News |

Mandatory life sentences for juveniles at issue before state high court

Adolfo Davis was just 14 when he committed the crime that led to the life sentence he’s serving today.

An eighth-grader from a troubled home, he had fallen in with a street gang on Chicago’s South Side and took part in a 1990 robbery in which two men were killed.

Though Davis never fired the gun he wielded, he was convicted in the murders and received a mandatory sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

More than two decades later, Davis, now 37, is hoping that a 2012 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court could lead the way to his release.

On Wednesday, Illinois’ highest court heard oral arguments in Chicago over whether the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling — which deemed sentences like Davis’ unconstitutional — should be applied retroactively in Davis’ case. The decision by the Illinois Supreme Court could set a precedent for the estimated 80 other inmates in the state who are serving mandatory life sentences for crimes they committed as juveniles.

At issue is the U.S. Supreme Court’s intent in its ruling in Miller v. Alabama, a case that similarly involved a 14-year-old boy who was sentenced to life without parole after participating in a crime that led to a person’s death.

The court ruled that sentences of mandatory life without parole for juveniles amounted to cruel and unusual punishment, making them unconstitutional.

The ruling does not apply to all sentences of life without parole imposed on juveniles — just those that were mandated by law, thus preventing judges from considering a defendant’s youth.

In writing for the majority in the 2012 opinion, Justice Elena Kagan did not specify whether the ruling should be applied retroactively to the approximately 2,500 inmates serving such sentences across the country.

In the 11/2 years since the high court decision, inmates have petitioned courts to be resentenced in about 10 states. Their success has been mixed.

Davis’ case is the first to reach Illinois’ highest court. He and four other inmates had successfully petitioned an appeals court for resentencing, but the state appealed those decisions, bringing the matter before the Illinois Supreme Court.

In arguments before a packed courtroom Wednesday at the Bilandic Building, Cook County prosecutors and lawyers for Davis offered competing views on how to apply the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to his case.

Alan Spellberg of the state’s attorney’s office said the ruling was not meant to reopen existing sentences. Inmates serving such sentences should petition Gov. Pat Quinn for clemency, Spellberg said.

Patricia Soung, a lawyer representing Davis, argued that the 2012 decision was so significant that it amounted to a substantive and “watershed” change to the law, requiring the state to reconsider sentences that resulted from the faulty law.

“This is a new protection,” Soung said in an interview after the hearing. “It’s not something that existed before, where we’re tinkering with it to increase it’s accuracy.”

Davis requested clemency almost two years ago and is still awaiting a decision from the governor.

Illinois’ tough approach to juvenile murderers dates to the late 1970s, a time when many states were worried about rising juvenile crime.

Advocates for juvenile offenders view Davis’ case as an example of the problem with such laws, known by inmates as “the other death penalty.”

“Adolescent research has determined that teens do not have the same capacity as adults to consider the long-term consequences of their actions, have less impulse control (and) are more easily influenced by peers and older individuals,” Jody Kent Lavy, director and national coordinator of the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, said Wednesday in an email. “They also possess a unique capacity for change. These facts apply to all children, including those convicted before the Miller ruling in June 2012.”

At the time of the murders that swept Davis into the prison system, he was living on the South Side with a grandmother who could barely care for him. His father was absent, and his mother was a drug addict. He had no money, so he fed himself by committing petty crimes. He was a scrawny kid who was teased because he often wore the same clothes to school.

Davis has turned his life around in the decades he’s spent in prison, said his cousin, Shanna Davis-Washington, who attended Wednesday’s hearing.

He renounced his gang membership and encourages youngsters to avoid gang life. He writes poetry and recently finished a book. He has a fiancee, whom he met through a relative, and his fiancee says she talks to him twice a day by telephone.

“This is the time for Adolfo to live,” Davis-Washington said at the Bilandic Building. “We’ve been waiting a very long time.”

kgeiger@tribune.com Twitter @kimgeiger