Harshest parole law for youths gets second look
For teen crimes, 1,500 Texans have no chance at parole for 40 years
For years, Demetrius Johnson, now 54, spent his days imagining what his life could have been if he had made different decisions at the age of 16. He describes it as if it actually happened to an alternate version of himself: A Demetrius Johnson who got a job at 18 and took care of his family. Who bought a two-bedroom house next door to his aunt, where he lived with his mother, his son and his son’s mother. Whose aunt helped turn the garage into an extra bedroom.
But since he was 16, almost four decades ago, people from his dream life have passed away while he’s been locked in prison for killing a cab driver. Eventually, he was forced to put down his old dream (“God told me: Let them rest”). He picked up a new one, one that takes place in the future. “Now what I do: I done got out of prison because of the Second Look Bill, I got me a job. … I got me a good girl, she got three kids, they call me daddy. They love me.”
Versions of the Second Look Bill that Johnson has pinned his hopes on have aimed to change parole requirements in Texas for people serving long sentences for crimes they committed as juveniles. Roughly 1,500 Texans fall in that category, meaning they’re either ineligible for or denied parole for at least 40 years, according to a 2020 report by the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, a nonprofit group advocating to end mass incarceration.
The amount of time juvenile offenders can serve before they’re eligible for parole in Texas is a national outlier — while many states set the maximum amount of time at 20 years, Texas has set it at 40. That’s 33 percent longer than the next harshest state.
At the heart of parole reform for juvenile offenders are questions about the purpose of incarceration and the capacity for teenagers who commit violent crimes to change their ways.
“I don’t even think the way I thought, not as a 16-year-old,” Johnson said. “I don’t think like I thought as a
30-year-old. … This is something scientists say: Kids don’t think the way adults think.”
But Andy Kahan, director of victim services and advocacy for the public safety nonprofit Crime Stoppers, said justice for the families of victims also have to be kept in mind.
“Of course there’s going to be change,” he said. “It’s hard to maintain that behavior when you’re in that controlled environment. I applaud anyone who changed their lifestyle, changed
their behavior. But still, it doesn’t negate that you took someone’s life that’s never going to come back.”
Shifting approaches to crime
Last regular legislative session, both the state House and Senate passed a bill that would require parole panels to consider “the greater capacity of juveniles for change, as compared to that of adults” when deciding whether or not to release an inmate on parole.
The bill also would have reduced the maximum amount of time people could serve in prison without being eligible for parole to 30 years, unless they had been convicted for capital murder, in which case the maximum would remain at 40.
But Gov. Greg Abbott vetoed the bill, saying that he feared the way it was written could open the state to “needless, disruptive litigation,” and that he planned to work with the author of the bill to address his concerns in a way that would “allow for meaningful reform on this important manner.”
Johnson took Abbott’s words as a sign the bill would be passed in 2021 with some changes, in the third special legislative session.
His face fell in November when he realized the session had ended without a chance to vote on the bill. The next time the bill could be considered is the 2023 legislative session.
In 1984, 16-year-old Johnson and his friends decided they needed a cab. The teenagers had gone to the Northline Mall, and needed to get back to their homes in Fifth Ward, but the bus hadn’t shown up, Johnson recounted. They flagged down William Leinert, 59, for a ride. Leinert was suspicious of the Black teenagers, according to Johnson’s testimony at the time, and demanded his payment in advance and showed them he was armed.
Johnson said he stabbed Leinert in order to wrest away the gun and give himself and his friends time to flee to safety. The prosecutor said that Leinert was missing not only his pistol, but also three rings and as much as $50 in cash, and argued Johnson had killed Leinert in order to rob him. Johnson was convicted and sentenced to life.
The case took place as the nation’s attitude toward crime was changing. In the early 1900s, in the Progressive Era through World War II, white crime in urban areas was seen as product of poor living conditions, spurring policymakers to invest in education and social services, according to the National Academy of Sciences, a nonprofit research organization founded by Congress.
