Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/michigan/)
The murders would not have happened if the parents hadn't purchased a gun for Ethan Crumbley or if they had taken him home from Oxford High School on the day of the shooting, when staff became alarmed about his extreme drawings, the appeals court said, in a groundbreaking case of criminal responsibility for the acts of a child.
LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Armed with two handguns and dozens of rounds of ammunition, 43-year-old Anthony McRae open fired on the Michigan State University campus on the night of Feb. 13, killing three students and wounding five more. Democrats are expected to bring a sweeping 11-bill gun safety package before the Michigan Legislature this week. The package aims to establish safe storage laws, universal background checks and extreme risk protection orders.
Since 2016, Elder Yusef Qualls has been on a tireless campaign to have officials in Michigan revisit a criminal case that has kept his son incarcerated for over two decades.
A so-called “juvenile lifer,” Qualls’ son, also named Yusef Qualls, has lived within Michigan’s adult correctional system since 1997. At 17 Qualls was sentenced to life without parole after police linked him as an accomplice to the murder of a woman in Detroit. Elder Qualls has been a juvenile justice advocate since his son’s incarceration began. But the fight took a new turn when, in 2016, the Supreme Court retroactively banned sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole for juvenile offenders. That meant the courts had to revisit his son’s case.
NEW YORK — Cornelius Fredericks, 16, was sitting at a table eating lunch when he was tackled by a staff member at Lakeside Academy in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Soon after he hit the ground, two other staff members ran over to assist. They started restraining Fredericks for throwing food. The teen remained restrained for 12 minutes. It would be the last minutes of his life.
As the pandemic raged, a Louisiana activist flashed back to the last time an outside menace threatened to invade detention facilities and kill those helplessly locked away.
Every summer when I was off from college, I worked with Kendell Barry, at Developing K.I.D.S. It was a six-week summer program. We did academic work, team building, community service. It was my job to create the curriculum for the summer.
In Michigan, 17-year-olds are not allowed to buy lottery tickets, get a tattoo, rent a car or hotel room or drop out of school. They can’t vote, serve on a jury or sign a legal contract either, presumably because they don’t possess the requisite maturity to make adult-level decisions. This distinction, however, is tossed out the window if a 17-year-old breaks the law. Suddenly, they are adults, facing devastating repercussions that can come with an adult conviction.
On a summer day in 1970, two Chicago Police officers assigned to the “walk and talk” team, meant to improve relations between police and the community at the Cabrini-Green public housing projects, were walking across a field when gunfire erupted. Surrounded by the high-rise buildings, snipers fired on the men, killing them both.
In 1990, in California’s 15 largest cities, 373 youths (in a population ages 10 to 17 of 850,000) were arrested for homicide. In 2015, in those same cities (now with 1.1...
While the man behind the landmark decision that ended mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles waits for a new sentence, other inmates given the same term are getting a shot at eventual freedom.