Life without parole: Too harsh for juveniles?

updated 4:23 p.m. ET Dec. 8, 2007

DETROIT - It began as a feud only a child could invent — teenage chest-thumping over who had the right to sneak across a golf course after dark and scoop lost balls out of a pond.

But by the time it ended in the pre-dawn blackness of a long-ago June morning, that juvenile bravado had exploded into a crime whose horror defied adult comprehension.

Buried inside the charred skeleton of a Saginaw home, three children lay dead. They perished at the hands of two local teens who hurled pop-bottle firebombs through the windows so one could settle a petty score.

For taking three innocent lives, a judge decided, Michael Lee Perry had to pay. Perry was 16 at the time of the fire, but for an adult crime he’d have to do adult time — and spend the rest of his life in prison, without any chance for parole.

That was 17 years ago. And today, when Perry rises and offers his hand to a visitor allowed inside the razor wire-topped brick of Detroit’s Mound Correctional Facility, it is clear that prisoner No. 217645’s claim on childhood has long since lapsed.

He stands 6-foot-2, graying at the temples, his hairline receding. No question, Perry is a man now.

He appeals, though, for the understanding he says the boy he once was still deserves.

“I was wrong. I took people’s lives who didn’t even have a chance to grow up and experience life. But, I mean, I didn’t even experience life myself,” says Perry, now 34. “I’m not saying a child should go unpunished. ... (But) it’s like I’m just abandoned, discarded, left for nothing.”

Perry is far from alone.

Difficult questions surround debate
At least 2,381 people are serving life without parole in U.S. prisons for crimes when they were 17 or younger, the vast majority for taking another life.

Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that sentencing juveniles to death is unconstitutional, advocates have been nudging lawmakers, courts and the public to go one step further and re-examine the life sentences meted out to young people convicted of the most serious crimes.

If we believe that juveniles are intrinsically different from adults — that their judgment is lacking, that they are capable of learning from mistakes — then how can we justify locking them away forever?

It is a difficult question and a painful one to contemplate. Some of the crimes are horrific. The age of the perpetrators — and often of their victims — is enough to make any parent say a quiet prayer.

Then there is the fact that laws often give courts little choice in weighing punishment. Even when some discretion is allowed, it can distort the choices.

When the time came to sentence Michael Perry, state law forced a judge to decide between widely disparate options. He could treat Perry as a juvenile and see him released by 21. Or he could send him away forever.

“The only conclusion that I can reach,” Judge Leopold Borrello told two grieving families gathered in the courtroom that day, “is that the law deprives me of doing justice.”

'I spent the first six months crying to myself'
Quantel Lotts was 14. He and his brothers were at a friend’s house in St. Francois County, Missouri, and Quantel and his stepbrother Michael Barton started fighting.

Quantel chased Michael — who was three years older — with a bow and arrow before an adult stepped in. Not long after, while they snacked, one of the younger children noticed Quantel holding a knife and reported him to Michael.

“Let’s take this outside,” Michael told Quantel. In the yard, their shoving match ended in Michael’s death. Found guilty, he was sentenced to life without parole.

Today, speaking by telephone from prison, Quantel Lotts will not talk about what happened that day. But he remembers clearly where it left him.

“They say my stepbrother’s dead and they say I killed him,” he says. “When I first got locked up, I spent the first six months crying to myself every night.”

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