Read more about the episode here.
News Archival: “Cyntoia Brown. She’s been in prison for more than a decade now, but her case is catching fire on social media.”
“Are you building.”
“Today, Brown’s lawyers are heading all the way to Cincinnati. They’re gonna go before the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to argue that Cyntoia Brown’s sentence was unconstitutional.”
“While you bill.”
“A scholar.”
“Her dream of freedom now denied as the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Brown will become eligible for parole after her 69th birthday. Brown said.”
Julieta Martinelli: Chances are if you paid attention to the news at any point between 2017 and 2019, you’ve heard Cyntoia Brown’s name. Then in her 30s, the Tennessee Native had been serving a life sentence for a murder committed as a teen.
At the time of her trial in 2006, the state of Tennessee had a mandatory sentence for this type of crime. Life in prison. No matter the circumstances.
Cyntoia’s Lawyer: “We have a situation where a 16-year-old child, who operates at about a 10-year-old level who has organic brain damage, and that affected her all the way to the present. When you look at all this, was it a fundamentally fair trial?”
Julieta Martinelli: Cyntoia was born to an alcohol and crack addicted teen mom, and was later diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome. By 2 years old, her mother had given her up. She later became a runaway as a young teen in the streets she was sex trafficked by an older man.
Then one night in 2004, Cyntoia was picked up by a man in his 40s. She was 16. While in bed, Cyntoia thought her abuser was reaching for a gun and she shot him. She claimed it was self-defense, but it didn’t really matter. Per Tennessee’s law, Cyntoia was tried as an adult.
News Archival: “We the jury, find the defendant Cyntoia Denise Brown, guilty first degree murder. Guilty of felony murder.”
Julieta Martinelli: And sentenced to life.
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More than a decade into Cyntoia’s time in prison, artist Rihanna shared her case in 2017 and it quickly went viral. A number of high-profile supporters, including celebrities Kim Kardashian and Snoop Dogg called for a second chance for Cyntoia. In 2019, Cyntoia was finally granted clemency by then Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam.
But what about the other 180-plus juvenile lifers who remain in prison in Tennessee, the ones who didn’t get GoFundMe campaigns, segments on national TV and support from celebrities.
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Maria Hinojosa: From Futuro Media and PRX, it’s Latino USA. I’m Maria Hinojosa. Today, the growing movement to push juveniles into the adult prison system in Tennessee.
In our show today, producer Julieta Martinelli, who you heard from at the top, is going to take us to Tennessee where a legal battle is currently brewing between those who believe in rehabilitation for kids facing time in prison, and those who wish to see longer, harsher sentencing for minors. Here’s Julieta Martinelli once again.
Julieta Martinelli: The science is very clear. Human beings don’t fully develop their brains until they’re at least 25, sometimes even older. That’s particularly true for the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which is responsible for our decision-making and our ability to think through consequences of our actions. That’s why in 2016, the Supreme Court made a monumental decision in a case known as Montgomery v. Louisiana.
News Archival: “In a five-to-four decision, the high court ruled that it is unconstitutional for states to mandate sentences of life without parole for juveniles under the age of 18.”
Julieta Martinelli: A flurry of resentencing hearings followed all around the country for juvenile lifers. But in Tennessee it seemed as if the Supreme Court decision never came down.
Tennessee claimed that the Supreme Court decision didn’t apply to them because its mandatory sentences are technically 60 to life. And even when the Tennessee Supreme Court reduced the minimum serving time to 51 years in 2018, advocates argued it was still basically a life sentence. I mean, let’s do the math.
Someone’s sentenced at 16 years old, like Cyntoia, has the right to go in front of a parole board after serving 51 years. By then, that person would be at least 67. But according to data from the Tennessee Department of Corrections, the average life expectancy of an incarcerated person in the state is just 52.
So basically, the chance that you would even make it to a parole hearing is in practice null. And that’s exactly what led to another lawsuit before the Tennessee Supreme Court in 2022. The case revolved around Tyshon Booker, who like Cyntoia, was convicted under the state’s de facto life sentence when he was 16.
Booker’s lawyers argued that the sentence was unconstitutional.
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This time, Tennessee’s highest court agreed.
News Archival: “New at five tonight. Life in prison, no more for certain inmates. Recently, the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed years of law ruling it is unconstitutional for a juvenile to serve a mandatory life sentence in the state. The court says juveniles should be eligible for parole after 25 to 36 years in prison instead of 51.”
Julieta Martinelli: Advocates thought, this is it, change is coming. And in a way, change did come. Just not quite as they imagined.
