Man gets 30 years to life in resentencing for 1994 homicide

The teen who pulled the trigger got 10 to 20.

The one who drove the car and provided the gun got life.

Police said Isaac Butler and Michael Harrison were responsible for killing Byron Patton, 16, of Wilkinsburg, on March 7, 1994, in a gang shooting. A third teen, Kenneth Lee, was charged as well. The suspects weren’t arrested for more than four years.

Butler, now 38, pleaded guilty to third-degree murder and ended up serving 12 years in state prison. He was released in March 2012. Lee, now 40, was found not guilty by a judge.

Harrison, though, went to trial, and in March 2000, a jury found him guilty of first-degree murder. He was ordered to spend the rest of his life in prison with no chance for parole.

But on Friday, Harrison, now 40, had a new sentencing hearing before Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge W. Terrence O’Brien based on recent state and U.S. Supreme Court decisions that found that mandatory sentences of life without parole for juveniles are unconstitutional.

After listening to testimony about Harrison’s childhood, the prevalence of gangs in his Larimer neighborhood growing up, and his prison record, Judge O’Brien ordered the defendant to spend 30 years to the rest of his life in prison; he already has served 17.

“This is a very difficult decision for me,” the judge said. “I do believe he has true remorse for his conduct. Quite frankly, I do believe he has been rehabilitated to a large

degree.”

But, Judge O’Brien continued, rehabilitation is not his only consideration. Harrison, he said, was 17 years and 8 months old at the time of the crime, and the oldest of the three suspects. And, the jury found that he did have the specific intent to kill by finding him guilty of first-degree murder.

“This is as bad as you can get, although he was not the trigger man,” he said.

Harrison testified for about an hour Friday, detailing a childhood where he didn’t really know his father, who lived in Texas, and only sporadically saw his mother, who was a drug addict in and out of prison.

“Most of us didn’t have a father figure. But everybody had a mom, and I was lacking that, too,” Harrison said.

He was raised by his grandmother in Larimer, surrounded by gang violence. He described it as a “war-like mentality.”

“It either made you or broke you,” Harrison said. The guys he grew up with protected each other, became like a family, and just like that, he said, they were in a gang. “It just shifted overnight. It was like, in the blink of an eye, somebody said we were this, and that was it.”

By the time he was arrested on the homicide charges, at age 22, he had been the pallbearer at several funerals for friends who were killed.

They killed Byron, the defendant said, in retaliation for the shooting death more than a year earlier of Butler’s brother, Wendell.

“It was senseless when I look back,” Harrison said.

Harrison said prosecutors offered him a plea deal for five to 10 years in prison in exchange for his testimony against Butler and Lee. He refused.

“I didn’t want to be a rat on guys I was running with,” he said. Instead, he got life. Since he got to prison in 2000, Harrison has earned his GED and a paralegal certificate. He completed classes on the impact of crime, victim awareness and violence prevention.

He works as a peer assistant in the therapeutic community, facilitating meetings for other inmates.

"I learned that I am responsible for me,” he said. “I can’t give in to my emotions or let them control me.”

Harrison now has a close relationship with his mother. She has been clean for 17 years and earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in human behavior and works as a drug and alcohol counselor for offenders.

“I let Michael down,” Patricia Murphy wrote in a letter to the judge.

“I was given a responsibility, and I didn’t live up to it. My shortcoming has cost his life, his freedom. I’m quite sure a lot of decisions he made in his past were because of the examples I set.”

Although he has 11 misconducts on his prison record — including one for having a piece of sharpened metal in his cell — Harrison has had none since 2006.

No one from Byron’s family attended the sentencing hearing, but Harrison asked the judge if he could make a statement to him, anyway.

“I cut your life short, way too short, and that I will forever regret. Because of me, you never had a chance to add to your character, or subtract the traits you did not like. Because of me, you never had a chance to learn your potential.”