The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

The thugs rummaged over his bloodied body looking for loot, but
Broyko, gasping his last labored breaths, was unresponsive. So instead, the girls pilfered $40, jewelry, jackets and a beeper from Broyko's terrified friends before fleeing the murder scene.

Bell didn't pull the trigger that ended Broyko's life. But the law says she will spend the rest of her life behind bars.

With an exploding number of kids becoming killers, more than 2,225 juveniles across the country now are serving life in prison without parole, like Bell.

Because of tough state laws such as charging murder suspects as adults regardless of their age, Pennsylvania tops the nation in the number of young offenders condemned to life in prison without parole.

Some prosecutors argue that some kids commit such heinous crimes that they deserve to lose their freedom forever. But civil-rights activists say life-without-parole sentences are unfair for young people who are impaired by poor judgment and have a chance of being rehabilitated.

"Tamika Bell had no record and did not pull the trigger. But now, she will never get out of prison short of commutation, which is rarely granted," said her attorney, Dan Stevenson. "Life without parole is a cruel sentence, offers no hope of redemption, and is really inappropriate for juveniles, whose cognitive functions are not fully formed."

But without Bell's cooperation in the crime, others counter, Broyko might be alive today.

"I have very little sympathy for the Amnesty International position, when these little assassins come in with machine guns and submachine guns and kill people. Murder is murder," said Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne Abraham.

"If I killed you, would you care whether I was 16 or 80? You're still dead forever."

The way Alison Parker sees it, the law considers children too young to vote, drink beer legally, drive without restriction, buy cigarettes, gamble or serve in the military.

So why, she demands, do they face different rules in American criminal courts?

"Children don't have the same rights as adults, so why should they face the same consequences?" asked Parker, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch. "This sentence is inappropriate, cruel, unnecessary and a serious human-rights violation for people under the age of 18."

Parker authored a report released last fall that found that 42 states permit judges and juries to condemn juveniles to life in prison without parole, despite widespread global rejection of that penalty for young offenders.

Pennsylvania leads the nation in the number of juvenile lifers, with more than 330, even though the state ranks sixth in population, according to the report. The analysis, called "The Rest of Their Lives: Life Without Parole for Child Offenders in the United States," was a joint study with Amnesty International.

The number of juveniles heading to jail for life likely will rise as authorities collar more kid killers.

In Philadelphia, 17 juveniles were arrested for murder in 2000. At least 20 were arrested last year (through November, the most recent month statistics were available), according to police data. Nationally, the number of juveniles arrested for murder rose 37 percent from 1999 to 2004, when 1,300 juveniles were nabbed for homicide nationwide, according to the FBI.

With such statistics in mind, Parker and other civil-rights advocates are calling on legislators to abolish laws allowing life-without-parole sentences for juveniles. Inmates already condemned as juveniles to life should be granted the possibility of parole, they say.

"Children are children, and even though they may do bad things, that doesn't change the fact that their brains haven't developed the way adults' have," said attorney Bradley Bridge, who is appealing the life sentence of Eddie Batzig. Batzig was 16 when he and two friends beat Fishtown teen Jason Sweeney to death in 2003.

"Children shouldn't receive adult sentences," Bridge said. "They should receive sentences commensurate with their age and background."

Batzig, in a brief written response to questions from the Daily News, agreed: "I do believe juveniles, like me, can and will be rehabilitated, in time. Then not only be of no further danger to society, but be a productive member of society. Everybody makes mistakes, right?!"

But some say killers like Batzig are exactly why the law shouldn't be changed.

Batzig swung the first blow, a hatchet chop to Sweeney's head.
Brothers Nicholas and Dominic Coia joined in with a hammer and rocks, and within minutes Sweeney was dead. Coroners determined that only one bone in his head was left intact.

Justina Morley, then 15, lured Sweeney with the promise of sex to the weed-choked lot where he would be butchered. For her role, she was sentenced to 17 ½ to 35 years in prison.

The quartet, all regarded as neighborhood nuisances even before the attack, said they targeted Sweeney for the $500 he'd earned that week working in construction with his father. Afterward, they shared a group hug and "partied beyond redemption," they confessed.

Such atrocity merits no mercy, said state Rep. Dennis O'Brien,
R-Philadelphia.

"Life without parole recognizes the seriousness and heinousness of the crime," he said. "Kids are growing up quicker in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh than they are maybe in Kansas. You can't just say: 'You can do time until you're 21.' That's marking these crimes as being 'on-the-house.' "

Charles Porter, whose 16-year-old brother, Alex, was kidnapped, robbed and murdered in North Philadelphia in 1988, agreed: "These aren't normal, small mistakes. I truly believe people deserve a second chance, but you don't owe someone who murders anything."

The three men and one juvenile involved in Alex Porter's death all are serving life-without-parole sentences.

Tamika Bell was a drug addict and troubled teen who was diagnosed with a mental disorder that made her surly and rebellious.

Yet she - like 59 percent of the juveniles serving life-without-parole sentences nationally - had no prior criminal convictions before being placed in prison for life, according to Parker's report.

Long before the punishment of murderous juveniles ignited national debate, lawmakers fearful of vicious super-predators enacted Pennsylvania's tough laws.