But after white flight from city cores in the ’50s and ’60s, homicides in cities, which had fallen per capita during the New Deal and stayed relatively low in decades since, began in the ’70s to rise near the levels they had reached during the Great Depression. This time, the violence was associated with Black communities with poor living conditions, and politicians began campaigning on being tough on crime. By the ’80s, legislators were passing laws, such as minimum sentencing requirements, that created harsher consequences for those convicted.
The length of stay for murder increased nationwide by 238 percent between 1981 and 2000, according to the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition. The superpredator myth — that a surge of violent, remorseless children was imminent — came to the fore. The number of people across the country serving life without parole for crimes committed as children surged, reaching 2,310 in 2016 up from 152 in 1996.
Capacity for change
In the past decade, the Supreme Court and policymakers have rolled back some of the harshest sentencing for young offenders. Now the bulk of juvenile offenders the advocacy group Second Look Texas calls second lookers, like Johnson, are middle-aged.
Many, like Johnson, were convicted of violent crimes in their youth. One woman, now in her 40s, was convicted of killing and robbing a motel owner at the age of 16 with her husband, whom she told police had assaulted her and her child. A man in his 40s robbed a pawn shop when he was 16 with his friend, whom he says killed the owner.
Tina M. Zottoli, a clinical psychologist, has studied the recidivism rates of people who were given life sentences for crimes they committed in Philadelphia as juveniles, then released from prison as the city changed its approach to sentencing. (In 2016, the Supreme Court ruled that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles were unconstitutional and such sentences could be reviewed retroactively.) The study found that those released had a dramatically lower risk of new convictions than the population of paroled homicide offenders overall.
Only four of the 174 people who been sentenced to life as juveniles, then released, were arrested again (two were convicted: one for contempt and another for robbery in the third degree). That’s 2 percent, compared to an estimated 34 percent of homicide offenders nationwide who are arrested within two years of release, according to Department of Justice numbers.
“The vast majority of youth who commit crimes will desist with maturation,” Zottoli said. She pointed out that an intervention — prison, in the case of everyone in the study — was necessary, because young people need environments where they can safely mature, psychosocially and neurobiologically.
“If we’re going to justify a particular sentence from the perspective of risk to society, there is no science that could ever support a mandatory sentence for youth of 20, 30, 40 years,” she said. “Science would suggest they should be looked at again in their mid-to-late 20s. I’m not advocating direct release, but they should at least be looked at.”
But, she acknowledged sentencing involves factors besides risk to society, including justice for victims and their families.
Kahan said that resentencing is a painful prospect for victims’ families. “Their loved one is never coming back,” he said. “Going through the parole process means having to relive everything all over again. … To be put through the parole process much earlier than they originally thought would be difficult for many to comprehend.”
As for whether an offender’s capacity for change from the person they were as a teenager should be taken into consideration at a parole hearing, Kahan called it a balancing act.
“There’s no winners in any of this,” he said. “Everyone loses. But the victim’s family lost for eternity. … I’m talking about homicide specifically — when you consciously and knowingly take someone’s life, there’s a price to pay for it.”
Meanwhile, Johnson keeps dreaming. At 54, his memories of childhood are unusually sharp. He can still remember when his grandfather explained prison to him (he was 3 years old) and the day he first went on a boat (Dec. 8, 1982). He remembers the award he won in elementary school for playing his French horn and the words of the song he sang at his fifthgrade graduation. As if it were yesterday, he can describe the first and only time he ever met his father and what it was like to recover from a car accident that permanently damaged the muscles on half his face.
When he gets out, he plans to use his memories of his childhood to connect with others like him.
“I’m going to the county jail, talking to the juveniles,” he said, as if he could picture it now. “I’m going to Giddings State School,” a juvenile correctional facility, “Crockett State School, talking to who I was back then. … And I’m talking to them, and I’m blowing them away, man.”
Upon hearing what he has to say, he hopes they go on to live the alternate life he spent decades imagining for himself.