his clemency powers. Cooper didn’t grant any commutation until March 2022—two years into his second term—shortening the prison terms of three people who committed crimes when they were children. In December 2022, after three weeks of protests outside his home, Cooper commuted the sentences of six more people.

So far, Cooper has made no public comment on the 136 currently on death row. In 2017, after the murders at the prison in Pasquotank, a spokesperson for the governor said Cooper supported the death penalty and had a “long history of upholding it” during his 16 years as attorney general. The governor’s spokesperson did not answer recent questions from Bolts and NC Newsline on whether he still supports the death penalty or if he was considering commuting North Carolina’s death sentences.

Puckett credited the annual campaign for getting Cooper to issue commutations last year. She doesn’t think he would have exercised clemency otherwise.

“That’s the only reason he’s doing something: because he’s forced to do something,” she said.

A lasting legacy

The North Carolina governor’s office is weak by design but clemency is one area where the executive branch has broad authority to commute prison sentences without approval from a parole board.

“This is a rare policy area where the governor has power, can exercise it, and doesn’t need to ask anyone else for permission,” said Christopher Cooper, a professor of political science at Western Carolina University (who has no relation to the governor).

Even so, it would be novel for a Democratic governor—especially in the South—to use their power to unilaterally empty their state’s death row. Louisiana’s John Bel Edwards, tried to grant the mass clemency request he received before he left office, but he was ultimately thwarted by the state board of pardons.

Cooper has already laid the groundwork for clemency on a systemic level. In June 2020, just after a white Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd, the governor established a Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice that he asked to make recommendations for ending racial disparities in the criminal justice system. One of the subjects they tackled was the death penalty.

Ken Rose, who was a senior attorney at the Durham-based Center for Death Penalty Litigation for 35 years before retiring in 2017, gave a presentation to members of the task force in November 2020 showing two strikingly similar maps of the United States: One showing where Black people were lynched across the nation between 1883 and 1940, an another marking the execution of Black defendants between 1972 and 2020. 

Later that year, the task force published a report noting the death penalty has a “relationship with white supremacy.” They did not recommend abolishing capital punishment, but they did propose ways to narrow its use. 

The task force also identified commutation as a remedy to address injustice, suggesting officials examine commuting sentences of people sentenced to death before July 2001, when North Carolina had a “quasi-mandatory” death penalty law that forced prosecutors to seek a death sentence in capital cases. More than two thirds of the people on the state’s death row are there because of that law, according to Rose.

“You have a lot of people on death row, still on death row, who wouldn’t be there if DAs had a choice for pleading cases to life,” he said.

Following another recommendation of the task force, Cooper created the Juvenile Sentence Review Board in 2021, which reviewed the sentences of people who committed crimes as children and recommended suitable applicants for clemency. Of the nine commutations Cooper granted in 2022, five were based on recommendations from that board. In a press release, his office acknowledged science showing children’s brains are different than adults’, and that state and federal laws treat minors differently in sentencing in criminal cases.

“As people become adults, they can change, turn their lives around, and engage as productive members of society,” Cooper said in a press release.

Kerwin Pittman, one of the members of the task force, thinks Cooper’s own political ambitions could make him reticent to use clemency more broadly. At 66 years old, he is a relatively young politician and could have decades left in public office.

“To just issue a blanket clemency to everybody, or commute everybody, he may not feel that is in his best interest,” Pittman said. “I’m sure he doesn’t want to make a misstep that’s going to come back and bite him.”

But this reluctance is frustrating to advocates who see Cooper as wasting his authority to commute sentences as he sees fit. 

“Why do you work so hard and be so shrewd to get to the top just to piss the power away?” Puckett asked. 

The exonerees

More than 20 organizations from across the state and country are working with the North Carolina Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty to persuade Cooper to use his clemency powers. Members of the European Union also came to Raleigh in November to meet with Cooper and Attorney General Stein to talk about the death penalty.

But it is exonerees like Alfred Rivera and Ed Chapman who are leading the charge—men who intimately know the hopelessness of death row but escaped it once they proved they should have never been convicted. 

