THE JUDGE AND THE INMATE
More than 20 years after Jennifer Pruitt was ordered to spend the rest of her life behind bars, she sat down in a Michigan prison with the judge who sent her there.
Pruitt was 17 when Fred Mester sentenced her in 1993 for her role in a plot to rob her neighbor, 75-yearold Elmer Heichel, whom Pruitt’s accomplice fatally stabbed.
Now retired, Mester visited Pruitt last year as she awaited a new sentencing hearing and says he found “a new person.” Believing she deserved freedom, he wrote letters to a prosecutor and Pruitt’s new sentencing judge, saying her “willingness to take responsibility for her actions should certainly warrant a re-examination of her sentence.” During their meeting, Pruitt told Mester how she had changed in prison, serving as a mediator and a mentor for inmates. “It was an opportunity to be able to finally tell him that I was sorry, to be able to demonstrate what I couldn’t twenty-something years earlier,” Pruitt, now 41, said in an interview.
Her progress followed a tumultuous decade behind bars. Pruitt was a plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit over allegations that more than 100 women were raped and sexually abused by prison guards and staff. The case resulted in a $100 million settlement with the Michigan Department of Corrections.
At her February resentencing hearing, Pruitt apologized to her victim’s family, wanting to assure them she “understood the pain that they had suffered — even today.” One of Heichel’s granddaughters urged the judge to impose the maximum punishment; two other grandchildren and one of their sons wrote letters supporting Pruitt’s release.
A month later, Pruitt was resentenced to 30 to 60 years, making her eligible for parole in 2022. She says the guilt she feels never goes away, but she wishes those who believe she should never go free could judge her not just by her crime but “for where I’m at today.”
—BY SHARON COHEN sponsor of a ban signed into law in March. It was a dramatic reversal for the second-term Republican who only a few years earlier opposed a similar measure.
Petty comes to criminal justice reform from a painful perspective. Her 12-year-old daughter, Andi, was raped and murdered in 1999. The killer, who was not a juvenile, is on death row now, and Petty remains a staunch supporter of the death penalty.
But she changed her mind about tough sentencing for juveniles after reviewing scientific studies that show teens’ brains are not yet fully developed. She also came to know a former gang member who was convicted of murder at 15, spent about 13 years in prison and turned his life around. He now works as a youth advocate.
“It’s very difficult for me
to think about leaving a kid in prison their whole life,” she says. “It’s just like you take all hope away from them.”
In Arkansas, the new law allows juvenile homicide offenders to seek parole after 25 to 30 years, depending on the crime. Victims’ families would get notification, and the state parole board would weigh release. Petty says it is not a “get-out-of-jailfree card” but that it is about second chances.
“I’m a child advocate. How could I not fight for a kid, even if they had done the most heinous thing ever?”
—BY SHARON COHEN