http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/08/16/MNHC1KLTBU.DTL via @sfgate
Oya Sherrills of El Sobrante holds a photo of her brother Terrell, who was fatally shot seven years ago. The state "cannot just keep throwing away our youths," she says.
Christian Bracamontes will grow old and die in prison because of a terrible decision he made at the age of 16 - going along with his 19-year-old friend on an armed robbery that escalated into the shooting death of the victim.
Bracamontes didn't pull the trigger, but under California's aiding and abetting law, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The shooter, by contrast, will have his first chance at parole in less than two decades because he struck a deal with prosecutors. Jose Luis Morales received a 29-year-to-life sentence after pleading guilty to the 1998 Riverside County homicide, which took the life of 15-year-old Thomas Williams.
"If I could go back, I would have stepped up and tried to talk to him," Bracamontes said of Morales during a recent phone call from California State Prison in Lancaster (Los Angeles County). "I would have made sure he wouldn't have pulled the gun out. ... It would have been different. No one would have gotten hurt."
Sen. Yee's bill
Now 30, Bracamontes says he never thought Morales would fire the gun he'd shown him earlier that day, and had turned and begun to run away when Morales opened fire. Bracamontes, who grew up in Fontana (San Bernardino County), passed up several plea-bargain offers from prosecutors, not understanding that he could spend the rest of his life in prison for a murder he didn't physically commit."When they arrested me and said it was for aiding and abetting, I was like, 'What is that?' I was confused," said Bracamontes, who has been incarcerated for 13 years and works in the Lancaster prison as a building porter, cleaning the inside of the building where he's imprisoned.
Now, human rights advocates and a state senator are pushing a bill through the Legislature that would let some offenders - juveniles sentenced to life without parole - appeal their lifetime sentences and possibly qualify for parole after serving at least 25 years in prison. Supporters of the bill, SB9, by Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, say juvenile criminals should be treated differently than adults because they are not as good at making decisions and have the capacity to change.
They note research conducted by the University of San Francisco's School of Law that determined that outside of the United States, there are no juveniles convicted of life without parole. They also point out that even in the United States - where such a law exists in 38 states and affects an estimated 2,500 people nationwide - it has begun to fall out of favor.
Regret, rehabilitation
Texas banned juvenile life without parole sentences in 2009; the next year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the sentence violates the Constitution's cruel and unusual punishment clause if it is imposed on a minor for any crime other than murder.The California measure, which Yee has tried to make law several times before, is not as ambitious: It would let inmates, after 15 years behind bars, petition the court to change their sentence to 25 years to life, with the possibility of parole. That means that even if the court agreed to modify a sentence, there is no guarantee the inmate would get out: The offender would have to wait until 25 years have been served, then could appeal to the state's parole board for release. To request a reduced sentence, the offender would have to "describe his or her remorse" and prove he or she has worked toward rehabilitation.
About 295 California inmates are serving juvenile life without parole sentences, a punishment authorized by voters in 1990 as part of a wave of tougher laws that grew out of spikes in violent crime in the 1980s.
Elizabeth Calvin, an advocate in the Children's Rights Division of Human Rights Watch, estimated that about 45 percent of juvenile lifers were convicted under the state's aiding and abetting law.
"This bill is a very modest bill, and very limited. At its most elemental, this is really about young people being different from adults," she said.
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