Rivera is both a victim of violence and wrongful incarceration. After his father was killed in a robbery when Rivera was a toddler, his mother, left alone with five children to care for, started drinking. She died from cirrhosis of the liver seven years after her husband passed away. 

“This is the toll that it took on her,” Rivera said.

Two decades later, a jury sent Rivera to death row, convicting him for murder. But he was exonerated in two years, after the state supreme court ruled he should get a new trial because jurors hadn’t heard evidence suggesting he’d been framed. 

Chapman, meanwhile, spent 14 years on North Carolina’s death row before being exonerated in 2008 after a judge ordered a new trial and a district attorney dropped the charges. He had been sentenced to death for two murders he didn’t commit. There were serious issues with the investigation; police had withheld evidence, and a detective later faced perjury charges for lying on the stand.

Chapman struggled after he came home. He lost a job, isolated himself and used drugs and alcohol to cope. He moved to Florida, staying in a spate of recovery houses before sleeping on the streets for about a year. 

He felt guilty about how he was living, like he was wasting the second chance he’d been given. “I let those people down that fought for me,” he said.

The guilt, shame and remorse compelled Chapman to join the commutation campaign after he moved to Durham in 2022. Now he is fighting for a cause bigger than himself.

“I’m trying to be better than I was before,” he said.

On Aug. 19, 2023, almost 17 years to the day since North Carolina’s last execution, Chapman and the coalition met at Pullen Memorial Baptist Church and marched more than a mile to Central Prison to honor those executed there.

The crowd of roughly 200 held a vigil to remember the 43 people executed by the state since 1984. Dozens of people held signs with the names of those who were killed in the execution chamber within the prison behind them. They also called for an end to death row, chanting at cars driving past them on Western Boulevard.

It was the first time Chapman had been back at the prison since getting off death row. He got chills standing outside, knowing what it was like to live on the other side of the metal doors, behind the barbed wire. But he found strength standing beside death penalty abolition advocates and people like Rivera, those sentenced to death for something they didn’t do.

“I felt that the cause for me being there outweighed my anxiety,” Chapman said.

Innocent people like Chapman and Rivera are easy cases to make to the public. It is harder—and potentially poses a greater political risk—to show grace to those who did their crimes.

Rose has represented many people on death row. He’s found that those individuals can be caring and selfless, thoughtful and resilient. They can also struggle under the weight of the mental illness and the trauma they’ve endured. 

“I look at them differently because I’ve gotten to know them,” Rose said. “I think people can do really terrible things. I think people can do monstrous things. But I do not think that that makes them a monster.”

That is a sentiment shared by Lynda Simmons, another member of the commutations coalition. Simmons’ son Brian was murdered by a teenager named James Moore, in 2004. Simmons struggled for years with relentless waves of grief over Brian’s death. But in time, trying to make sense of a senseless act, she connected with Moore, who wound up serving 15 years for second-degree murder. The two traded letters, helping one another process the trauma and grief they’d both endured. 

As they were communicating through the mail, Simmons was also doing restorative justice work with people on death row. She’d share her story with the men at Central Prison, helping those sentenced to death connect with someone who had lost a loved one to an act of violence. There, working with men like Moore who had gone to prison when they were teenagers, she could see that Moore had done something terrible, but that action didn’t define his entire humanity. 

“Listening to them, I knew that when James murdered my son, that’s what he did,” Simmons said. “I believe with everything in me, that’s not who he was.”

Simmons has always been against the death penalty, but that belief was crystallized when she went to Moore’s sentencing hearing in 2005. When she walked into the courtroom and saw Brian and Moore’s friends and family on opposite sides, she saw the impact of the shooting echoing across generations and familial lines, lives irrevocably changed by a single violent act.

“I knew that they were victims, too,” Simmons said. “They didn’t shoot my son. And I don’t believe that they raised James to shoot my son.”

“I do believe that human beings are able to change,” she continued. “And when we execute people, we rob them of the chance to change.”

Politics vs. reality

Members of the North Carolina Republican Party have long campaigned on their support of the death penalty.

