affected by the recent decisions, but no lawyers were available to assist these condemned juvenile lifers. We ended up taking on almost one hundred new cases following the court’s ban on life imprisonment without parole for kids convicted of non-homicide offenses. We then took on another hundred new cases after the decision banning mandatory life without parole for juveniles. In addition to the dozens of cases already on our juvenile docket, we were quickly overwhelmed.
The total ban on life-without-parole sentences for children convicted of non-homicides should have been the easiest decision to implement, but enforcing the Supreme Court’s ruling was proving much more difficult than I had hoped. I was spending more and more time in Louisiana, Florida, and Virginia, which together had close to 90 percent of the non-homicide cases. The trial courts were often less sophisticated in thinking about the differences between children and adults than we had hoped, and we would often have to relitigate the basic unfairness of treating kids like adults that the Supreme Court had already recognized.
Some judges seemed to want to get as close to life expectancy or natural death as possible before they would create release opportunities for child offenders. Antonio Nuñez’s judge in Orange County, California, replaced his sentence of life imprisonment without parole with a sentence of 175 years. I had to go back to an appellate court in California and argue to get that sentence replaced with a reasonable sentence. We met resistance in Joe Sullivan’s and Ian Manuel’s cases as well. Ultimately, we were able to get sentences that meant they could both be released after serving a few more years.
In some cases, clients had already been in prison for decades and had very few, if any, support systems to help them re-enter society. We decided to create a re-entry program to assist these clients. EJI’s program was specifically developed for people who have spent many years in prison after being incarcerated when they were children. We were committed to providing services, housing, job training, life skills, counseling, and anything else people coming out of prison needed to succeed. We told the judges and parole boards we were committed to providing the assistance our clients required.
In particular, the Louisiana clients serving life without parole for non-homicides faced many challenges. We undertook representation of all sixty of those eligible for relief in Louisiana. Almost all of them were at Angola, a notoriously difficult place to do time, especially in the 1970s and 1980s when many had first arrived. For many years, violence was so bad at Angola that it was almost impossible to be incarcerated and not get disciplinaries—additional punishments or time tacked onto your sentence—due to conflicts with another inmate or staff. Prisoners were required to do manual labor in very difficult work environments or face solitary confinement or other disciplinary action. It was not uncommon for inmates to be seriously injured, losing fingers or limbs, after working long hours in brutal and dangerous conditions.
For years, Angola—a slave plantation before the end of the Civil War—forced inmates to work in the fields picking cotton. Prisoners who refused would receive “write-ups” that went into their files and face months of solitary confinement. The horrible conditions of confinement and their constantly being told that they would die in prison no matter how well they behaved meant that most of our clients had long lists of disciplinaries. At the resentencing hearings we were preparing, state lawyers were using these prior disciplinaries to argue against favorable new sentences.
Remarkably, several former juvenile lifers had developed outstanding institutional histories with very few disciplinaries, even though they did their time with no hope of ever being released or having their institutional history reviewed. Some became trustees, mentors, and advocates against violence among inmates. Others had become law librarians, journalists, and gardeners. Angola evolved over time to have some excellent programs for incarcerated people who stayed out of trouble, and many of our clients took full advantage.
We decided to prioritize resentencing hearings in Louisiana for the “old-timers,” juvenile lifers who had been there for decades. Joshua Carter and Robert Caston were the first two cases we decided to litigate. In 1963, when he was sixteen, Joshua Carter was accused of a rape in New Orleans and quickly given the death penalty. A condemned black child awaiting execution in those days had little reason to hope for relief. But to coerce a confession from him, police officers had beaten Joshua so brutally that even in 1965 the