"[SILENCE]" "OPERATOR:" "Hello, this is a collect call from an inmate from the Banner County Jail." "BRIAN'S MOTHER:" "Hello?" "BRIAN:" "How you doing?" "BRIAN'S MOTHER:" "All right, sweetheart." "How are you?" "BRIAN:" "Not so good." "BRIAN'S MOTHER:" "I know, baby." "BRIAN:" "I have to come home." "I have to come home." "BRIAN'S MOTHER:" "Baby, I know that." "I'm sorry;" "you're going to have to stay strong." "Are you saying your prayers?" "BRIAN:" "Yeah." "But, Mom," "I want to come home." "BRIAN'S MOTHER:" "Baby, I promise you that we're working on that, okay?" "I promise you." "BRIAN:" "When can I come home?" "BRIAN'S MOTHER:" "Huh?" "BRIAN:" "When can I come home?" " BRIAN'S MOTHER:" "Sweetheart." " BRIAN:" "Can you try?" "BRIAN'S MOTHER:" "Honey, we're trying everything we can," "I promise you." "We're trying everything we can." "There's nothing more in the world than I want my boy home with me." "Okay?" "We're doing everything we can here." "You know how much I love you, baby?" "BRIAN:" "The prosecutors are trying to get me life with no parole." "BRIAN'S MOTHER:" "Huh?" "NEWS WOMAN:" "Should minors who commit murder be sentenced to life without parole?" "This is a crucial question the" "Supreme Court is going to be deciding tomorrow, that 38 states currently allow life without parole for minors who commit murder, but is it constitutional?" "NEWS MAN:" "So the court comes to a fork in the road." "Make a complete ban on life without parole for adolescents or set an age limit?" "Many lives hang in the balance." "NEWS MAN 2:" "Their brains are not fully developed, they will change, they will grow." "Is this something that we can judge them for for the rest of their lives?" "NEWS WOMAN 2:" "After Bar was questioned by police, he was charged with the 12-year-old's murder." "WOMAN:" "Anyone who knows to muffle the gun so nobody else hears it has the mind of an 18-year-old." "BRYAN:" "I think everyone is more than the worst thing they've ever done and I think that policy makers can make decisions about how to punish them." "But I think children are uniquely more than their worst act, they have quintessential qualities and characteristics that a decent society, maturing society, an evolved society we believe is constitutionally obligated to recognize and protect." "BRIAN:" "High school is a very hard time." "I had no idea who I was." "I had no idea where I fit in among my peers, and I thought that I was a nobody at my high school and I wanted to be known." "And so I tried all these different identities and I couldn't, you know, find an identity that I could not be pushed out of, I guess." "So I got into Columbine." "GIRL:" "We saw these two kids, they were white and they had dark hair." "NEWS MAN 3: upwards of a dozen people were injured and running out of..." "BRIAN:" "Columbine kind of created a subculture for disenfranchised kids who don't fit in anywhere." "I saw, at the time, they transcended their high school, for the hour that they did what they did, they were in the spotlight and that's what I wanted." "I wanted to be in the spotlight." "Actually I was really happy to do it." "BRIAN:" "Oh yeah?" "[INAUDIBLE]" "Hey, look, it's Cassie." "BOY:" "Hey, look, I don't know her." "BRIAN:" "Hello, Cassie." "I'm getting you on tape, okay?" "Say hi, please." "CASSIE:" "Hi." "BRIAN:" "Okay, see you." "When I first met Cassie Stoddart, I think that the first memory I have of her is we were joking around in class and she was smiling and that's vivid, the image I have in my mind now, is I can't get it out of my mind." "And, oh, man, it's hard to talk about... but, in the beginning she was just a nice person and she... you know... sorry." "I was attracted to her." "I thought she was a special person but she started going out with this other kid I knew in high school, and it kind of struck me hard and I was like, "Okay, so, I am a loser."" "Wait, have you seen Torey?" "He's supposed to meet me here at 7:30 and it's 8:19." "He's an hour late." "You don't even care, do you?" "Okay." "I met Torey Adamcik in sophomore year." "He started talking about the movie "Scream," how it would be cool to actually do a "Scream" type crime." "And I was like, "Okay." He's like, "Have you ever thought about that? " " Not really." "I've thought about other things like Columbine." And he really was into that and I was like, "Well I could either be alone or I could join his plan and be with him and not be alone."" "SEAN A.:" "Torey got there;" "there was about eight months where we would come up every three weeks." "And we'd leave right after work on Friday, drive up all night, come stay in the hotel." "We wouldn't miss a visit or anything." "Torey is a good kid and we enjoy the visits, we have a good time and Torey is the same person he was before he went in." "TOREY:" "My mom still treats me like a mom and she tells me to brush my teeth as she is leaving and exiting and tells me to go to bed early or whatever, just the typical stuff but, I don't know, I think they're" "just worried about me." "SEAN A.:" "Just really good kid." "SHANNON:" "Torey is a good kid and Torey is just a kind, kind, kind person and we're still family." "He's still every bit as much a part of our family as before." "TOREY:" "I remember the first article I read about my case." "Jeez, they made me sound like this brutal, cold, psychopathic killer." "SEAN A.:" "They were talking about Brian." "They were making you just like Brian." "TOREY:" "They put us like as the same person." "SHANNON:" "They lumped them together." "TOREY:" "I only hung out with him for six weeks before this happened." "I think it's crazy how... the last week of me being on