In 2010, the State Republican Party sent out a mailer slamming Majority Leader Hugh Holliman, a Democrat whose teenage daughter was raped and murdered, as a “Criminal Coddler” for helping pass the Racial Justice Act, legislation that offered people a chance to get off death row—but not, as the flier erroneously claimed, out of prison—if they could prove racial discrimination had affected their charging or sentencing. 

The front of the flier read: “Meet your new neighbors. You’re not going to like them very much.”

On the back were mugshots of two men sentenced to death: Wayne Laws and Henry McCollum. 

McCollum did eventually get out of prison, not because of the Racial Justice Act but because he was innocent, like Chapman and Rivera. 

Public support for the death penalty has declined since its peak in 1994, when 80 percent of Americans said they were in favor of capital punishment, and has been on the decline ever since. Now, just over half of Americans support the death penalty.

But in 2010, North Carolina’s politicking over capital punishment worked: Holliman lost the election, as did other Democrats targeted for their support of the Racial Justice Act. Rose said it was impossible to determine whether the misleading flier swung the elections, but it doesn’t change the fact that it was a politically salient issue at the time.

“There was a lot of political use of the death penalty for a long, long time, in a way that arguably shaped elections,” said Rose.

Today, the exonerations of people like Rivera, Chapman and McCollum are eroding public support for the death penalty further, said Rose. But that doesn’t mean Republican politicians won’t bring it up when it is to their political benefit. It resurfaced in 2017 because of the prison escapes, and has been mentioned this election cycle. 

During the first Republican gubernatorial debate, one candidate called for resuming executions under the death penalty. Lawyer and businessman Bill Graham polled second in the governor’s race a few weeks after releasing an ad advocating for the death penalty for drug dealers and human traffickers. (He still trailed the Republican frontrunner, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, and 42 percent of respondents were undecided, but the director of the Meredith Poll told WRAL the ads seemed to be helping Graham.)

“As a prosecutor, I went after violent criminals,” Graham said in the ad. “As governor, I’ll put ‘em in jail or in the ground.”

The Republican-controlled state supreme court has also shown a willingness to overturn precedents set by previous Democratic majorities. Earlier this year they issued new rulings on partisan gerrymandering and the state’s voter ID law, reversing Supreme Court opinions written in 2022, when Democrats were in control.

“If you were an ordinary court and you were honoring precedent and you were trying to build on that precedent and navigate that precedent, then they have a long, long way to go before they restart executions,” Rose said. “But if what you wanted to do is resume executions and kill the people that are currently on death row, you could do that, but you’d have to ignore the precedent.”

But the politics of the death penalty are often divorced from reality. The most common outcome of a death sentence in North Carolina isn’t an execution, but a long process of appeals that leads to a reversal of a sentence, said Frank Baumgartner, a political science professor at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a national expert on the death penalty.

“These things are reversed not because somebody put a paperclip on the wrong side of the paper,” Baumgartner said. “They’re reversed because evidence was withheld or because improper instructions were given to the jury, or, you know, something serious.”

Baumgartner maintains an internal database on capital punishment in North Carolina. According to his figures, 411 people have received death sentences since 1976; 190 of them, or 46 percent have been overturned.

Nationally, more than 8,500 people have been sentenced to death since 1972, Baumgartner said, wondering, “What are the odds that every one of them is guilty as charged?”

On death row, community

To live on North Carolina’s death row is to be constantly reminded of one’s mortality. The men housed on death row in Central Prison in Raleigh, can spend years, decades, entire generations together in their communal pod. Most of the people on death row have been there for 20 or 30 years. They grow old together; sometimes they die of natural causes. (There are two women on death row, incarcerated at a different prison.)

“Our memories of the dead become death row lore, significant to us, living on in our hearts and minds and dreams. We live together, die together, mourn together, and remember,” said Lyle May, who has been on death row since 1999.

That quote is included in “Bone Orchard: Reflections on Life Under Sentence of Death,” a book written by one of May’s peers, George Wilkerson, who was sentenced to death in 2006. The book, co-written with Robert Johnson, a professor of justice, law and criminology at American University, is a firsthand account of life on North Carolina’s death row. 

