The greater argument concerns the conditions that merit shifting an adolescent defendant out of the juvenile system, into the world of adult punishment. Some crimes are so heinous — and strike such a deep public nerve — that they seem to cry out for adult consequences, such as the recent abduction and slaying of ten-year-old Jessica Ridgeway in Jefferson County, a case in which seventeen-year-old Austin Sigg faces first-degree murder charges as an adult. But critics of the system say that media-flamed fears of baby-faced killers have made it too easy to prosecute in adult court juveniles of widely varying culpability and maturity, with disastrous results.
Jeff Johnson's case is not all that different from many other juvenile LWOP convictions; in a significant number of them, the juvenile defendant ends up with a harsher sentence than an older co-defendant who may be more culpable. According to figures compiled by the Colorado Juvenile Defender Coalition, one-fourth of the Colorado LWOP cases involve convictions obtained under the felony-murder statute, rather than a first-degree murder conviction. In other words, the jury didn't find an intent to commit murder, but did find that the defendant had a supporting role in some crime that resulted in homicide.
Johnson as a teen in the early 1990s.
Johnson after receiving his GED certificate in prison in 2009.
Details
Related Content
More About
Juveniles are also less sophisticated about the justice system and more susceptible to peer pressure — including the fear of being labeled a snitch — than adult defendants, and that can be a crucial factor in ending up with a life sentence.
"At least a handful of the juveniles serving life were offered the Youthful Offender System or minor sentences, but it was conditioned on testifying against co-defendants," notes Kim Dvorchak, the executive director of the CJDC. "That's a big issue. Also, it can be difficult for attorneys to represent adolescents if they don't have a lot of experience with them. Particularly in the 1990s, attorneys weren't handling these cases any differently than they would have an adult case."
Over the past decade, defense attorneys have cited emerging brain research to bolster arguments that adolescents need to be treated differently from adults in the justice system. The research confirmed what parents already knew: that teens are inclined to thrill-seeking behavior, lack impulse control, are easily swayed by peers and often fail to recognize alternative courses of action when things go bad. The argument began to find traction with appeals courts, and soon the Supreme Court got involved, chipping away at the adult-time-for-adult-crime logic.
In 2005 the Court ruled that defendants under the age of eighteen couldn't be executed, citing juveniles' immaturity and still-developing personalities. In 2010 the Court threw out life without parole for juveniles for crimes other than homicide. And this summer, in a ruling known as Miller v. Alabama, the justices rejected mandatory life without parole in juvenile homicide cases, too.
Colorado's mandatory LWOP sentence for juveniles convicted of homicide amounts to "a cookie-cutter approach to sentencing these defendants," says Doug Wilson, who heads the Office of the Colorado State Public Defender. "The guy who went down on felony murder for just being in the car was treated the same as the guy who pulled the trigger. The idea [of the Miller decision] is that you need to do an individual sentencing package."
But many state officials have taken the position that the Supreme Court decision should be narrowly applied and doesn't require individual resentencing hearings, a process that victim-rights groups also regard with dread. "There are no words that can describe the emotional difficulty that victim families go through at the thought of reopening these cases," says Jennifer Bishop-Jenkins, president of the National Organization of Victims of Juvenile Lifers. "The word that comes closest is 'torture.' One victim described it to me as like having heart surgery without any anesthetic."
Bishop-Jenkins says her group, which claims more than a hundred victim family members in 22 states, was launched largely in response to what she describes as "offender advocate propaganda" that tends to present juvie lifers as victims rather than dangerous criminals. She praises Iowa governor Branstad's effort to head off resentencing hearings by commuting the sentences of that state's juvenile lifers to sixty-year terms.
"He saved the state a load of money, and the victim families a ton of agony," she says. "There's a false hope here that's been generated by the offender advocates. Assuming they are guilty of horrific crimes, which most of them are, then even if they go through a resentencing process, almost all of them are going to be serving life in prison anyway. Some people will probably obtain some sentencing relief who deserve it, but very few sentences are going to be changed to any significant degree. All of them have already been through multiple levels of due process."
Other observers, though, expect the Iowa commutations to face legal challenges, because the process doesn't take into account the individual circumstances of each defendant. "Our position is that every one of the Colorado LWOPs should get a new sentencing hearing," says Dvorchak. "Obviously, the court is going to look at the nature of the crime and the participant's involvement."
Yet the Colorado Court of Appeals has so far sent out mixed signals about how it's going to interpret the Miller decision. Dvorchak recently won an appeal on behalf of Michael Tate — who, at sixteen, was involved in a break-in at a friend's house that ended in homicide and a felony-murder conviction ["Killer Instinct," September 20, 2007]. A three-judge panel agreed that Tate's LWOP sentence is unconstitutional and ordered that he should be resentenced by the trial court, without specifying what that sentence might be. But the Tate decision is unpublished, which means it has no value as precedent. In a published opinion, another appeals panel ruled that a different LWOP defendant should be resentenced to forty years, with the possibility of parole to follow. That's consistent with the current sentencing scheme; in 2006, state lawmakers changed the maximum sentence for juveniles to forty-to-life. A third recent decision also indicates that an LWOP sentence can "roll over" to forty calendar years without a new hearing.
