Young Killers Serving Life Without Parole May Get Chance at Freedom
She started leaving home at 13, and soon she was gone for good. The streets drew her, the Barrio Pobre gang took her in.
She does not deny that at 16 she was there in Long Beach the night her boyfriend killed a younger girl in a gang dispute over a piece of jewelry.
Now she is 37, and though two decades have passed, Elizabeth Lozano still looks young — short, thin, with long black hair and expressive eyes. Even in her prison blues, she radiates youth, and she has won acclaim for reaching out to help teenagers in prison and others who are at risk of ending up there.
She was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of ever being released, one of at least 2,500 inmates nationwide who were convicted of murder as juveniles, with no chance of parole.
“You feel hopeless,” she said, of having the jail door slammed shut on someone so young. “The smell, the noise. You feel like you are going to die in here.”
But now the U.S. Supreme Court and state lawmakers in Sacramento may give some of these inmates another chance. The court will hear oral arguments March 20, in two cases involving 14-year-olds, on whether it is unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment to put young juvenile murderers in prison without hope of release.
The justices have been moving toward greater protection for minors. They abolished the death penalty for juveniles in 2005, and in 2010 ruled out life sentences without parole for them except in cases of homicide.
In Sacramento, a state Senate-passed bill to make juvenile murderers eligible for parole fell two votes short in the Assembly last year but is up for reconsideration this week.
The attorneys for the 14-year-olds point to forensic evidence that a teenager’s brain is not fully developed and that youths consequently take too many risks.
The research comes from Laurence Steinberg, a psychology professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. “Adolescents, because of their immaturity, should not be deemed as culpable as adults,” Steinberg said. “But they also are not innocent children whose crimes should be excused.”