Most states keep those on death row in segregation, meaning the incarcerated are locked in their cells most of their days, for decades, until they win their appeals, die or are executed. But North Carolina’s death row is unusual in that it houses condemned people together. The consistent group setting makes people with death sentences in the state particularly suitable for commutation, Johnson argued, saying they have had time to develop social and emotional skills since they spend so much time out of their cells.

“You don’t get the feeling of a pressure cooker on North Carolina’s death row,” Johnson told Bolts and Newsline. “There’s the overshadowing threat of death, but there’s a lot of community.”

There are risks to the incarcerated if their death sentences are commuted. Breaking up the community established on death row, for one. There are also implications for their appeals. People on death row in North Carolina are entitled to attorneys in appellate proceedings. Plus, Johnson said he thinks people facing death sentences typically get more attention on their cases from criminal justice reformers and the media, compared to people serving life. 

“That is definitely a valid concern, them losing legal remedies if granted a commutation,” said Pittman, a member of the racial equity task force. “They could lose access to having automatic counsel in the appellate courts, as well as if somebody is on the row and somebody is innocent, they could lose access to their freedom through the court system.” 

Even still, Johnson said those on death row stand to gain much from clemency. They could have better access to rehabilitative programming.“We’d been told many times point-blank, ‘You are not here to be rehabilitated,’” Wilkerson writes in “Bone Orchard.”

Receiving clemency would also allow more opportunities for them to see their loved ones because of a less restrictive visitation policy, Johnson added.

And obviously, they won’t have a death sentence hanging over their heads. Only about 20 people have been added to death row since the last execution in the summer of 2006, according to the state’s roster. One of those is Wilkerson, who has been a part of the community since Dec. 20, 2006.

“We live shoulder-to-shoulder for ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years,” he wrote in the book, “and gradually this me versus them mentality I’d walked in with, melted away, leaving only us.”

Two miles from Wilkerson’s cell, on a warm, wet December afternoon, members of the clemency campaign met in a parking lot across the street from the governor’s mansion. They sang, chanted and chatted about their support for emptying death row. Nickle said the theme of the day was “community, compassion and commutation.” 

Cooper has yet to say publicly whether he will commute the death sentences, or if he is even considering such a broad use of his clemency powers. He will leave office at the end of 2024, giving advocates about a year to build support for emptying North Carolina’s death row.

Chapman and Rivera stood in a corner laughing amongst themselves as two people sang “We Shall Overcome” to the crowd. After a few minutes, the exonerees went separate ways. Rivera stepped onto the sidewalk, glancing at the signs that listed the birth date and day of execution of 43 people killed by the State of North Carolina. 

The rallies are a surreal experience for Rivera. The names on the signs aren’t just words to him. When he sees or hears the names of people still facing a death sentence, those who haven’t yet been executed, he can still see their faces, and he wonders how they’ve changed in the 24 years he has been free.

“I knew these guys personally,” Rivera said. 

He feels a sense of survivor’s guilt for having gotten off death row. He still thinks about what it was like living there, “the horrible conditions,” having to reckon with “how I went from that to this,” as he gestures at the wide open parking lot, the community of supporters. 

“Is it fair that people are still suffering under those conditions?” he asked. “I think about that, me being free and at these events.”

The post Inside the Urgent Campaign to Commute North Carolina’s Entire Death Row appeared first on Bolts.

For more than 25 years, Mike Rose felt alone. After his son Jeremy was arrested at age 17 in 1994, sentenced to life in prison, Mike and his wife had no community with which to share the pain of losing a son to prison. “In the battle to help your loved ones, it feels like you’re by yourself, fighting this battle on your own,” he says. Jeremy was shipped to an out-of-state prison, as New Mexico does with many kids serving long sentences, deepening his parents’ isolation. 

Then, about four years ago, Mike says his world opened up after he stumbled upon a coalition that had assembled in New Mexico to fight extreme sentences imposed on children. 

“It was like a breath of fresh air,” he told Bolts. “I was able to join them and it’s like, I’m not by myself anymore. We’ve got resources, we’ve got people who are in the same situation, we can pull our knowledge and our strengths and start working on the passage of legislation. It was a godsend.” 

