On Sep. 23, 2006, Travion Blount, 15, and his two friends, Morris Downing, 18, and David Nichols, 18, decided to rob an acquaintance, a known drug-dealer who shared a two-story house at the time with several other roommates in Norfolk, Va. As reported by the Virginian-Pilot on its Hampton Roads website, upon being let in, Downing and Blunt both pulled guns. Blount held the gun on two girls in a bedroom, where he took their purses and belongings. Locking the girls in, Downing and Blount rounded up several men in the kitchen at gunpoint before taking their wallets, phones, $60 in cash and the keys of a 17-year old. In all, the three teenagers robbed 13 people that night, with only one teenager — who was pistol-whipped by Downing across the head — being the only victim of any physical violence that day.
After just a few hours of deliberation in 2008, the jury found Blount guilty of 49 counts of gun violations and armed robbery. Blount was sentenced to six life sentences plus 118 years — the harshest sentence ever imposed upon a minor. Considering that his co-defendants took plea deals that sentenced them to 18 years, one must ask about the fairness of the sentence. More importantly, one must ask if this crime — a non-violent offense — deserves a de facto sentence of death behind bars.
Besides execution, life imprisonment without parole is the harshest sentence that can be offered by the criminal justice system. Typically, such an extreme punishment — containment until the prisoner dies — is reserved for the most brazen cases of murder, where the public safety cannot be reasonably assured should the prisoner be set free. But it has become increasingly commonplace to offer life sentences for nonviolent offenses.
Yet there may be hope for Blount. The 2010 Supreme Court ruling Graham v. Florida ruled that life imprisonment without parole of minors (at the time of the crime) is “cruel and unusual punishment” in violation of the Eighth Amendment for non-homicide cases (2012’s Miller v. Alabama made life imprisonment without parole of juvenile offenders unconstitutional in all cases). However, for the more than 3,200 prisoners nationwide that are serving life terms without parole for nonviolent offenses, justice is elusive.
Throwing away the key
As profiled by the American Civil Liberties Union, Patrick Matthews — who had no record of violent criminal history — was arrested and convicted to life in prison without parole for riding in the back of the truck of a friend who stole and pawned stolen tools and equipment. While no evidence exists that suggests Matthews was involved in the theft scheme, he was convicted on concert of action, or the idea that since he was present at the commission of a crime and participated in some elements of the crime, he is responsible for all facets of the crime, even if someone else actually performed the actions. Matthews received a mandatory maximum sentence due to an unarmed burglary conviction when he was 17.
Teresa Griffin was used as a drug mule by her abusive boyfriend. Under severe control from him and under the threat of death and harm to her children, Griffin was forced to stay in the destructive relationship and assist her boyfriend in his drug-dealing. While she was seven months pregnant, she was apprehended by the police with $38,500 of her boyfriend’s money and a half-pound of cocaine. Despite not having a previous criminal record, she was sentenced to life without parole.
Aaron Jones, after serving two years in prison in his 20s for involuntary manslaughter during a bar fight, turned his life around. He earned his electrical technician degree, got married, was ordained and founded the Perfect Love Outreach Ministry. While renovating a motel, Jones used a co-worker’s truck, which was being used at the time as a company vehicle, to visit his wife and children. When the co-worker discovered the truck missing, he reported it stolen, not knowing that Jones had it. Jones was pulled over while driving the truck, arrested and convicted to life without parole in Louisiana due to his previous conviction.
Matthews, Griffin and Jones are not alone. According to the ACLU, the bar for receiving life without parole has been lowered to such a degree that the following offenses have all earned lifetime imprisonment:
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forgery and petit larceny by attempting to cash a check found to have been stolen;
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a junk-dealer’s possession of stolen junk metal (10 valves and one elbow pipe);
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possession of stolen wrenches;
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siphoning gasoline from a truck;
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stealing tools from the back of a truck;
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possession of a few pieces of stolen jewelry, a cordless telephone, and an amplifier;
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stealing a money bag from a desk drawer in a municipal building;
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shoplifting a computer from a Walmart;
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shoplifting three belts from a department store;
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shoplifting several digital cameras from a Walmart;
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shoplifting two jerseys from an athletic store;
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shoplifting a jacket worth $159 from a department store;
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slashing tires in the lot of a used car dealer;
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breaking into a parked car and stealing a bag containing a woman’s lunch;
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stealing a wallet from a hotel room;
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stealing a car radio from a 16-year-old car;
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taking a television, circular saw, and a power converter from a vacant house;
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possession of a stolen car;
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and kicking in the back door of a house and entering it in an aborted daytime burglary.
In the name of justice…
Currently, nine states — Iowa, Florida, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and South Dakota — and the federal government currently have non-parole conditions for non-violent prisoners with life sentences. This represents the fastest-growing population in prisons. From 1992 to 2012, the number of life sentences without parole jumped from 12,453 to 49,081. In Louisiana, one in every nine inmates are serving life without the possibility of parole. In Pennsylvania, it’s one in ten.
