In 2009, a 14-year-old boy shot and killed another teenager who was riding a bicycle down a suburban street. The boy told police he committed the crime on orders from a high-ranking gang member.
A few months later, police in Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood arrested a 15-year-old for a murder that, while unrelated, was notably similar: He too said he shot another young person to prove his allegiance to his gang.
Both teens pleaded guilty. But because Andrew Lorek, the Chicago defendant, had turned 15 two weeks before his crime, he was automatically transferred to adult court, where he was sentenced to 28 years in prison. Now 20, he’s due to be released when he’s 43.
The other boy’s case was handled in juvenile court. He’s set to regain his freedom next year, after he turns 21.
The markedly different paths for two teenagers who were both charged with first-degree murder are in large part the result of a decades-old Illinois law that automatically transfers offenders 15 or older to adult court for offenses ranging from the use of a weapon on school grounds to murder.
But as the U.S. Supreme Court, lawmakers and criminal justice experts continue to recognize fundamental differences between adolescents and adults, the country has started to rethink the tough-on-crime policies once touted as vital in combating a surge of youthful “superpredators.” That wave never came to pass, most experts agree, and new science mapping the brain development and rehabilitative potential of juveniles replaced those fears and buttressed calls for reform.
In Illinois, legislators voted in May to end automatic transfers for 15-year-olds and to limit the transfer of 16- and 17-year-olds to those accused of first-degree murder, aggravated criminal sexual assault and aggravated battery with a firearm. Both advocates and opponents applauded the measure as a reasonable compromise between juvenile rights and public safety, though some question whether the reforms go far enough.
That measure now awaits action by Gov. Bruce Rauner. But even before it passed, Illinois courts also started to weigh in. Last year, appeals court judges raised an alarm over the existing law’s “absence of any judicial discretion.” Another judge argued in a dissenting opinion a year earlier that the “blanket transfer” of juveniles without consideration of maturity, intelligence, background or culpability “cannot pass constitutional muster.”
The Tribune reviewed thousands of pages of records from dozens of cases involving Illinois juvenile offenders — plus interviews with several people who committed murders before they turned 17. The analysis revealed vast differences in the outcomes of those charged as adults and those who remained in juvenile courts and typically walked free at 21.
‘Trying to fit in’
In a bare room at Menard Correctional Center, Andrew Lorek glanced at the homemade tattoo on his wrist and sighed, saying he hates the emblem of his prior gang affiliation.
In the years before the shooting, Lorek said he was teased for his glasses, chipped tooth and stutter. He began treatment for mental health issues at 11, court records show. Behind every youthful misstep — joining a gang at 12, using drugs and alcohol, stealing cars — was a yearning to belong.
“I was trying to fit in with the crowd because I didn’t want to be looked at as uncool or lame or anything like that,” he said.
The day he gunned down a man believed to be a rival gang member in 2009 was no different. Lorek said he was working “security” for his gang when he spotted the 19-year-old wearing the wrong colors.
“I panicked,” Lorek said. “I emptied the clip.”
Lorek had been picked up before for battery, drugs and residential burglary, court records show. His father, a pastor, had moved the family to Bolingbrook, hoping the change of scenery would keep his son out of trouble.
After five years in detention, Lorek said his tattoo represents someone who no longer exists. He said he supports the move to give judges discretion to deciding to send a youth to adult court. But he’s come to terms with his fate.
“There’s no justifying what I’ve done,” he said. “I deserve a punishment for my crime. … If I knew what I know now, I wouldn’t have joined the gang. It’s not worth dying over a fading color.”
The progression of a juvenile who makes impulsive decisions, particularly at the behest of peers, to an adult who weighs the consequences of his actions, is not uncommon, said Dr. Jay Giedd, a leading neuroscientist who studies adolescent development. The part of the brain needed for impulse control, decision-making and long-term planning generally isn’t fully developed until a person’s late 20s, he said.
“The capacity for change is amazing,” said Giedd, adding there is “no bright line” or age that determines when a person’s brain reaches maturity. “It’s undeniable that the 25-year-old brain is different than the 16-year-old brain or the 14-year-old brain.”
He objects to any “one-size-fits-all” approach to how minors are handled in court.
“The individual should matter greatly,” Giedd said.
The U.S. Supreme Court appears to agree. In three landmark cases in the past decade, justices rejected the death sentence for one juvenile offender, a sentence of mandatory life without parole for another juvenile convicted of homicide, and life without parole in a non-homicide case.
One key difference between juvenile and adult court is that offenders convicted as juveniles are typically released at age 21, while those tried as adults can get decadeslong prison terms. Also, juvenile court cases are generally not a matter of public record, allowing those who complete their sentences to re-integrate into society without the shadow of a permanent criminal record.
