Chapter Fourteen

Cruel and Unusual

On the morning of May 4 , 1989 , Michael Gulley, fifteen, and Nathan McCants, seventeen,
convinced thirteen-year-old Joe Sullivan to accompany them when they broke into an empty
house in Pensacola, Florida. The three boys entered the home of Lena Bruner in the morning,
while no one was there. McCants took some money and jewelry. The three boys then left.
That afternoon, Ms. Bruner, an older white woman in her early seventies, was sexually
assaulted in her home. Someone knocked on her door, and as she went to open it, another
person who had entered through the back of her home grabbed her from behind. It was a
violent and shocking rape; Ms. Bruner never even saw her attacker clearly. She could describe
him only as “quite a dark colored boy” with “curly type hair.” Gulley, McCants, and Sullivan
are all African American.
Within minutes of the assault, Gulley and McCants were apprehended together. McCants
had Ms. Bruner’s jewelry on him. Facing serious felony charges, Gulley—who had an
extensive criminal history involving at least one sexual offense—accused Joe of the sexual
battery. Joe was not apprehended that day, but he voluntarily turned himself in the next day
after learning that Gulley and McCants had implicated him. Joe admitted helping the older
boys with the burglary earlier in the day but adamantly denied any knowledge of or
involvement in the sexual assault.
The prosecutor chose to indict thirteen-year-old Joe Sullivan in adult court for sexual
battery and other charges. There was no review of whether Joe should be tried in juvenile or
adult court. Florida is one of a few states that allows the prosecutor to decide to charge a
child in adult court for certain crimes and has no minimum age for trying a child as an adult.
At trial, Joe testified that he had participated in the earlier burglary but had not committed
sexual battery. The prosecution relied primarily on the self-serving stories of McCants and
Gulley, including Gulley’s claim that Joe had confessed the rape to him in a detention facility
before trial. After implicating Joe, McCants was sentenced as an adult to four-and-one-half
years and served just six months. Gulley, despite admitting his involvement in some twenty
prior burglaries and a prior sex crime, was adjudicated and sentenced as a juvenile and spent
only a short period of time in a juvenile detention facility.