By Chris Dankovich
Discovering mistakes in complicated legal proceedings is difficult if you’re a lawyer. It’s difficult
if you’re like me, someone with an 8th grade education on the outside who has spent years since learning some basics the hard way (by reading it and talking to others). And all the more challenging when you’re a 17-year-old, disabled, impoverished, high-school dropout who’s innocent.
That’s why I was here in the prison library, signing out the book containing the variable sentencing factors for vehicle crimes. Only I didn’t know the person I was helping was innocent yet. He didn’t describe himself that way. I brought the book back to the table because he had asked me if I would look over how the aggravating factors in his “variables” raised his sentence. He wasn’t sure, but he thought they may have been calculated incorrectly.
It’s boring: Helping someone lower an incorrectly calculated sentence doesn’t involve the excitement of Andy DuFresne’s prison escape in “Shawshank Redemption,” or the courtroom drama of a witty attorney changing a jury’s opinion by tongue-tying a hostile witness. The person’s already guilty of whatever they’ve been charged with, but specific sentences are often determined by the guidelines these sentencing factor scores reflect. For example, in Michigan if you break into a home that’s occupied and it is called Home Invasion, First Degree. Did you merely open an unlocked door to their garage and steal a container of gasoline? The guidelines may suggest five years in prison. Did you break down the door with a sledgehammer in the middle of the night and ransack what you could take while a family woke up in fear for their lives? The guidelines may suggest a twenty- or thirty-year sentence.
I sit down next to Dalton, and we open the book to find the variables for reckless driving causing a death. I ask him as we go down the list.
“Have you ever been in trouble before?”
“No, never.”
“Were you drunk or high?”
“No.”
“Were you speeding?”
“No.”
“Are you sure? Could they even just argue that you were speeding?”
“No… the prosecutor even acknowledged I wasn’t speeding. All I did was go through the stop sign.”
“So, you went through a stop sign and crashed into someone and they died?”
“Yes. Unfortunately. I didn’t mean to…”
He hadn’t told me anything about what had happened in the couple months since I had met him when he came into my prison unit, the skinniest kid I had ever seen. Feeling bad for him, I along with a few people I knew had tried to look out for Dalton, giving him some ramen noodles here and there, letting him hang out with us, bringing him out to the weight pit to work out and hopefully put on some muscle so he wouldn’t seem like such an easy target. In prison, being short and looking near-anorexic brings extra hardship, especially when combined with being somewhat slow mentally, which we discovered about him. He was a good young man, now 18, and he eagerly joined in with us. None of us minded having him around, and he could be pretty funny at times. With a thick Upper-Peninsula accent (similar to a heavy Minnesota or Wisconsin accent) and some unique figures of speech as well as a sense of humor, Dalton could keep those around him entertained.
I hadn’t minded when he asked for some help with this bit of legal stuff, and I was starting to feel bad for him that he was sentenced to years and years for what happened as a result of him going through a stop-sign. But it changed when he finished explaining. “I didn’t mean to… there was a tree growing in front of the stop-sign and I couldn’t see it.”
“What do you mean, ‘growing in front’? Like, a branch was in front of it a bit?”
“No, I mean a whole branch with leaves completely covered it from view. I have a picture of it. You can’t see the stop-sign at all.”
When we got back to the unit, Dalton went to his room and came back out with a photo-album full of pictures. There was his son, him already a father at 17. There were the cars he worked on with his family for a living. And there were a couple pictures of a stop-sign . . . or I should say there was one picture showing a stop-sign at an angle with a branch thick with leaves in front, and another picture of the same branch from in front, with only the stake of the stop-sign visible underneath. The traffic-marker was completely covered and wasn’t visible.
“Dalton, when were these pictures taken?” I asked.
“Uh, my dad took them two or three days after the accident.”
“So when you said the stop-sign was covered by a tree, you really meant that it wasn’t possible to even see it.”
“I was driving how I was supposed to, and I couldn’t see any sign, so I drove forward and a car hit me and someone died because of it. That’s why I’m in here.”
This kid is innocent of any wrongdoing.
But that doesn’t explain everything. Why didn’t the jury realize what these pictures were?
“They didn’t see them.”
“Why not? Didn’t your lawyer show them, or ones like them, to the jury?”
“No.”
“So you’re in prison for running a stop-sign and your jury never saw any proof THAT YOU COULDN’T SEE THE STOP-SIGN?!?!”
“No, my lawyer didn’t show them anything.”
“WHAT THE &#$? %$& $# @$#!!!”
When Dalton’s court-appointed lawyer didn’t respond to him before the trial, he went out of his way, in that precious angsty-teenage way, to cuss her out and then retreated sullenly and let her handle everything from there. Evidence that he was innocent of wrongdoing wasn’t presented. When asked why he didn’t appeal right away (your initial right to appeal your sentence must be used within a few months) he shrugged his shoulders and said he didn’t know he was supposed to. “No one told me.”
That. That is why children, even older children, cannot be treated as adults, at least not in every way. An adult is supposed to fight for his rights. An adult is supposed to know how to, or at least be able to aid an attorney who knows how to and is willing. Kids get overwhelmed and under-helped at best, and railroaded at worst. And a bit of all these is what happened to him. Do I think it was maliciously and intentionally done to lock away some child? No, it was negligent, which is the very thing he was accused of and the very standards he was held to unto the loss of freedom for years.
I typed up a bunch of letters to appeals attorneys, and sat down with him to go over them. Asking for a review of his case and help filing an appeal for full innocence and that he was inadequately represented, as well as asking the court to appoint representation, he signed them.
“Dank… do you think I borrow some stamped envelopes to mail them out with?”
I gave him the envelopes, and out they went. A few weeks later, he had an appeals attorney. A couple months later, he had a new court date. Leaving prison for the day, he came back all smiles. Offered a plea to a misdemeanor traffic violation in return for release and no probation, he signed it, and soon Dalton went home to his family and his son. An innocent child was released from adult prison.
Dalton was a kid who was innocent and was railroaded by the system because he was a kid and by nature ignorant, impulsive, full of emotions, unable to express himself, along with having disabilities. Not all kids who come to prison are completely innocent like he was, but if the criminal justice system is meant to give fair punishments for crimes in addition to fairly determining innocence or guilt, children (those under 18) statistically often receive HARSHER punishments for the same crimes than adults do. This is because they, like Dalton, don’t know how to introduce (or demand their lawyers introduce) evidence of innocence or mitigating factors, have not lived enough to have standing in the community, aren’t able to hire good attorneys, impulsively damage their relationships with their attorney in frustration, or otherwise aren’t able to understand what is needed to defend themselves in court. By not accounting for these traits and factors, the American criminal justice system discriminates against youth. A system designed by and for middle-aged white men cannot adequately administer real justice to a disabled, juvenile high-school dropout considered by that same system to be too young and irresponsible to vote, smoke, or even work a full-time job.
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