Warren Harris Jr. said he was sorry.
He directed his remorse to the families of the three men he robbed and fatally stabbed when he was 16 and high on heroin in New Orleans. Sitting at a table at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Harris, 63, talked in a video conference about the guilt that has gripped him while serving life in a prison known as Angola, originally a slave plantation on the banks of the Mississippi River. With God’s help, he said, he reevaluated his life. Family members of his victims were not at the April 17 hearing.
“I have a few nephews,” Harris said during the hearing before the state parole board. “I have one that I constantly pray for and I wish to reach him before anything happens to him or before he winds up in prison. Not just him. Maybe a few of his friends, you know.”
It was an apology 47 years in the making. The murders happened during an eight-week span from February to April 1977. Fear spread in New Orleans that a serial killer was targeting gay men in the French Quarter, where officers on horseback were put on patrol around the strip joints and jazz clubs of Bourbon Street.
“It was a very horrific crime, but I do feel that you’ve done all you can do in Angola,” said parole board member Curtis “Pete” Fremin Jr., a former state director of probation and parole who provided the crucial second vote needed for Harris’ release.
Harris wiped tears behind his glasses. He’s now among the roughly 121 “juvenile lifers” to be granted release via a parole hearing or negotiated resolution with prosecutors since a 2017 Louisiana law made them eligible after serving 25 years, according to the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights.
Under the law, juvenile lifers resentenced and offered parole eligibility must also obtain a GED, spend a year without a major disciplinary write up and meet other requirements.
‘A punishment to sentence a child to die in prison’
Harris’ release was set in motion by recent US Supreme Court decisions.
In 2012, in Miller v. Alabama, the high court ruled life sentences for juvenile offenders without the possibility of parole violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The court relied on research that showed young people are scientifically different from adults, their brains and self-control not fully developed. In Montgomery v. Louisiana in 2016, the Supreme Court made the Miller decision retroactive.
After the Montgomery decision in 2016, some 297 Louisiana prisoners were eligible for resentencing, according to Hannah Van De Car, deputy legal director of the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights. About 150 of them are still incarcerated. At least 18 of the 297 died behind bars before their hearings, Van De Car said.
Van De Car said there is no official state tally of cases involving juvenile lifers.
“It’s maybe better than an estimate. Not as good as perfect,” she said of the center’s count of the cases. “In Louisiana we are the only people who track this … so whether we are catching every single case, I don’t know. I really hope so. But it’s really hard to know.”
The United States is the only nation that sentences people to life without parole for crimes committed before age 18, according to the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit that studies inequalities in the criminal justice system.
Despite the distinction, the US in recent years has witnessed a reassessment of incarceration standards, with efforts to promote rehabilitation and reduce excessive sentences – particularly involving youth in the criminal justice system.
Since Miller in 2012, 28 states and the District of Columbia have banned life sentences without parole for people under 18, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
In the US, 488 people are serving life without parole for crimes committed as children – including people awaiting resentencing and new cases since the Miller decision, the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing…
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