The coalition has for years pushed legislation to give every ‘juvenile lifer’ a meaningful chance at release, which faltered in repeated legislative sessions until they finally succeeded this spring: In March, lawmakers adopted Senate Bill 64, a law abolishing sentences of life without parole for children. 

The law also addresses other extreme sentences by making anyone convicted of a crime they committed under the age of 18 eligible for parole hearings—usually after 15 years in prison, though in some cases after 20 or 25 years behind bars. 

“In a moment of pretty extreme political polarization around crime and public safety, our community was able to pass one of the more progressive juvenile parole laws in the country, and we did it with bipartisan support,” said Denali Wilson, an attorney at the ACLU of New Mexico who co-founded this coalition, though she also stresses that 15 years remains too long a time. “For people that went to prison when they were 15-16 years old, we’re talking about a lifetime to wait for just an opportunity—just an opportunity to come home.”

The law does not guarantee release for anyone. It only provides review by a parole board, a shot to showcase one’s rehabilitation inside and ask for a second chance that the governor-appointed board can still deny. Many people newly eligible for review will still likely remain in prison for decades. 

Still, Mike Rose calls himself “eternally optimistic” and says the law’s passage opens the door to having his son home by the end of the year. Jeremy, who was convicted of murder alongside two other minors for the stabbing deaths of two elderly people three decades ago, received a sentence that made him eligible for parole after 30 years in prison, and likely would have had a parole hearing next near even without the new law. But Mike, whose wife died of cancer two years ago without seeing her son have a hearing, is keenly aware of what shaving even just a few years off his sentence could have meant—and now he’s eager to help others besides his son get a second look. 

“He left a boy of 17 and hopefully I get the opportunity to have him here shortly as a man of 47,” Mike said of his son. “There’s a huge push across the country to recognize the fact that we as a society cannot sentence our juveniles to a life behind bars… You’re not doing things to solve the crime problem, what you’re doing is throwing the next generation away.”

So far in 2023, two other states besides New Mexico have adopted similar reforms, making people convicted as children eligible for release after some lengthy term of incarceration: Illinois with House Bill 1064 in February, and Minnesota, which included the reforms in a large public safety package, in May. 

They are just the latest states to adopt such laws over the last decade, ever since the U.S. Supreme Court issued a series of decisions in the late 2000s and early 2010s affirming that minors deserve “meaningful opportunities to obtain release.” The laws passed in New Mexico, Illinois and Minnesota mean there will now be 28 states that no longer sentence kids to life without parole.

“Every state that ends the practice of condemning children to die in prison creates pressure for the next state to do so,” said Preston Shipp, a policy counsel with the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, a national organization that is helping spread those reforms.

Shipp traveled to Santa Fe and St. Paul this year to lobby lawmakers and share information about the many similar reforms that have already been implemented elsewhere, pointing to the low recidivism rate for people who have been released on parole in other states. He also tries to talk to lawmakers about research in neuroscience and psychology showing developmental differences between adults and youth.

“We know from the science of adolescent brain development that [kids] don’t appreciate all the consequences of their conduct; peer pressure hits differently,” Shipp said. ”In a flash point, this person does something that’s tragic, and it changes people’s lives, but it doesn’t mean that they cannot experience rehabilitation. It doesn’t mean that they’re beyond the hope of redemption.”

More states could soon make reforms. Shipp has traveled to Lansing three times this year to help bills that would end juvenile life without parole in Michigan. Connecticut already adopted similar reforms in 2015 for kids under age 18, but in June lawmakers passed a bill that extends parole eligibility to people with long sentences who were convicted before age 21. (The new Illinois law also applies to people up to age 21.) That measure now goes to Governor Ned Lamont, a Democrat who has blocked other efforts to curtail long sentences for juveniles. 

Despite the similarities, the youth sentencing reforms that three states have passed so far this year will vary widely in actual impact. In Illinois, people already serving extreme sentences for juvenile convictions are still set to spend their lives behind bars without review: The bill that passed this year—just like the 2019 law it builds on—isn’t retroactive. 

In New Mexico and Minnesota, by contrast, dozens of people incarcerated for decades are now suddenly poised to receive parole hearings very soon because of the new laws. “There are just a lot of people who have spent a lot of time in prison being introspective and growing and developing into adults,” State Representative Sandra Feist, a Democrat who helped shape Minnesota’s legislation, told Bolts. “And I’m just excited for them to get a second chance.”

