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Steven Markey's death was an unimaginable tragedy. Steven's family and community deeply loved him, and they have suffered an immeasurable loss. To avoid adding to their pain, we at the Hennepin County Attorney's Office have kept relatively silent about the case, speaking for the most part only in court. We believe, however, that it is important to be transparent about why we reached the outcome we did in Husayn Braveheart's case, and in other cases involving young people.
Our job is to make a just decision in each case. The voices of victims and their families are important in the process, but we do not represent victims in any case. We represent the public, which means we have a responsibility to do what we can to ensure we are keeping the community safe. Ultimately that is what led us to the result in Braveheart's case and is what drives decisions in all our cases.
Prison is our muscle memory in this country, but it has not made us safer. An extensive and ever-growing body of research demonstrates that incarceration does not improve public safety and may increase the risk of the person committing another crime. Sending young people to adult prison is simply not the best way to rehabilitate them. This has been demonstrated repeatedly by national research and is also supported by data from the Minnesota Department of Corrections which found that since 2002, nearly 80% of people sent to adult prison as youths were sent back to prison after their initial release.
If we truly want to improve community safety and reduce recidivism for youth, research is very clear on the path forward. It requires carefully tailored interventions and accountability measures focused on rehabilitation, mental health support, building career pathways, community connections and developing independent living skills. Much of the rest of the world has already implemented this approach, with significantly better outcomes. And this is the approach that is now recommended by the federal Department of Justice.
There were a handful of times in the last year that we recommended prison for individual youth because immediate safety concerns outweighed the negative impact of incarceration. Braveheart's case was not one of those times.
Braveheart experienced abuse and neglect during his childhood that was so severe that it would be incomprehensible to most of us. At the time that he and a co-defendant engaged in a series of carjackings, Braveheart was 15 years old and living on the streets. During one of these carjackings, Braveheart's co-defendant, Jared Ohsman, shot and killed Steven Markey. Braveheart shot at the car as it was driving away.