The Juvenile Act of 1972 requires that all children accused of murder in Pennsylvania be charged as adults. While they can petition to be decertified and tried as juveniles, many still end up in adult courts.

Once tried as adults, juveniles face adult sentences.

In Pennsylvania, first-degree murder carries a mandatory life sentence with the possibility of death, while second-degree murder gets an automatic life sentence. A U.S. Supreme Court decision last year outlawed executions of young offenders.

State law also allows prosecutors to charge people with murder
regardless of whether they directly, physically caused a death. That means getaway drivers, lookouts and such accomplices often are held just as accountable in murder cases as the thug who did the actual killing.

With such stiff penalties, some victims' families say they understand the desperation some juvenile lifers feel.

"If I'm locked in a cage, I'd want to get out too - I'd say anything to get out. What fool says he's not reformed? I think they're all reformed after their first couple nights in prison," Charles Porter said.

"But how many inmates have gone before the parole board, claimed they were reformed and then got out to commit another crime?"

That's a fear that has kept many inmates in their cells.

Since 1941, parole has been forbidden for anyone serving a life
sentence, unless the governor commutes it.

But worries about recidivism make commutation rare, especially since two members of the five-member state Pardons Board are elected. Just one inmate has been granted clemency since 1994, when paroled murderer Reginald McFadden got out of jail only to kill two people and brutalize a third in New York.

State Sen. Vincent Fumo, D-Philadelphia, supports eliminating
life-without-parole terms for juveniles. But proposing legislative changes would be political suicide in today's conservative climate, he said.

"The minute you do, you're 'soft on crime,' and then your opponents use it against you, and in today's society, that's all they need," he said.

Porter, whose brother was slain, is one example of those dynamics at work.

"I think the lawmakers should maybe try losing someone in their family to murder, and then think about changing the law," he said. "Whenever something hits home, you look at it in an entirely different way."

While Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch say life without parole must be abolished for juveniles altogether, some supporters say drastic change isn't necessary to improve the plight of juvenile lifers.

"Mandatory sentences should have a line of separation for the
different actors in crimes, such as the shooter versus the driver of a [getaway] car or the so-called lookout," said inmate Shavonne Robbins, now 29, who has been incarcerated since age 16 on a life sentence for a 1992 robbery in which an accomplice killed the victim.

Fumo advocates eliminating mandatory sentencing altogether for
juveniles, saying: "You've always got to give judges discretion. Judges are closest to the case, and not every situation is alike."

Juvenile lifers at least should be granted the opportunity of parole, Robbins said. "Without the chance to re-enter society, prison can no longer be considered a place of reform, but [rather] a holding pen," she said.

Others point to New Jersey as a model, where murder convicts face a minimum of 30 years in prison without parole. Judges then decide if the case warrants a more severe penalty based on the circumstances. While the Garden State allows juveniles to be sentenced to life in prison without parole, the
Amnesty International study found no juvenile lifers there.

States that don't allow life-without-parole sentences for juveniles are Alaska, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, New Mexico, New York and West Virginia; the District of Columbia also forbids them. Lawmakers in Michigan, where at least 306 lifers were juveniles when sentenced, introduced legislation in November to abolish life-without-parole sentences for young offenders.

"Pennsylvania has the most unenlightened laws in the country, and maybe even in the world," said William DiMascio, executive director of the Pennsylvania Prison Society.

"This concept of 'life means life,' and the insistence by politically minded officials that they need to adhere to that, is ridiculous given the growing body of evidence from neurologists who have found that people at the age of 14, 15, and even as far as the early 20s do not have fully developed, fully functioning brains."

In 2004, National Institutes of Health researchers found that the part of the brain that inhibits risky behavior isn't fully formed until age 25. That region affects judgment, values, common sense and related reasoning functions, according to the study.

Robbins, for one, agrees that her youth impaired her judgment. When her older cousin urged her to help rob victim Mitchell Thompson Jr., Robbins, then 16, said she naively complied, blinded by a child's unquestioning trust.

"I was easily influenced by the fast life, the dangerous life, and the negative environment and people I was with every single day," said Robbins, who is incarcerated at the state prison in Muncy in Lycoming County. "It was life to me, so I didn't understand then that there was a different way of doing things."

Some question whether such aggressive sentencing works.

"How much good are we doing by putting all these people away?"
DiMascio demanded. "Are we ending homicides in the city of Philadelphia?"

Last year's homicide rate - 380 - was the highest since 1997. That spike came despite a surge in the number of convicts the city sent to state prisons; Philadelphia committed 2,069 inmates to state jails last year, 5 percent more than in 1997, according to the state Department of Corrections.

"Tough sentencing has not deterred the level of violence or murder in Philadelphia," said state Sen. Anthony Williams, D-Philadelphia, who supports abolishing life-without-parole sentences for juveniles. "We think locking people up and throwing away the key will solve our crime problems. But that is not the answer."

DiMascio agreed: "We're helping to destroy families, not fight crime, when we lock away so many people so thoughtlessly."

Still, some say the state should maintain its hard line on crime.

"You hear case after case across the country of teenagers committing the most horrible crimes," Lynne Abraham said. "They might not have the judgment of an adult, but they know risks. They know rewards. They know what they want. And it's not like they don't know that if they point this gun and pull the trigger that the bullet won't come out and hit somebody."