For advocates like Wilson who hope to reduce the prison population and spent years guiding these bills through the state legislatures, that effort was just about setting up the difficult parole processes that are only now starting.  

“It’s the moment that our community has been preparing for,” Wilson said. “We knew that passing the law was only the first step. Making the law mean something, making it mean real opportunity for people to come home, is the next chapter.”

The states that adopted new juvenile sentencing reforms this year significantly limited if not eliminated discretionary parole in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a period during which many states toughened sentencing and gutted paths to release throughout the country. That gives advocates a chance to start fresh—after all, established parole boards are typically dysfunctional and punitive—but creating a new process out of virtually nothing is also a daunting task. 

Wilson warns that legal services in New Mexico aren’t trained to counsel the people who are newly eligible for parole, even as their hearings are coming up soon. “The work ahead is happening outside of existing institutions in the state because this is new work,” she said. “This reform was passed without any kind of budget allocation from the state, and so much of the work is around shoring up resources to make sure that people are supported in the way that they deserve.” Wilson has set up an organization, Deserving Life, that’s crowdfunding to help provide people with this support. 

Wilson says she knows of at least 75 people incarcerated in New Mexico who were given decades-long sentences for crimes they committed as minors and will be affected by SB 64. More than half are already eligible for a hearing under the new law because they’ve served more than the minimum period (15 to 25 years, depending on the crime). The actual number is likely higher: ProPublica exposed in March how the state lost track of nearly two dozen people locked up since they were sentenced to life in prison as kids. 

Meanwhile, close to 100 people will be affected by Minnesota’s new law, according to Perry Moriearty, who helps run a law clinic at the University of Minnesota that represents “juvenile lifers” and played a central role in crafting and championing the reforms over the last decade. In Minnesota, like in New Mexico, most people will be eligible after 15 years in prison, though it will be longer for some categories of crimes. Moriearty says nearly half have been in prison long enough that they are already eligible for a hearing.

But the panel that will review these cases doesn’t even exist yet. Minnesota lawmakers this spring created a brand new review board that must still be staffed. For cases that involve people who were sentenced as minors, that five-member board will be supplemented by two additional members who must be experts in neurodevelopmental science.  

Advocates for the law say these two additional members will be critical to remind the rest of the board of what makes youth different. “One of the things that neurodevelopmental experts may be able to speak to is why, with a lot of kids who are incarcerated, the first few years look bumpy,” said Moriearty, the University of Minnesota professor.  “For kids who are told that they’re entering prison and they’re gonna die there, there tend to be more infractions in those early years.”

Avra Anagnostis was 14 when her 16-year-old best friend, Roberto Lopez-Rios, was arrested and sentenced to life in Minnesota in 2001. “Life in prison, obviously, as kids, we couldn’t really comprehend what that meant,” she told Bolts. “It sounded so scary and overwhelming.” 

For more than two decades, Anagnostis has advocated for her friend to get a second look. She and Lopez-Rios co-founded an organization called Juvenile Sentencing Reform MN, paired up with Moriearty to advocate for reform, and reached out to people who have been incarcerated since they were kids. “Some of these guys are really alone,” she said. “Several have never had anyone reach out to them.” 

“For them to know that this group of people was coming together, people that they’ve never met, and advocating for them and saying, you are more than the worst thing you did as a child, that was huge,” she added.

From prison, Lopez-Rios has developed his painting, working with a group called Art from the Inside to have his art sold and shown at exhibitions. In April, this Minnesota-based organization hosted an art workshop in St. Paul alongside Juvenile Sentencing Reform MN that featured Moriearty and other coalition members talking about their bill.

Moriearty says that most kids sentenced to spend their life in prison in Minnesota come from Hennepin and Ramsey counties, which include the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, the most diverse area in the state—and that the vast majority, 81 percent, are also Black and Latinx. The prosecutors who represent these population centers—Ramsey County’s John Choi, who has long backed this issue, and Hennepin County’s Mary Moriarty, who was elected in November in a victory for progressives—both supported the reform this year. 