News Archival: “Lieutenant Governor Randy McNally says violent crime is out of control in Tennessee and that lawmakers must change the process so criminal gangs can no longer use young people for violence with impunity.”
“Republican lawmakers want more juveniles to be tried as adults.”
Julieta Martinelli: The state legislature controlled by Republicans unleashed a flurry of new bills following the Tennessee Supreme Court’s decision. Rep Robert Stevens of Smyrna, a neighboring town to Nashville, introduced a bill that would require juveniles 16 or older to be tried in adult court for their second defense, even for petty arrests like shoplifting.
Another bill by Republican lawmaker John Gillespie of Memphis would allow courts to consider a person’s juvenile record when making decisions about bond, even decades down the line. But according to advocates and lawyers that we spoke with, the worst of all was passed at the start of the year. It’s called blended sentencing.
Sheila Calloway: “You’re blending their sentence where part of it’s done in a juvenile setting and part of it’s done in the adult setting.”
Julieta Martinelli: That’s Judge Sheila Calloway, who for over a decade has presided over a juvenile courtroom in Nashville. Before that, she spent a decade in the same courtroom as a magistrate. Calloway says the new law requires judges like her to impose on minors as young as 14 years old, a juvenile sentence and an adult sentence once they reach legal age.
Sheila Calloway: “If a child over 14 commits a certain serious offense, those sentences could be eligible for our blended sentencing.”
Julieta Martinelli: And it comes with some new rules.
Sheila Calloway: “They have the right to have a jury trial on that matter within one year, and that jury trial has to be held in the adult system by an adult judge. Then they are sent back to the juvenile court judge to do the actual sentencing and so as they judge, I have to sentence them to no less than serving up until the time they’re 19 years old. And once they turn 19, I am also obligated to sentence them to an adult sentence.”
Julieta Martinelli: I want us to really take in what’s happening here.
Say a 16-year-old is charged with a felony like robbery, then a judge is obligated to sentence them to prison until they’re 19 years old. And then on top of that, the teen has to be sentenced a second time for the same crime as an adult too.
Sheila Calloway: “You have the constitutional right to have a jury of your peers, but if you’re a 14 or a 15-year-old, you’re not allowed to be on a jury. Most juries are filled with people who are voters first and foremost there’s not a lot of diversity in the voting pool, and so what you find out is most of those juries of your peers, even as adults, aren’t really what our peers look like. And so, there’s a question about whether this jury of your peers is really going to stand up to constitutional muster.”
Julieta Martinelli: Some context here, about 75% of Tennessee’s population is white, but four out of five juvenile lifers in prisons in Tennessee today are Black men. The juries already don’t represent them.
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She also points out that the way the new law is written, it is an adult court judge who hears the facts and evidence of the case and decides whether to convict. When the child is sent back to her courtroom just for sentencing, she now has to issue a sentence without being the one who heard the circumstances around the case.
Maria Hinojosa: When we come back, we’re gonna continue looking at why those working in juvenile justice say moving kids to the adult system is a mistake and we take a visit to a group of volunteers hoping to step in so minors don’t end up in the system in the first place. Stay with us. ¡No te vayas!
Before the break, we learned about the growing pressure to prosecute children as adults in Tennessee. Now we pick up with a juvenile court judge who tells us why it matters to keep kids within their own justice system. Here’s Julieta Martinelli once again.
Julieta Martinelli: Judge Sheila Calloway says her nearly two decades in a juvenile courtroom has taught her that many of those children who end up in front of her are also dealing with complex trauma and unmet needs.
Something her courtroom, which she calls trauma-informed, has been trained to detect and deal with. That is not true of adult courts, where yet many juveniles end up in.
Sheila Calloway: “The majority of the youth that we see who have been charged with crimes have started in our system either being a child who is abused or neglected, or being the center of a custody battle. And so there’s a large number of our youth that come through the system that we’re not given the best opportunity to thrive from when they were children or when they were babies. And for me, that is something that is super important for us to understand.”
Julieta Martinelli: Advocates have long said. What we often end up seeing is victims become victimizers if there’s no intervention to heal the root issue.
Sheila Calloway: “When we put children in prisons, we are stopping their growth. We are halting their ability to change in a positive way. We are placing them in ultra-negative circumstances where their brain is absorbing everything around them. We are cutting off their ability to get true education, to have counseling and job training, and all the things that we need for our youth to develop in a positive way.”
Julieta Martinelli: So when a child ends up in an adult prison system, the effect is the whole opposite.