“Today, the United States is virtually alone in its willingness to sentence nonviolent offenders to die behind bars,” read the ACLU report, “A Living Death: Life Without Parole for Nonviolent Offenses.” “It is among a minority of countries (20 percent) known to have LWOP sentences, while the vast majority of countries that do provide for LWOP sentences place stringent restrictions on when they can be issued and limit their use to crimes of murder.”
According to those that are sentenced to life confinement without parole, common sentiments of the reality include “a slow death sentence,” “a slow, painful death,” “a slow, horrible, torturous death,” “akin to being dead, without the one benefit of not having to suffer any more,” “like you’re…a walking dead,” and “like you are a living dead person on a [life] support machine.” Life without parole prisoners have reported unyielding feelings of hopelessness, loneliness, anxiety, depression, fear, isolation from family and their community, loss of purpose and meaning in life and suicidal thoughts. While it can be argued that prison is meant to solicit such feelings from prisoners, it is in the hope that this can form a deterrent to help reform future behaviors.
“Without a date on which they know they will be set free, prisoners wake up each day facing a lifetime of imprisonment with no hope of release,” the report continued. “They grow old, fall ill, and eventually die behind bars. The sentence turns prisons into geriatric wards where ailing, aging prisoners who no longer pose any risk to society are warehoused until their deaths,” the ACLU report said.
“Too many people go to too many prisons for far too long for no good law enforcement reason,” said U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. “We need to ensure that incarceration is used to punish, deter, and rehabilitate—not merely to warehouse and forget.”
Considering the damned
In discovering why such heavy-handed sentencing exist, a number of elements must be looked at. First, the question of race. In the federal system, 60 percent of all non-violent, life without parole inmates are African American, with 21.1 percent being Latino. In Illinois, 70 percent of are black, with 20 percent being Latino. In Mississippi, the black rate is 78.5 percent, and in Louisiana, it’s 91.4 percent. The ACLU has calculated that an African American is 7.94 times more likely to be convicted to a life without parole sentence for a non-violent offense than a white person in Florida. That rate shoots up to 17.97 times in Oklahoma, 20.38 times in the federal system, 23.1 times in Louisiana and 33.25 times in Illinois.
Nationwide, 65.4 percent of all non-violent life without parole inmates are black. This reflects the attitudes of the areas where these individuals are being convicted. In areas that have historically disregarded African Americans and Latinos, an increased ease of “locking them up and throwing away the key” seems to exist. But there is another part of the equation.
Currently, all 50 states, the District of Columbia and the federal government, have habitual offender laws or “three-strikes-and you’re out” laws that have contributed to this rash of life without parole sentences. For example, in Nevada, a person that faces a fourth conviction of any kind — nonviolent or not — is eligible for the death sentence. In Louisiana, any felony charge against a person that previously served ten years or more in prison, has a previous violent conviction or two previous felony convictions of any kind, faces life imprisonment. Under California’s “three strikes” law, offenses as petty as stealing small change, a pair of socks, chocolate chip cookies, work gloves, a car jack, a leaf blower, three golf clubs, meat from a grocery store, or a slice of pizza have all yielded a 25 years to a life sentence.
Among the states, most non-violent life without parole sentences are property crimes, while with the federal government, most are drug offenses. Mandatory sentencing guidelines have created a situation in which the severity of the sentence is not justified by the seriousness of the offense.
“If lengthy mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug addicts actually worked, one might be able to rationalize them,” wrote Mark Bennett, a federal judge who has served four district courts. “But there is no evidence that they do. I have seen how they leave hundreds of thousands of young children parentless and thousands of aging, infirm, and dying parents childless. They destroy families and mightily fuel the cycle of poverty and addiction…[F]or all the times I’ve asked jurors after a drug conviction what they think a fair sentence would be, never has one given a figure even close to the mandatory minimum. It is always far lower.”
By its definition, sentencing that exceeds the crime committed is cruel and unusual. As a society, this nation must find a way to figure out how to make the criminal justice system fair and responsive to the needs of both the community and the individual. If a person is not a threat to society — per an analysis from the Sentencing Project, released life sentence holders are less than one-third as likely to be rearrested than all released prisoners. How can a civilized nation justify such a heavy-handed approach?
“There’s an answer to this without being so extreme,” said Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola Warden Burl Cain to the ACLU. “But we’re still-living-20-years-ago extreme. Throw the human away. He’s worthless. Boom — up the river. And yet, he didn’t even kill anybody. He didn’t do anything, but he just had an addiction he couldn’t control and he was trying to support it robbing. That’s terrible to rob people—I’ve been robbed, I hate it. I want something done to him. But not all his life. That’s extreme. That’s cruel and unusual punishment to me.
“I really think it’s ridiculous because the name of our business is ‘corrections,’ but everybody forgets what corrections means. It means to correct deviant behavior, so if I’m a successful warden and I do my job and we correct the deviant behavior, then we should have a [parole] hearing…If this person can go back and be a productive citizen and not commit crimes again, these nonviolent crimes, then why are we keeping them here, spending all this money?,” Cain continued. “I need to keep predators in these big old prisons, not dying old men.”