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death penalty for juveniles could provide a basis for relief. In 2005 , the Court recognized that
differences between children and adults required that kids be shielded from the death penalty
under the Eighth Amendment. My staff and I discussed how we might use the constitutional
reasoning that banned the execution of children as a legal basis for challenging juvenile life-
without-parole sentences.
We filed similar challenges to life-without-parole sentences in several other cases involving
children, including Ian Manuel’s case. Ian was still being held in solitary confinement in
Florida. We filed cases in Missouri, Michigan, Iowa, Mississippi, North Carolina, Arkansas,
Delaware, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and South Dakota. We filed a case in Pennsylvania to help
Trina Garnett, the girl who had been convicted for arson. She was still struggling at the
women’s prison but was excited about the possibility of our doing something to change her
sentence. We filed a case in California for Antonio Nuñez.
We filed two cases in Alabama. Ashley Jones was a fourteen-year-old girl who had been
convicted of killing two family members when her older boyfriend tried to help her escape
her family. Ashley suffered from a horrific history of abuse and neglect. When she was still a
teenager serving her sentence at the Tutwiler Prison for Women, she started writing to me to
ask about various legal decisions she’d read about in the newspaper. She never asked for legal
assistance; she simply asked about what she’d read and expressed interest in the law and our
work. She started sending notes congratulating me and EJI whenever we won a death penalty
appeal. When we decided to challenge death-in-prison sentences imposed on children, I told
her we might be able to finally challenge her sentence. She was thrilled.
Evan Miller was another fourteen-year-old condemned to die in prison in Alabama. Evan is
from a poor white family in North Alabama. His difficult life was punctuated by suicide
attempts that started at age seven when he was in elementary school. His parents were
abusive and had drug addiction problems, so he was in and out of foster care, but he was
living with his mother at the time of the crime. A middle-aged neighbor, Cole Cannon, had
come over one night seeking to buy drugs from Evan’s mother. The fourteen-year-old Evan
and his sixteen-year-old friend went to the man’s house with him to play cards. Cannon gave
the teens drugs and played drinking games with them. At one point, he sent the boys out to
buy more drugs. The boys returned and stayed over as it got later and later. Eventually the
boys thought Cannon had passed out and tried to steal his wallet. Cannon was startled awake
and jumped on Evan. The older boy responded by hitting the man in the head with a bat.
Both boys started beating him and then set his trailer on fire. Cole Cannon died, and Evan
and his friend were charged with capital murder. The older boy made a deal with prosecutors
and got a parole-eligible life sentence, while Evan was convicted and sentenced to life
imprisonment without parole.
I got involved in Evan’s case right after his trial and filed a motion to reduce his sentence,
even though it was the mandatory punishment for someone convicted of capital murder who
was too young to be executed. At a hearing, I asked the judge to reconsider Evan’s sentence in
light of his age. The prosecutor argued, “I think he should be executed. He deserves the death
penalty.” He then lamented that the law no longer authorized the execution of children
because he just couldn’t wait to put this fourteen-year-old boy in the electric chair and kill
him. The judge denied our motion.
When I visited Evan at the jail, we would have long talks. He loved to talk about anything