Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/series/from-the-bureaus/page/23/)
On Friday, Manhattan Justice Edward McLaughlin sentenced Taylonn Murphy Jr. to 50 years to life for the 2011 murder of Walter Sumter. Murphy was also convicted of conspiracy, robbery and weapons charges.
As word of the not guilty verdict spread from the second-floor courtroom down to the crowd waiting in the street below, resident Shana Ashby, 21, stood across from the courthouse and worried about how the verdict will affect her four younger siblings.
New York has some of the strongest gun laws in the country but that hasn’t stopped gun violence from affecting the lives of many. According to the Crime, Arrest and Firearm Activity report issued by New York’s Division of Criminal Justice Services, there were 127 gun deaths in 2015.
Nicholas Heyward Sr., 58, remembers the night. It was a warm Tuesday in 1994 and the sun had yet to set. Neighborhood children trickled into the Gowanus Houses, the Brooklyn housing project where he lived, answering their parents’ calls, while others stayed outside to enjoy the remainder of a beautiful fall day.
About two dozen activists rallied outside the downtown office of District Attorney Ken Thompson today to urge him to revisit the case of 13-year-old Nicholas Heyward Jr., who was fatally shot by a police officer 22 years ago.
Katrina Alston wasn’t trained as a therapist, social worker or anything of that nature when she worked at a Pasadena, California, group home for emotionally troubled teenage girls in the Los Angeles County foster care system. She simply went through a weeklong training process and two weeks of job shadowing.
In the Resnick Education Wing 10 floors above the main stages of historic Carnegie Hall, a teenage girl named Breanni stood nervously in front of the crowd.
Withelma “T” Ortiz Walker Pettigrew grew up in the foster care system in Los Angeles, where she lived in 14 different group homes, most of which featured various levels of abuse. Her experience showed her how children, in a system built to protect them, often face life-endangering risks that often go unnoticed by the public.
Twenty-two years seems like an awfully short time to already be talking about redemption. But the young man sitting on the velvet couch in the splendor of the Omni Parker House Hotel’s mezzanine is living proof that for someone who has survived the juvenile justice system in America, there is a fine line between ending your life and turning it around.
Adolphus Graves, the chief probation officer of Fulton County Juvenile Court in Atlanta, was driven to transform his juvenile justice system by the mistakes he made as a young probation officer.
“I was a little wayward and misguided as a probation officer,” he said. “Knowing my times as a probation officer, and how many things I did horribly, or how many children that I irresponsibly, or sometimes just ignorantly, subjected to detention because I had no other tools. ... The recurring theme consistently has been the lack of knowledge, of understanding what’s going on, the depth of what’s going on in a child’s life.”