Sheila Calloway: “An adult system is about crime and punishment. We can absolutely affect the way that their brains are developing, which gives them the opportunity to be rehabilitated. That’s what the goal of a juvenile system was supposed to be and what it should always be.”
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Julieta Martinelli: But if juvenile crime in the state is so out of control that measures like these are needed to protect the general population, then it makes sense. Right? The thing is, despite Republican lawmakers across the state pushing for tough-on-crime sentencing and ongoing claims that juvenile crime is higher than ever, data actually shows that, as of 2024, youth arrests have decreased by more than half in the last decade.
Sheila Calloway: “Educating the public is difficult, and we have several different media that are constantly talking about that juvenile crime is increasing, and it’s the same story of the same kid that committed the same crime. And so people who are listening to news and hearing these things or hearing, ‘oh my God, all these kids are breaking in stuff.’ I think sometimes our news media highlights juvenile crime much, much, much more than they highlight adult crime. That’s not really accurate.”
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Julieta Martinelli: Calloway says, in essence, what we’re seeing is the unexpected result of the Supreme Court decision that aimed to bring Tennessee laws regarding juvenile lifers to equal footing with other states. It’s a hard push by Republican lawmakers the opposite way.
Sheila Calloway: “I, I think it’s an effort to open the floodgates of who has to go into the adult system.”
Julieta Martinelli: So how do you deal with public safety, with children who commit crimes, especially serious crimes that hurt and alter the lives of other people? How do you provide accountability while still taking their humanity into account? It’s a question that judges, lawyers, activists, and lawmakers have been scrambling over for a long time, seemingly nowhere closer to a solution.
Marcel Hernandez: “It’s not a, a simple, straightforward, like here’s the secret, magic bullet that cures it all. But when it comes to prevention, it’s a matter of just really showing a young child that they’re cared for, nurtured, and that there’s a community of support.”
Julieta Martinelli: That’s Marcel Hernandez
Marcel Hernandez: I am founder of Be About Change, and we are here at the Boys and Girls Club in Columbia, Tennessee.
Julieta Martinelli: Hernandez currently works in development for programs that empower marginalized communities. He also runs this program called Project L.E.A.D. He partners with other nonprofits, community groups, and even school systems to encourage at-risk kids to participate.
Marcel Hernandez: “We know the strongest predictor of negative justice outcomes involve poverty and the inability to see available life choices. That’s so one thing that we really prefer to focus on is how can we elevate the viewpoint of young people so that we can then see farther, wider, broader, in terms of what life has to offer. Oftentimes, it’s just a matter of either environmental factors or circumstances or past traumas even, and things that seemingly don’t allow us to see farther down the road. So we try to function as a mirror so that young people can see their own strengths.”
Julieta Martinelli: On this warm, sunny April morning, I get to witness it myself.
Marcel Hernandez: “Right? So I’m gonna give you all some candy. You all can have this much of that as possible, however. The number of starbursts that you are holding in your hand is the number of things that you have to tell the person who says, (LAUGHS) tell me about your son alright? (VOICES) you got four minutes. Alright. Simply walk around and talk to each other. And I just want to hear one question. I want you to ask the person: tell me about yourself. Alright, let’s go to work. Let’s go to work.”
Julieta Martinelli: I look over at Marcel and he’s smiling.
Marcel Hernandez: “You’re leading to a personal pitch, uh, learning how to tell others about ourselves, so just social skills, communication. Um.
Julieta Martinelli: “It’s just so funny because they. They had the opportunity to pull as many candies as they wanted, but now it’s a little bit of punishment if you get a little greedy. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s, it’s such a dual lesson, right?”
Columbia is a town with about 50,000 residents, an hour southwest of Nashville. There really isn’t much to do in Columbia.
On the drive there, I passed gorgeous open pastures, farms, cows. It’s a big football town. So a lot of kids dream of making it by playing sports. As I sit in on the activities of the day, I learn more about them. There are 10 kids here, nine boys and one girl. They range in ages from 12 to 17. The day started with a group workout.
First, they did pushups and burpees. Hernandez is a lifelong believer that learning to be disciplined in fitness spreads to other areas. The kids seem to enjoy it. Most of the leaders in the room today are African American men, as young as college aged all the way to retirement. They tell me that it’s important that kids have male figures in their lives to look up to, who understand where they come from and what their lives are like.
Marcel Hernandez: “Oftentimes we find that we’re trying to kind of undo a lifetime of things that have kind of led up to that. And so in a very real sense, it’s more of an intervention rather than a prevention.”
Julieta Martinelli: But at Project L.E.A.D., the name of the game is here and now, not when it’s too late.
