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I was also encouraged by our new staff. We were now attracting young, gifted lawyers from
all over the country who are extremely skilled. We started a program for college graduates to
work at EJI as Justice Fellows. Having a bigger staff with very talented people made meeting
the new challenges created by our much broader docket seem possible.
A bigger staff, bigger cases, and a bigger docket also sometimes meant bigger problems.
While exciting and very gratifying, the Supreme Court rulings on juveniles created all sorts of
new challenges for us. Hundreds of people were now entitled to pursue new sentences, and
most were in states where they had no clear right to counsel. In states like Louisiana,
Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas, there were hundreds of people whose cases were 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 1970 s and 1980 s 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