The difficulties outside Antonio’s home were compounded by severe domestic abuse inside the home. From the time Antonio was in diapers, he endured abusive beatings by his father, who hit him with his hand, fist, belt, and extension cords, causing bruises and cuts; he also witnessed terrifying conflicts in which his parents would violently assault each other and threaten to kill one another. The violence was so bad that on more than one occasion Antonio called the police. He began experiencing severe nightmares from which he awoke screaming. Antonio’s depressed mother neglected him; when he cried, she just left him alone. The only activity she could recall ever attending for Antonio was his graduation from a Drug Abuse Resistance Education program in elementary school.
“He was excited to take his picture with the police officer,” she would later say. “He wanted to be a police officer when he grew up.”
In September 1999, a month after he turned thirteen, Antonio Nuñez was riding his bicycle near his home when a stranger shot him in his stomach, side, and arm. Antonio collapsed onto the street. His fourteen-year-old brother José heard him screaming and ran to his aid. José was shot in the head and killed when he responded to his little brother’s call for help. Antonio suffered serious internal injuries that hospitalized him for weeks.
When Antonio was released from the hospital, his mother sent him to live with relatives in Las Vegas, where he tried to recover from the tragedy of José’s death. Antonio was relieved to be away from the dangers of South Central Los Angeles. He stayed out of trouble, was helpful and obedient at home, and spent evenings doing his homework with help from his cousin’s husband. He put the gangs and violence of South Central behind him and showed remarkable progress. But within a year, California probation authorities ordered him to return to Los Angeles because he was on probation following his adjudication as a ward of the court for a prior offense.
In poor urban neighborhoods across the United States, black and brown boys routinely have multiple encounters with the police. Even though many of these children have done nothing wrong, they are targeted by police, presumed guilty, and suspected by law enforcement of being dangerous or engaged in criminal activity. The random stops, questioning, and harassment dramatically increase the risk of arrest for petty crimes. Many of these children develop criminal records for behavior that more affluent children engage in with impunity.
Forced back to South Central, blocks from where his brother was murdered, Antonio struggled. A court later found that “[l]iving just blocks from where he was shot and his brother was killed, Nuñez suffered trauma symptoms, including flashbacks, an urgent need to avoid the area, a heightened awareness of potential threats, and an intensified need to protect himself from real or perceived threats.” He got his hands on a gun for self-defense but was quickly arrested for it and placed in a juvenile camp where supervisors reported that he eagerly participated in and positively responded to the structured environment and guidance of staff members.
After returning from the camp, Antonio was invited to a party where two men twice Antonio’s age told him that they were planning to fake a kidnapping to get money from a relative who would pay the ransom. They insisted that Antonio join them. Fourteen-year-old Antonio got in a car with the men to pick up the ransom money. The pretend victim sat in the backseat, while Juan Perez drove and Antonio sat in the passenger seat. Before they arrived at their Orange County destination to retrieve the money, they found themselves being followed—and then chased—by two Latino men in a gray van. At some point, Perez and the other man gave Antonio a gun and told him to shoot at the van, and a dangerous high-speed shoot-out unfolded. The men chasing them were undercover police officers—but Antonio didn’t know that when he fired. When a marked police car joined the pursuit, Antonio dropped the gun just before the car crashed into some trees. No one was injured, but Antonio and Perez were charged with aggravated kidnapping and attempted murder of the police officers.
Antonio and his twenty-seven-year-old co-defendant were tried together in a joint trial, and both were found guilty. Under California law, a juvenile has to be at least sixteen to be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for murder. But there is no minimum age for kidnapping, so the Orange County judge sentenced Antonio to imprisonment until death, asserting that he was a dangerous gang member who could never change or be rehabilitated, despite his difficult background and the absence of any significant criminal history. The judge sent him to California’s dangerous, overcrowded adult prisons. At fourteen, Antonio became the youngest person in the United States condemned to die in prison for a crime in which no one was physically injured.
Most adults convicted of the kinds of crimes with which Trina, Ian, and Antonio were charged are not sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. In the federal system, adults who unintentionally commit arson-murder where more than one person is killed usually receive sentences that permit release in less than twenty-five years. Many adults convicted of attempted murder in Florida serve less than ten years in prison. Gun violence with no reported injuries frequently result in sentences of less than ten years for adult defendants, even in this era of harsh punishments.
Children who commit serious crimes long have been vulnerable to adult prosecution and punishment in many states, but the development of juvenile justice systems has meant that most child offenders were sent to juvenile detention facilities. Juvenile justice systems vary across the United States, but most states would have kept Trina, Ian, or Antonio in juvenile custody until they turned eighteen or twenty-one. At most, they might have stayed in custody until age twenty-five or older, if their institutional history or juvenile detention record suggested that they were still a threat to public safety.