the street and being free really has affected the rest of my life." "If you were to watch that video and nothing had happened, it would literally be a joke." "TOREY:" "I don't know if it was my... it was probably my fault;" "I should have seen it but I just... he did not seem capable of something like this, and it completely caught me off guard." "I was just in..." "I don't know;" "I just couldn't believe it." "There should be no law against killing people." "I know it's a wrong thing but..." "Hell." "You restrict somebody from it, they're going to want it more." "BRIAN:" "We found our victim and, sad as it may be, she's our friend." "But you know what?" "We all have to make sacrifices." "Our first victim is going to be Cassie Stoddart." "She's going to be alone in a big, dark house out in the middle of nowhere." "How perfect can you get?" "Holy shit, dude." " TOREY:" "I'm horny just thinking about it." " BRIAN:" "Hell yeah." "I don't know if either of us would have done it if we were alone." "We fed off each other, I guess, and it was a formula for disaster in the end." "The time is 9:50, September 22nd, 2006." "We know there are lots of doors and there are lots of places to hide." "I unlocked the back doors." "It's all unlocked." "Now we just got to wait." "I was actually the individual who snuck downstairs and locked the basement door." "And it's that one choice where" "I was just kind of going along with it." "I really didn't stop and say, "Why am I doing this?"" "I just did it, and that one thing that I did started this whole thing, and that's something that is hard to deal with because all I had to do was just not do that and this may have never happened." "Cassie was there alone, and we both had masks on." "He walks up and tells me, "You do something scary that's going to freak her out." And I'm like, "Okay."" "So I grab a door and I open it and I slam it." "And then" "we just kind of go into the room and the crime happens, and we stabbed her." "I really don't have a lot of vivid memories of the actual incident." "I have what they call... flash bulb images of that." "She's breathing hard and her eyes are open, and she's looking off someplace else and, uh..." "And then I..." "I remember... so many, like..." "She wasn't screaming but in my head I could hear that." "And I know she screamed before it happened to her, and uh... but in my memories I have, she's screaming." "BRIAN:" "Okay." "TOREY:" "When it did happen, I was just too shocked to do anything and I just ran from it and hid from it and I made a lot of mistakes." "But... they were, I don't know." "I just think, I look at myself now and I'm 21 and I think how stupid I was at 16, and I just think how I feel like I'm paying for somebody else's mistakes at this point." "JACOB:" "When I was 13 years old, I had a friend who was over, he was hanging out at the house and my mom just went and left on me." "He said, "Man, you mom's really a bitch." "You should kill her."" "And I didn't really take it seriously, but that's the first time the thought was planted in my head and I started escaping into that daydream." "When things got really bad I could say," ""Oh, yeah." "One day, they're going to be gone."" "NEWS WOMAN 3:" "In the early morning hours of December 17, 15-year-old Jacob Ind slaughtered his mother and stepfather in their Woodland Park home with the help of a friend." "NEWS WOMAN 4:" "Jacob Ind reportedly tried to block out the screaming." "NEWS MAN 5:" "His appearance is that of a studious prep school student." "As they say, Jacob Ind was cold and cruel, that he recruited schoolmate Gabrial Adams to do the job." "JACOB:" "The kid was looney tunes and I just knew he would help so I asked for his help." "I just didn't want anything directly to do with it." "I just wanted the problem solved, things to be gone." "I didn't want to see it," "I didn't want to hear it;" "I wanted nothing to do with it." "I just wanted him gone, and that's what I thought would happen." "I was sleeping when I heard the gunshots go off." "The .22 that I gave Gabrial really didn't have enough of a punch to get the job done." "Went down the hall and saw their door was open to their bedroom." "It was like 1:00 in the morning and..." "I saw my stepdad." "He was bleeding and..." "He said he'd been shot." "So I went back to my room and got some pepper spray and" "I came back and I sprayed him with the with pepper spray, my mom and stepdad." "And I went into their bathroom and closed the door and I figured, "Okay, maybe this can end." "Maybe this can be over by now." And it kept going and going," "I couldn't see anything but I heard that there was still a ruckus." "I just wanted it to be over." "And so eventually the .357 was in the closet in the bathroom, and I grabbed that and loaded it with one bullet." "And I opened up the door and I saw my stepdad there, slumped kind of against a wall and I shot him in the head and he fell over." "I turned around and went back, put another bullet, and my mom was there." "I shot at her and I missed her." "And..." "So I turned around and went back, put another bullet, and went to shoot her again and she asked me, "Why?" Because at that point it dawned on her what was going on." "And I told her because she was cruel, and I shot her, and she fell over." "I was just so, I guess, disturbed by what I saw." "I grabbed my alarm clock, went to the downstairs couch, and I just laid there and I couldn't think." "And I said, "Man, I fucked up." "Fucked up so bad."" "JENNIFER:" "Our organization is the" "National Organization of Victims of Juvenile Lifers, NOVJL." "I'm the president of NOVJL, Jennifer Bishop-Jenkins." "Three of my