Deserving a 2nd chance?
Some adolescents who receive automatic transfers to adult court under the existing law might have ended up there, anyway, had a judge been given discretion to make that call.
Clifford Baker was 15 when he killed two of his neighbors, Debra Tish and John Michael Mahon, in their sleep in the tiny Illinois town of Loogootee, outside St. Louis.
“They were two people that just completely enjoyed life,” said Tish’s niece, LaTisha Paslay. “They were kind. They loved to fish.”
As time goes on, “it doesn’t get easier,” she said.
Baker was automatically transferred to adult court, where he was sentenced to mandatory life in prison without parole for the 2010 murders. As a result of the new Supreme Court ruling, he is among about 80 Illinois inmates who got mandatory life terms as juveniles but will now get new resentencing hearings. Paslay, for one, hopes the outcome will be the same for Baker.
“I have a 15-year-old son right now who knows right from wrong, just as Clifford Baker did when he shot them,” Paslay said. “We will do everything we can to make sure that he spends his life remembering what he did.”
But Baker’s public appellate defender, Amanda Horner, said the automatic transfer and mandatory life sentence prevented the judge from taking into consideration a mitigating factor: namely, that Baker was mentally ill.
Just two weeks before the slayings, Baker shot his dog and then shot himself in the abdomen. He was placed in a psychiatric hospital and prescribed anti-depressants that his uncle later testified caused Baker to dream of killing himself and others, court records show.
“This isn’t a kid that was involved in a gang or that was the local thug,” said Horner. “Clifford was suffering from some sort of psychiatric, mental health issues. Once he left that hospital, that care really just stopped.”
In a prison interview, Baker spoke in a hushed voice as he described growing up with an alcoholic father and a mother who, according to court records, went to prison when he was 3. He attended special education classes and other kids picked on him.
He said he turned to drugs and alcohol at 10 when the grandmother who raised him died.
Now, Baker said, he’s trying to rehabilitate himself in prison, proudly displaying certificates for milestones like earning his GED, completing substance abuse classes and behavioral therapy sessions.
“I feel like I should be able to get a second chance,” Baker said. “I was only 15. I was just a kid.”
Weighing rights of victims, too
Another juvenile killer who got mandatory life in prison — but who will soon be resentenced by court order — is David Biro.
Biro was 16 in 1990 when he led a pregnant Nancy Langert and her husband Richard to the basement of their Winnetka home and shot them as they begged for their lives.
While Nancy’s sister Jeanne Bishop wrote a book about finding forgiveness for Biro, another sister, Jennifer Bishop-Jenkins, was spurred to become a victims’ rights advocate.
“If a teenager murders your loved one … or an adult murders your loved one, it feels the same to us,” she said. “It feels as hurtful. It’s as traumatizing. It’s as life-changing”
Yet Bishop-Jenkins supports juvenile reform initiatives. She said the changes to the automatic transfer law that have passed the General Assembly strike the right balance by allowing less serious cases to remain under juvenile jurisdiction but moving the more heinous, violent offenders to adult court.
The original bill called for an end to all automatic transfers to adult court. After pushback primarily from county prosecutors around the state, a compromise emerged that would eliminate automatic transfers for 15-year-olds and limit them for older teens to the most serious crimes.
“We don’t believe in a system that would allow somebody to be the trigger person at age 17 and then get as few as four years in prison,” said Matt Jones, legislative director of the Illinois State’s Attorneys Association.
Those on both sides of the debate agree that a lack of state data on automatic transfer cases is a problem.
The Evanston-based nonprofit advocacy group Juvenile Justice Initiative has been monitoring juvenile cases in Cook County for years. The group’s data show that, of 257 juvenile offenders who were automatically placed in adult court between 2010 and 2012, 99 percent were nonwhite. More than half pleaded guilty to lesser offenses that, had those been the original charges, would have kept them in juvenile court. Four percent were cleared.
A key provision of the new legislation mandates data tracking by all counties.
Initiative President Elizabeth Clarke called the bill awaiting Rauner’s signature a “critical first step” but said her group and others had hoped automatic transfers would be halted and discretion given to judges to decide who goes to adult court.
“The profound racial disparities and very poor outcomes really troubled us,” she said.
Of the five juvenile murderers who were tried in adult court and interviewed in prison by the Tribune, four acknowledged their involvement in the crimes. The fifth, Arsenio Willis, denied he had a gun during a 2008 killing over a $100 debt in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood. Records from his trial indicate his lawyers argued he discharged a gun but not the fatal shot.
None of the five — all 15 or 16 at the time of their arrests — said they had understood why they were tried as adults.