Nevertheless, the statewide association of county attorneys opposed Minnesota’s bill this year. Robert Small, its executive director, told Bolts that the organization agreed with the principle of ending juvenile life without parole but thought that people should wait for longer periods before being eligible, and that the decision should be made by a judge and not by a parole board. Feist says the support her bill received from Choi and Moriarty helped counter the idea that local law enforcement was uniformly hostile to it.

New Mexico’s prosecutors association, which has a long history of torpedoing criminal justice reforms and opposed prior iterations of this bill, remained neutral on the 2023 version after extracting concessions that extended how long kids have to wait before becoming eligible for parole. (An earlier version of the bill made most minors eligible for parole after 10 years.)

Advocates in both New Mexico and Minnesota say they insisted the bills be retroactive, bringing hope to the very people who were championing them. They also pressed lawmakers to cover anyone who was convicted of a crime as a kid, no matter how serious. 

“The reason why we are so adamant that there should not be carve outs is because this whole policy is all about the difference between kids and adults,” Shipp said. “It’s not about the nature of the offense.”

All three bills adopted this year passed Democratic-led legislatures and were then signed by Democratic governors. In each case, the opposition largely came from GOP ranks, even though the bills in Illinois and New Mexico each received Republican support. (Minnesota’s package, which incorporated many other reforms, passed on strict party lines.) Some GOP-run states have adopted similar legislation—most recently, Ohio in 2021. 

In Illinois, a Republican state senator even played a lead role this year in pushing lawmakers to fix the fact that HB 1064 does not apply to past cases. In the same week Governor J.B. Pritzker signed it into law in February, Senator Seth Lewis filed new legislation, SB 2073, to make it retroactive. Lewis’ bill would also apply to an earlier sentencing reform that Illinois adopted in 2019, which curtailed juvenile life without parole but did not eliminate it. If it passes, it would make hundreds of people incarcerated since they were kids eligible for parole, according to Lindsey Hammond, policy director of the Chicago-based Restore Justice. 

SB 2073 drew numerous Democratic co-sponsors but it received no vote by the end of the legislative session in May. Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford, a Democrat, did not respond to a request for comment on her plans for next year.

While the sentencing reforms in Illinois are limited to only new convictions, the state has still gone further than most others (including New Mexico and Minnesota) in another dimension: age. 

Reforms that take a more rehabilitative approach to youth are traditionally written to apply to people who committed a crime before age 18, but the laws Illinois passed in 2019 and 2023 instead both draw the line at 21. Hammond says the usual arguments for treating kids differently apply to young adults too. “Eighteen isn’t a line that you magically become an adult,” she told Bolts. “The emerging brain science shows that our brains continue to develop till the mid-20s.” 

Hammond says there was interest in the Illinois legislature to set the age of eligibility at 25: “Why are we stopping?”

Back in 2021, Washington, D.C., became the first jurisdiction to eliminate life without the possibility of parole for anyone convicted of a crime committed under age 25. Bolts reported last year that the reform sparked releases but at a slower pace than its proponents hoped for because of pandemic delays and recalcitrant prosecutors. Other states, like Massachusetts and Vermont, have also raised the age until which someone can be treated as a juvenile past 18. Connecticut could join that roster if its governor, Lamont, signs SB 952, the bill that ends life without parole for youth under 21. 

People in other states are watching these developments closely. In Minnesota, Moriearty says they didn’t press raising the age of adult criminal liability in this year’s session but hopes to revisit it in the future. “We didn’t necessarily feel like we had time,” she says.

Some advocates also hope to build on these new laws to make a broader case: They wonder if re-opening the door to parole for juveniles may make people more receptive to the idea that we shouldn’t throw anyone away for life. They’re pushing for reforms to cap prison terms, expand parole hearings for the elderly, or guarantee everyone some form of “second look.”

“If we allow ourselves to believe or to entertain the possibility that a child is more than the worst thing that they’ve ever done,” Wilson says, “it’s really not that far of a leap for people to wonder if that may be true for everybody.”

The post “Just an Opportunity to Come Home” appeared first on Bolts.

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.

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.