This caused mini seizures, which will leave him more impaired.” Sullivan had had only sporadic contact with his family over the years, and his only visitors came from E.J.I. “He was basically in a dorm where he was forced to walk places.
“As he became someone who couldn’t walk, and needed a wheelchair, the state was terrible in recognizing his needs,” Stevenson said. His current prison was not a violent place, Sullivan told me, but his M.S. As a young teen in an adult state prison, he had been the victim of numerous sexual assaults. Sullivan had had a rough time in custody. In light of Sullivan’s record in prison, the Florida Department of Corrections informed him that he would be released on June 30, 2014.
Strafe profiles trial#
Joe is one of only two children this age who have ever been sentenced to life without parole for a non-homicide, and no child has received this sentence for non-homicide in the last eighteen years.” The Justices dismissed Sullivan’s case on procedural grounds, but in a companion case, argued earlier that day, they had embraced Stevenson’s argument: juveniles in non-homicides could not be sentenced to life.Īfter the decision, Stevenson took Sullivan’s case back to the Florida trial court for resentencing. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court: Joe Sullivan was thirteen years of age when he was arrested with two older boys, one fifteen and one seventeen, charged with sexual assault, ultimately convicted, and sentenced to life without parole. On November 9, 2009, Stevenson stood before the nine Justices of the Supreme Court and began, “Mr. They said I’m the mastermind to everything.
“I was just with the wrong people at the wrong time. His speech is halting and slurred, owing to a long-standing mental disability and to multiple sclerosis, which was diagnosed more than twenty years ago. Joe Sullivan is forty now, and he lives in the Graceville Correctional Facility, a privately run prison in a remote part of northern Florida. He began a nationwide search for inmates who had been convicted of crimes as juveniles and sentenced to life without parole. In order to push for an extension of Roper, he needed to find a test case. “The Court was saying, in a categorical way, ‘Look, children are fundamentally different from adults.’ ” If the Supreme Court ruled that children were too immature to be sentenced to death, Stevenson reasoned, then they shouldn’t be sentenced to life, either. ‘Oh, seventy more years in prison.’ ”īut Stevenson saw an opportunity in the Roper ruling. “It was just another kind of death sentence. “When I went down and started talking to the guys and said, ‘I’ve got great news, they’re not going to execute,’ it wasn’t, like, joy, because they were all still quite young,” Stevenson recalled. He described his visit to me as we sat in his windowless office at E.J.I.’s headquarters, a converted warehouse in downtown Montgomery. To inform them of the ruling, Stevenson went to death row at the Holman Correctional Facility. At the time, the Equal Justice Initiative had several clients in Alabama who had been charged when they were teen-agers and were now exempt from execution. Simmons, a landmark ruling that held that states could no longer execute offenders who had committed their crimes before the age of eighteen. In 2005, the Supreme Court decided Roper v. Sullivan was sentenced to life in prison, with no possibility of parole. The older boys implicated Sullivan, and he was convicted. That afternoon, Bruner was sexually assaulted in the home by someone whose face she never saw. Sullivan’s original trial, in 1989, established that he and two older boys had burglarized the home of a woman named Lena Bruner on a morning when no one was there. One was Joe Sullivan, who was thirteen when he was charged in a sexual battery in Pensacola, Florida. In recent years, Stevenson has also argued the appeals of prisoners around the country who were convicted of various crimes as juveniles and given long sentences or life in prison. Over the decades, it has handled hundreds of capital cases, and has spared a hundred and twenty-five offenders from execution. It guarantees legal representation to every inmate on the state’s death row. In 1989, a twenty-nine-year-old African-American civil-rights lawyer named Bryan Stevenson moved to Montgomery, Alabama, and founded an organization that became the Equal Justice Initiative. Photograph by Ryan Pfluger for The New Yorker Stevenson’s Memorial for Peace and Justice will commemorate some four thousand lynching victims in twelve states.
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