In an earlier era, if you were thirteen or fourteen when you committed a crime, you would find yourself in the adult system with a lengthy sentence only if the crime was unusually high-profile—or committed by a black child against a white person in the South. For instance, in the infamous Scottsboro Boys case in the 1930s, two of the defendants, Roy Wright and Eugene Williams, were just thirteen years old when they were wrongfully convicted of rape and sentenced to death in Alabama.
In another signature case of juvenile prosecution, George Stinney, a fourteen-year-old black boy, was executed by the State of South Carolina on June 16, 1944. Three months earlier, two young white girls who lived nearby in Alcolu, a small mill town where the races were separated by railroad tracks, had gone out to pick flowers and never returned home. Scores of people across the community went searching for the missing girls. Young George and his siblings joined the search party. At some point, George mentioned to one of the white adult searchers that he and his sister had seen the girls earlier in the day. The girls had approached them while they were playing outside and asked where they could find flowers.
The next day, the dead bodies of the girls were found in a shallow ditch. George was immediately arrested for the murders because he had admitted seeing the girls before they disappeared and was the last person to see them alive. He was subjected to hours of interrogation without his parents or an attorney present. The understandable anger about the death of the girls exploded when word circulated that a black boy had been arrested for the murders. The sheriff claimed that George had confessed to the murders, though no written or signed statement was presented. George’s father was summarily fired from his job; his family was told to leave town or else they would be lynched. Out of fear for their lives, George’s family fled town late that night, leaving George behind in jail with no family support. Within hours of announcing the alleged confession, a lynch mob formed at the jailhouse in Alcolu, but the fourteen-year-old had already been moved to a jail in Charleston.
A month later, a trial was convened. Facing charges of first-degree murder, George sat alone in front of an estimated crowd of fifteen hundred white people who had packed the courtroom and surrounded the building. No African Americans were allowed inside the courthouse. George’s white court-appo
inted attorney, a tax lawyer with political aspirations, called no witnesses. The prosecution’s only evidence was the sheriff’s testimony regarding George’s alleged confession. The trial was over in a few hours. An all-white jury deliberated for ten minutes before convicting George of rape and murder. Judge Stoll promptly sentenced the fourteen-year-old to death. George’s lawyer said there would be no appeal because his family didn’t have the money to pay for it.
Despite appeals from the NAACP and black clergy, who asked that the sentence be converted to life imprisonment, Governor Olin Johnston refused to intervene and George was sent to Columbia to be executed in South Carolina’s electric chair. Small even for his age, the five foot two, ninety-two-pound Stinney walked up to the chair with a Bible in his hand. He had to sit on the book when prison staff couldn’t fit the electrodes to his small frame. Alone in the room, with no family or any people of color present, the terrified child sat in the oversized electric chair. He frantically searched the room for someone to help but saw only law enforcement personnel and reporters. The adult-size mask slid off George’s face when the first jolt of electricity struck his body. Witnesses to the execution could see his “wide open, tearful eyes and saliva dripping from his mouth.” Eighty-one days after being approached by two young girls about where flowers might be found, George Stinney was pronounced dead. Years later, rumors surfaced that a white man from a prominent family confessed on his deathbed to killing the girls. Recently, an effort has been launched to exonerate George Stinney.
The Stinney execution was horrific and heartbreaking, but it reflected the racial politics of the South more than the way children accused of crimes were generally treated. It was an example of how policies and norms once directed exclusively at controlling and punishing the black population have filtered their way into our general criminal justice system. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the politics of fear and anger sweeping the country and fueling mass incarceration was turning its attention to children.
Influential criminologists predicted a coming wave of “super-predators” with whom the juvenile justice system would be unable to cope. Sometimes expressly focusing on black and brown children, theorists suggested that America would soon be overcome by “elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches” and who “have absolutely no respect for human life.” Panic over the impending crime wave expected from these “radically impulsive, brutally remorseless” children led nearly every state to enact legislation that increased the exposure of children to adult prosecution. Many states lowered or eliminated the minimum age for trying children as adults, leaving children as young as eight vulnerable to adult prosecution and imprisonment.
Some states also initiated mandatory transfer rules, which took away any discretion from prosecutors and judges over whether a child should be kept in the juvenile system. Tens of thousands of children who had previously been managed by the juvenile justice system, with its well-developed protections and requirements for children, were now thrown into an increasingly overcrowded, violent, and desperate adult prison system.
The predictions of “super-predators” proved wildly inaccurate. The juvenile population in America increased from 1994 to 2000, but the juvenile crime rate declined, leading academics who had originally supported the “super-predator” theory to disclaim it. In 2001, the surgeon general of the United States released a report labeling the “super-predator” theory a myth and stated that “[t]here is no evidence that young people involved in violence during the peak years of the early 1990s were more frequent or more vicious offenders than youths in earlier years.” This admission came too late for kids like Trina, Ian, and Antonio. Their death-in-prison sentences were insulated from legal challenges or appeals by a maze of procedural rules, statutes of limitations, and legal barricades designed to make successful postconviction challenges almost impossible.