Marcel Hernandez: “So somebody tell me from your experience how either easy or how difficult was that?
“It was easy.”
“Okay. Talk about it. LeBron. Oh my. So all you had to talk about was so, alright, so who got the not I’ll be right over there with you. Who got the opportunity to talk to Elijah? Alright. Somebody tell me what they remembered. This tell me about yourself question is going to be important for you to know and to know how to answer it because you will be asking job interviews to tell me about yourself as you begin to get into college and go forward and move into, uh, workspaces. People wanna know who you are, but…”
Julieta Martinelli: A few brave volunteers stand on a small table and share their elevator pitch that they spent the morning working on. Mentors have been teaching them how to confidently introduce themselves, share what they have to offer, and ask for what they want. They tell the young people in the room that it’ll help them when applying for college and later for a good job.
They will have college interviews. They will get good jobs. They want them to envision it, to see themselves doing it successfully.
“Tell me about yourself, sir.”
“So nice to meet you. I’m a 9th grader. I recently joined the track team and I’m currently headed to subsection. Mm-hmm. I’m interested in playing football this year and I love the opportunities to continue playing sports at the next levels. Uh, would you be open to scheduling something next week? Thank so much for your time. It was great to meet you. Alright! (Applause).
One by one more hands go up. In the end, every kid has volunteered to go up and introduce themselves, their peers, and the mentors cheer them on. They tell them how well they’ve done, how confident they sound. Even when they’re dismissed, the kids hang around. A few of them help clean up. Others go to the court and shoot a basketball. A couple others linger around, chatting with Hernandez and the group of men here today. It’s a Saturday, a day off from school, but the kids are not ready to go home.
Marcel Hernandez: “The biggest piece that we’ve seen when it comes to success or shifting those trajectories is, of course, number one, is family engagement, family involvement, number two, community involvement. So young people seem to thrive, um, when they are fully aware that there’s a community of support.”
Julieta Martinelli: At the end of the day, the mentors who are volunteering from different programs and cities, most of whom have just met today, gather around. They give thanks, speaking strength onto one another, just as they did the children.
Marcel Hernandez: “This confirmation that we got the right key people here to make all this happen. So, so kudos to you. I really admire your work. Uh, right, and your, uh. Man, you’re going, you’re gonna keep rising, right? I can see it.”
“I can. I can see the day when Jack remembers how you put your hand on his shoulder and told him, “I’ve been where you’re at.” And have somebody that I could say, here’s who I look up to. That was big. You feel right? Mm-hmm.”
“So I would encourage all of us to be praying for the hearts of these kids if they show up. Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Their hearts be soft. They be willing to listen to the wisdom. Right? That’s in this room.”
Julieta Martinelli: One of the local leaders speaks up.
Local leader: “I just know the city. I’ve been here my whole life. I just know how it works. They have to see it and it has to stay consistent ’cause a lot of people do this, but then they are gone, you know, so that, that’s really the key component to that. To where it comes to, ‘okay, you know what, that’s something I’m looking forward to’ or it is just another thing. And getting the parents, not kids. It’s getting the parents believing in that, ’cause we are only one failure away from being just like some people.”
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Julieta Martinelli: And maybe really that’s the only way out of this. Showing up and showing care and commitment to the parents too, and understanding that every adult was once a child, maybe a child who was also failed by the system, and treating children as children and working together as a community to make sure their needs are met before it’s too late.
After all, it does take a village. (MUSIC)
Maria Hinojosa: Our episode was produced by Julieta Martinelli and edited by Andrea López-Cruzado. It was mixed by Gabriela Baez. Fact-checking for this episode by Roxana Aguire. The Latino USA team also includes Julia Caruso, Jessica Ellis, Victoria Estrada, Dominique Hinestrosa, Reynaldo Leaños Jr, Stephanie Lebow, Luis Luna, Marta Martínez, Mónica Morales-Garcia, JJ Querubin, Tasha Sandoval, Nour Saudi, and Nancy Trujillo. Fernanda Echavarri is our managing editor. Peniley Ramírez, María Garcia and I are co-executive producers. And I’m your host, Maria Hinojosa. Join us again on our next episode. In the meantime, look for us on all of your social media. I’ll see you on Instagram.
Hasta la próxima. ¡No te vayas! Ciao.
Stephanie Lebow: Latino USA is made possible in part by Public Welfare Foundation, catalyzing transformative approaches to justice that are community-led, restorative, and racially just. Skyline Foundation. And this project was completed with the support of a grant from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights.
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