Study: Sentencing Children to Die in Prison

Test your knowledge:

1. How many nations sentence children to life in prison?

2. What states have the most people serving life for crimes committed before they reached adulthood?

3. What is the minimum age at which a child can be sentenced to life without parole?

4. Which children are most likely to receive life sentences?

ANSWERS ARE BELOW.

ANSWERS:

1. Just two - the United States and Israel. But Israel is in far distant second place, with only seven juveniles serving life as compared with 2,387 in the United States.

2. Pennsylvania is in first place, with 433; California is in second place, with 227.

3. Of the 44 states that permit life without parole for juveniles, 13 have no minimum age, and one sets the minimum at age 8.

4. More than half are first-time offenders. African Americans are 10 times more likely than white juveniles to be sentenced to life without parole. In California, the disparity is twice that – a 20:1 ratio.

These are some of the data from a new study, "Sentencing Children to Die in Prison," by the University of San Francisco's Center for Law and Global Justice. The study was highlighted in the Los Angeles Times on Nov. 19.

The racial disparity is very apparent to me in the cases that I've been involved in. Even when arrest rates are controlled, African American boys are far more likely than anyone else to be sentenced as adults. This is illustrated in the following graph, from California's Center on Crime and Juvenile Justice:


Yesterday's Ledger Dispatch (Amador County, California) has a long article on efforts in many states to undo the knee-jerk tough-on-juveniles statutes of the past decade. The article, "Prosecuting kids as adults: Some say laws too harsh, states taking second look," is available online. California, which you'll recall from the above quiz is #2 in the nation in locking up kids for life, is one of the states with reform legislation pending. The California Juvenile Life Without Parole Reform Act (SB 999) would allow people sentenced for juvenile crimes to apply for parole after serving 25 years. The measure is opposed by police and prosecutor associations.

California also has a pending challenge to the law as cruel and unusual punishment, barred by the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Antonio Nunez was 14 years old when he accepted a ride home from a 27-year-old man he had met at a party. On the way, the adult kidnapped another man. Although no one was injured in the 2003 incident, Nunez was convicted of kidnapping and attempted murder and is serving life without parole.

Juvies is a recent film chronicling the lives of a group of 12 California youngsters prosecuted as adults and sent to adult prisons.

New study: Brooklyn, NY prisoner reentry program

Prosecutors push alternatives to crime

Today's New York Times features an editorial on a pioneering prisoner reentry program in Brooklyn, NY. The ComAlert program has been going strong for eight years, and was just the focus of a study by a criminal justice expert at Harvard.

No surprise, the study found that paroled prisoners are more likely to stay out of trouble if they undergo rigorous counseling and drug treatment along with immediate job training and work experience.

The surprise (which isn't mentioned by the Times) is who is running and promoting the innovative program: The Brooklyn District Attorney's Office. Indeed, ComAlert stands for "Community and Law Enforcement Resources Together."

The New York Times editorial is here. A longer article by researcher Bruce Western is online here. Western is the author of Punishment and Inequality in America, an enlightening look at crime, race, and employment that was published last year.

Calif. court overrules governor on prisoner parole

It's always safer to err on the side of predicting high risk. You can never be proven wrong. If a prisoner is released, he can go out and commit a new crime that can come back to haunt the judge, parole board, or elected official who approved release. If he is not released, he has no way to prove that he would not have committed that next crime.

Nowhere is that defensive posture more in evidence than in California. Former Gov. Gray Davis had a reputation for blocking the release of every convicted murderer that the state's parole board approved for release. That was a spectacular record, considering that the parole board only grants parole to the most stellar success stories - 5% of the cases it hears, and even less than that for murderers.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has largely mimicked his predecessor, vetoing about three-fourths of such paroles. But, in the latest example of a recent trend, a state appeals court has overruled the governor's veto. The case involves Curtis Lee, who spent 22 years in prison for abetting a murder. He was 18 when his friend shot another young man to death on an Oakland street. Convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 17-years-to-life in prison, Lee became a model prisoner, undergoing extensive job training and therapy.

Today's San Francisco Chronicle has the story. The court ruling is here.

Canada: How false confessions occur

Yesterday's Toronto Star, in the latest in a series of excellent articles on criminal justice issues, features an analysis of false confessions. The article, "Pressure of interrogation imperils even the innocent" by Tim Moore, discusses how police bias toward guilt and resultant high-pressure interrogation techniques can coerce innocent people to confess:

The recent [Canadian] Supreme Court decision in R v Singh, in which the court upheld the conviction of a man who confessed after police continued to question him despite his repeated assertions of his right to remain silent, has attracted renewed attention to the protection that the right to silence is supposed to afford….

There is a substantial body of research on the psychology of confessions. We now know that depending on how they are interrogated, actual innocence may put innocent people at risk. Police cautions are imperfectly understood in the first place, especially by young people or adults with cognitive impairments.

Some innocent suspects waive their right to silence because they perceive innocence to be protective and believe that their blamelessness will soon be self-evident. Unrealistically, they anticipate they will be able to explain to investigators the error of their ways. Regrettably, the ensuing interrogation risks eliciting a false confession from an innocent person, possibly contributing to a false conviction.

The article continues here.

Expert witness controversy spreads

Wrongfully convicted woman can sue expert

Last week, I reported on the brewing controversy in England over unfettered reliance on expert witnesses. Now, the Toronto Star has an article focusing on the controversy in Canada, as well as elsewhere in the world.

It's a fascinating look at some of the high-profile cases that have led to the current attitude of skepticism toward expert scientific and medical witnesses.

As the article explains, the adversarial system is premised on an equal fight between
the accused and the government. Yet the criminally accused typically do not have the funds or expertise to obtain their own experts to challenge the government's expert witnesses, who often wear sterling credentials.

In reaction to a series of convictions based in large part on the testimony of a government pathologist, Canada has reformed its civil laws to allow people to sue an overzealous expert over his findings. The case was brought by Louise Reynolds against forensic pathologist Dr. Charles Smith, whose testimony led to her conviction in the death of her 7-year-old daughter. It later turned out that the girl was mauled to death by a dog. (See my previous blog post on the judicial inquiry into Dr. Smith's expert findings.)

Such tort law is "a first for the common-law world," according to the Star.

Tasers face growing opposition

U.N. Committee calls it "torture"

In the wake of the deaths of six people in just one week and a videotaped incident at an airport in Canada in which a man died after being tased, calls for the restriction or ban of shock-inducing tasers are becoming increasingly urgent.

On Friday, the controversy grew when a United Nations Committee Against Torture called taser use a form of torture. The comment was embedded in a larger report on the committee’s activities, and focused on the use of tasers in Portugal.

Although public criticism focuses on taser use by police, much more out of sight the weapons are widely used as weapons of control in U.S. prisons and juvenile detention facilities. Such widespread tasering of prisoners is documented in the BBC documentary, "Torture: America's Brutal Prisons."

A CBS news report is online here. An Amnesty International report on taser use is here.