Bad Ideas About Juvenile Crime That Won’t Go Away

On the morning of October 3, 2012, a trio of unarmed 16- and 17-year-old boys in Elkhart, Indiana, banded together to commit a burglary in their neighborhood. To avoid a confrontation, they planned to hit a vacant home. After some dogs scared them off their first target, the teens called two more friends, who were 18 and 21, to help them break into another neighbor’s house, which seemed empty. But the homeowner, Rodney Scott, was asleep upstairs, and when he heard the intruders, he thundered down with his handgun and began firing. One teen dashed out the door, another was already outside, and the others scrambled into a bedroom closet. As Scott was calling 911, the closet door opened and 21-year-old Danzele Johnson fell to the floor, dead, shot by Scott.The other four—16-year-old Blake Layman, 16-year-old Jose Quiroz, 17-year-old Levi Sparks, and 18-year-old Anthony Sharp Jr.—were arrested and charged with felony murder in the perpetration of a burglary, since their crime had resulted in Johnson’s death. Although three of the defendants were juveniles, all four were tried as adults, owing to an Indiana mandate for offenders who are at least 16 and charged with murder. After the teens either pleaded or were found guilty, they were each sentenced to at least 50 years in prison.These sentences proved controversial, not just because charging unarmed teens in a death they didn’t directly cause seemed bizarre, but also because the prosecution of juveniles as adults has long raised questions about justice and due punishment. Layman, who was sentenced to 55 years in prison, appealed the decision, arguing that the punishment was “cruel and unusual.” In 2015, Indiana’s Supreme Court agreed, ruling that the sentence was “disproportionate” given “what we now know about adolescent brain development and the impact it has on a juvenile’s susceptibility to engaging in risky behaviors.” The judges reduced the convictions to simple burglary and ordered the lower courts to resentence