When I met Trina, Ian, and Antonio years later, they had each been broken by years of hopeless confinement. They were legally condemned children hidden away in adult prisons, largely unknown and forgotten, preoccupied with surviving in dangerous, terrifying environments with little family support or outside help. They weren’t exceptional. There were thousands of children like them scattered throughout prisons in the United States—children who had been sentenced to life imprisonment without parole or other extreme sentences. The relative anonymity of these kids seemed to aggravate their plight and their despair. I agreed to represent Trina, Ian, and Antonio, and our office would eventually make challenging death-in-prison sentences imposed on children a major focus of our work. But it became immediately clear that their extreme, unjust sentences were just one of the problems that had to be overcome. They were all damaged and traumatized by our system of justice.
Trina’s mental and physical health made her life in prison extremely challenging. She was grateful for our help and showed remarkable improvement when we told her that we were going to fight to get her sentence reduced, but she had many other needs. She talked constantly about wanting to see her son. She wanted to know that she was not alone in the world. We tracked down her sisters and arranged a visit where Trina could see her son, and it seemed to strengthen her in ways I wouldn’t have thought possible.
I flew to Los Angeles and drove hundreds of miles through the heart of Central California farmland to meet Antonio at a maximum-security prison dominated by gangs and frequent violence. He was trying to acculturate himself to a world that corrupted healthy human development in every way. Reading had always been challenging for Antonio, but he had a strong desire to learn and was so determined to understand that he would read a passage over and over, looking up unfamiliar words in the dictionary we sent him, until he got it. We recently sent him Darwin’s The Origin of Species, which he hopes will help him better understand those around him.
It turns out that Ian was very, very bright. Although being smart and sensitive made his extended time in solitary confinement especially destructive, he had managed to educate himself, read hundreds of books, and write poetry and short stories that reflected an eager, robust intellect. He sent me dozens of letters and poems. I’d return to the office after traveling for a few days and often find letters from Ian. Sometimes I’d find within a letter a scrap of wrinkled paper, which, once unfolded, would reveal thoughtful and sobering poems with titles like “Uncried Tears,” “Tied Up with Words,” “The Unforgiving Minute,” “Silence,” and “Wednesday Ritual.”
We decided to publish a report to draw attention to the plight of children in the United States who had been sentenced to die in prison. I wanted to photograph some of our clients in order to give the life-without-parole sentences imposed on children a human face. Florida was one of the few states that would allow photographers inside a prison, so we asked prison officials if Ian could be permitted out of his solitary, no-touch existence for an hour so that the photographer we hired could take the pictures. To my delight, they agreed and allowed Ian to be in the same room with an outside photographer. As soon as the visit was over, Ian immediately wrote me a letter.
Dear Mr. Stevenson:
I hope this letter reaches you in good health, and everything is going well for you. The focal point of this letter is to thank you for the photo session with the photographer and obtain information from you how I can obtain a good amount of photos.
As you know, I’ve been in solitary confinement approx. 14.5 years. It’s like the system has buried me alive and I’m dead to the outside world. Those photos mean so very much to me right now. All I have is $1.75 in my inmate account right now. If I send you $1.00 of that, how many of the photos will that purchase me?
In my elation at the photo shoot today, I forgot to mention that today June 19th was my deceased mom’s birthday. I know it’s not a big significance, but reflecting on it afterward it seemed symbolic and special that the photo shoot took place on my mother’s birthday!
I don’t know how to make you feel the emotion and importance of those pho
tos, but to be real, I want to show the world I’m alive! I want to look at those photos and feel alive! It would really help with my pain. I felt joyful today during the photo shoot. I wanted it to never end. Every time you all visit and leave, I feel saddened. But I capture and cherish those moments in time, replaying them in my mind’s eye, feeling grateful for human interaction and contact. But today, just the simple handshakes we shared was a welcome addition to my sensory deprived life.
Please tell me how many photos I can get? I want those photos of myself, almost as bad as I want my freedom.
Thank you for making a lot of the positive occurrences that are happening in my life possible. I don’t know exactly how the law led you to me, but I thank God it did. I appreciate everything you and EJI are doing for me. Please send me some photos, okay?
Chapter Nine
I’m Here
Finally, the date for Walter McMillian’s hearing had arrived. We would now have an opportunity to present Ralph Myers’s new testimony and all the exculpatory evidence we’d discovered in police records that had never been disclosed.
Michael and I had gone over the case a dozen times, thinking through the best way to present the evidence of Walter’s innocence. Our biggest concern was Myers, mostly because we knew he would feel incredible pressure once he was brought back to the county courthouse, and he’d broken under pressure before. We were consoled by the fact that so much of our evidence was documentary and could be admitted without the complications and unpredictability that Myers’s testimony might introduce.
We now had a paralegal on staff, so we brought her into the case. Brenda Lewis was a former Montgomery police officer who joined us after seeing more abuses of power than she could tolerate at the police department. An African American woman, she was adept even in environments where her gender or race made her an outsider. We had asked her to touch base with our witnesses before the hearing to go over last-minute details and calm their nerves.