The proposed law would reduce by more than half the number of juvenile offenders in Cook County automatically sent to adult court, for lesser crimes, according to a representative of county board President Toni Preckwinkle, who lobbied for the state reform bill.
Even if that bill is signed into law, it would not have kept Willis out of adult court. He was 16, not 15, at the time of the shooting, which occurred on his way home from school and left one teen dead and another wounded. Willis received a 63-year sentence.
Appeals justices denied his attorney’s argument challenging the constitutionality of the automatic transfer provision but noted the national trend toward treating juveniles differently than adults.
During a prison interview, Willis was quick to smile behind black-rimmed glasses and thin goatee, a trait he said has helped him cope with life behind bars. But frustration crept in as he spoke of the future.
“How can you rehabilitate someone when you’re giving them 60 to 70 years?” Willis said. “That’s not rehabilitation. That’s basically just locking them away. I’ll be an old man. What do I do?”
‘Superpredator’ idea debunked
Few argue that minors should never be tried in adult court.
The issue, said Stephanie Kollmann, policy director at Northwestern University’s Children and Family Justice Center, is one of discretion. Prosecutors now have discretion in how juvenile offenders are charged — which ultimately determines whether they end up in adult court — but Kollmann noted that prosecutors are not intended to be impartial, as judges are.
“Whether the young person is getting transferred to adult court or not really determines the rest of their life,” she said.
Former Cook County juvenile court Judge Andrew Berman added: “Prosecutors come into it sort of biased toward wanting to be tough on crime. That’s why you have a judge act as a neutral arbiter to make these decisions.”
The tug of war is not new. Lawmakers debated some of the same points when the original automatic transfer law, supported by then-Cook County State’s Attorney Richard M. Daley, was passed in Illinois in 1982. In the 1980s and 1990s, the fear of a juvenile crime epidemic gripped the nation, and states scrambled to change laws to protect the public.
As the years passed, however, many experts who argued for harsher treatment of juveniles changed their stance. That includes John DiIulio, a University of Pennsylvania professor who was credited as the architect of the teen “superpredator” theory.
“Even in the ’90s, there was no case for automatic transfer even for young offenders charged or convicted of violent or multiple violent crimes,” DiIulio said in an email. “All the evidence since then indicates that automatic transfer policies have few if any positive consequences.”
The current bill awaiting Rauner’s signature bears similarities to the one state lawmakers passed in 1982. Since then, the use of automatic transfers was expanded.
“There was a blip in crime, but it caused a moral panic,” said Shawn Marsh of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges. “We’re seeing that course correction now. We’re starting to see people saying, ‘This has gone entirely too far.’ “
‘I thank God every day’
Byron Ashford knows how lucky he was that his case remained in juvenile court.
Ashford was 13 when he shot a 19-year-old gas station worker on Chicago’s West Side in a botched robbery attempt. The slaying happened months after Ashford had attempted suicide, he said.
He spent the next couple days hiding out at his cousin’s house, riding his bike and playing basketball.
“I enjoyed my last week as a child,” Ashford said. “I thought my life was over.”
Police picked him up, and he eventually pleaded guilty to the murder, he said.
“I’ve seen children who were charged as adults who were just a little older than me, and it ruined their lives,” Ashford said. “When you’re 15 and you don’t get out until you’re 30 or 40, it sets you up to be a criminal. Nobody is going to want to hire you. You’re going to be forced back to a life of crime.”
His transition to freedom was not without setbacks. He admits he dealt drugs for a time when he was released. He also pleaded guilty to a 2012 theft, received court supervision and completed it successfully, records show.
He’s not the first person who killed someone as a juvenile and had more police contact after being freed. A man charged with murder in Cook County at age 14 more than a decade ago is currently in prison for armed robbery and vehicular hijacking. He did not respond to interview requests.
Another man who was 14 when he committed a homicide.
“I have a lovely family,” said the man, who asked not to be named. “I am a fully functional citizen of the community that I live in, despite the tragedy. I’ve been able to turn a new leaf.”
Earlier this year, a Lake County teenager who was 14 when she fatally stabbed her younger sister was charged as a juvenile after a long review, in part because of the mental health services available in juvenile detention.
In Ashford’s case, he decided to move to Texas about a year ago to escape Chicago violence.
He said he moved in with his dad and began a career as a musician, met his girlfriend and took in her son as his own.
“I thank God every day that I was not charged as an adult,” Ashford said.
He said he still thinks about the man he killed.
“On the one hand, I feel like I took a human being’s life, and I wasn’t punished enough,” he said. “On the other hand, I’m really appreciative that I’ve gotten a chance to restart my life and have a beautiful family and a successful music career. I feel so blessed, so blessed.”
Twitter @deldeib
