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Some criminals are beyond redemption

Why we should never say never to a life sentence -- even for juveniles.

By PATRICK MCILHERAN, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Last update: November 6, 2009 - 10:16 AM

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Next week, the U.S. Supreme Court will be told that no young man can be as bad as Joe Sullivan, not even Joe Sullivan.

Sullivan was 13 when he broke into a house in Florida to rob it and, as long as he was at it, rape the 72-year-old woman living there. This came after 17 prior convictions for burglary, assault and such. A judge decided Sullivan was impervious to rehabilitation and, to protect Florida, sentenced him to life without parole.

This, justices will hear, was unconstitutional. Sullivan's lawyer will argue that it's cruel to decide a 13-year-old must be locked up forever. Groups that campaign on behalf of young criminals hope the court will rule such sentences impermissible. "You can never make that kind of judgment about a juvenile," wrote Sullivan's lawyer.

Never? Not even after 17 prior convictions? One seldom hears so pure an expression of the viewpoint. Rather, those advocating for the worst young criminals rest their arguments on the premise that an unduly harsh America is willy-nilly discarding children.

The numbers belie this. Nationwide, about 0.8 percent of juvenile offenders are packed off to adult court. This number generally has been declining since the mid-1990s.

As for the tinier fraction that America has put away forever, anti-incarceration groups claim it numbers more than 2,500. However, Charles Stimson, a former prosecutor (and now pro bono criminal-defense attorney) who studies the issue for the Heritage Foundation, notes that this figure is inflated with people who committed crimes at 18 or 19. A more accurate number is fewer than 1,300.

Anti-incarceration groups note that children as young as 10 in theory can be so sentenced. In practice, no child under 13 has been and, Stimson points out, the overwhelming majority are 16 or 17.

In Wisconsin, precisely one person is serving a life-without-parole sentence for a crime committed under 15.

He is Omer Ninham, who at 14 taunted another boy for being Hmong, chased him to the top of a Green Bay parking ramp and threw him over the edge to his death. When the Wisconsin Court of Appeals last March rejected Ninham's claim that it was unconstitutional to lock away a juvenile forever, the court noted that the boy had a long prior record. He threatened a judge and he threatened three witnesses, "including a threat to rape a woman and 'make sure it's a slow death.'"

What does one do with such outliers? As grim as it is to think a boy at 14 cannot be salvaged, to fail to recognize it is to take chances with the lives of whomever next crosses his path.

More recently, Labrina Brown, 13, was all over the news in Milwaukee for slashing the throat of the husband of her grandmother. It later emerged that the girl had suffered sexual abuse by another relative. She is the obvious counterexample: a teen who has done something terrible but who might be rehabilitated.

Stimson points out that the great majority of youthful offenders can be rehabilitated. No one argues otherwise. But the question isn't whether judges will be told they must lock away children forever; it is whether they should be told never to do so.

Why would anyone embrace such absolutism? Some of those campaigning against juvenile life sentences also oppose them for adults. They're starting where they think they can win.

Then there's naiveté. Some, Stimson says, simply believe that all actions can be explained and thus excused. They generalize, often from personal experience, that because they got in trouble and got over it, all children deserve a second chance. Or an 18th chance, as the case may be.

This has an obvious downside for whomever ends up dead before Chance No. 19.

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