family members were murdered in Chicago in 1990 by a teenager who is serving three life without parole sentences in Illinois." "He got mandatory sentences for Nancy and Richard but for the baby he got an optional life sentence." "Nancy was crossing her arms over her pregnant belly." "He pointed the gun and fired, and he hit it." "NANCY:" "Hi, Jenny." "JENNIFER:" "Hi, Nancy." "NANCY:" "How are you?" "JENNIFER:" "My ability to be Nancy's sister in the world is entirely about she was murdered." "I cannot be her sister and not care about that." "The discovery that there was a movement to free Nancy and Richard's killer was shocking and horrifying to me." "I actually think that that has motivated me more than anything, never to have any legal finality at all to your case." "I was awake all night for four straight months" "I was so traumatized by this." "I cried all the time, I was worried about it, I couldn't think, I just thought," ""God, if I have to spend the rest of my life like this and my children and my mother, don't you care about the victims at all?" "Doesn't this worry you at all?"" "It's at that point that I realized how absolutely clueless they are about the cost of victimization." "NANCY'S MOTHER:" "I have thought so often as I have been down in this basement where they died," ""Was she angry?" "Was she puzzled?" "Did she wonder why he had killed her?" "Was she lonely, was she cold?"" "It's something that comes over you when you're down here but life goes on." "Sometimes you forget why, but we go on with it." "BRIAN'S MOTHER:" "Brian didn't want us to know how much pain he was in, and he kept that very separate from our life with him and the family's life with him." "He just didn't want us to know how much pain he was in." "BRIAN'S FATHER:" "That's the thing that kept us up at night the most for the longest amount of time, is trying to find... trying to remember something that we missed" "We adopted Brian at birth." "When I think about our relationship and how strong of a relationship we had with Brian and how... good of a relationship we had with Brian," "if you walked into our house back then, we were normal." "And why we didn't recognize that we had... such a problem... is horrific and something we still cannot... bear." "BRIAN'S MOTHER:" "Sorry." "OPERATOR:" "Hello." "This call is subject to monitoring and recording." "SHANNON:" "I just had an emotional visit yesterday; it was really hard to come here alone." "It's always hard to go to a prison and it's hard to walk down the gates and to be buzzed in, and to wait, and to go to the searches, and then just to imagine doing this forever until I'm dead," "everybody involved is dead except for Torey and Brian." "They will outlive the prosecutors and the families and everybody and there will be... it will still be going on." "It's just very overwhelming all the time that there's never an end in sight or it's never... it's hard to imagine how we're going to spend our life doing this and I'm just overwhelmed today a little bit." "It's just hard." "AMBER:" "My brother is going to be 26 years old this year, and he will have spent ten years, a decade, in prison." "And it's a commitment to stay in somebody's life with that circumstance." "The majority of families forget about them;" "I refuse to." "NEWS WOMAN 5:" "On November 6, 2002, Stacy and Gary Alflen were shot to death in what many say was the couple's dream home." "In opening statements, prosecutors painted the killers as cold-blooded who "killed for fun,"" "maintaining that Josiah Ivy acted as the gunman." "AMBER:" "My parents visit him every week, too." "He's chosen to forgive and he's just so very grateful of my parent's relationship and willingness to commit to visiting him, to be interactive in his life, and they have a great working relationship." "INTERVIEWER:" "What do you mean they have a great working relationship?" "AMBER:" "What I mean by a great working relationship is that he's not embittered by anything that happened in our childhood." "JOSIAH:" "No, my parents spanked us when we were kids." "I don't know if these days that's considered abuse or not, I didn't really look at it like that." "JOSIAH:" "Okay." "Okay, so, maybe, yeah, there's," "I guess there's some stuff I really don't want to talk about, at least not on camera, you know?" "But..." "JOSIAH:" "I don't ever talk about it, no." "AMBER:" "As far as our childhood, it was... my parents regret a lot of it and I think they would do things very differently now but can't go back in the past and Josiah has forgiven my parents." "INTERVIEWER:" "I know you used the word, but did you guys grow up in a cult?" "AMBER:" "Yeah, when we were younger we definitely grew up in a religious cult." "I will tell you, I don't think..." "I don't like remembering our old home." "At the end there... you know, before Josiah was going to be sent away." "And you walk in every room and you have memories of things that you'd rather not have." "Do you feel like I'm still being closed?" "INTERVIEWER:" "I think you're being as open as you're capable of being." "AMBER:" "On the abuse stuff, yeah." "Just..." "INTERVIEWER 3:" "How old were you when your stepfather molested you?" "JACOB:" "Four." "Four, five, six." "A little bit of it, it's still something very easy to run away from and not address and not confront." "The brain is a beautiful mechanism keeping stuff like that shut out." "INTERVIEWER 3:" "How long did it go on?" "Did your mom know about it?" "Did you ever tell anybody?" "JACOB:" "No, God no." "I never told anybody about it." "INTERVIEWER 3:" "Can I ask what they did to you?" "JACOB:" "It's not really something I like talking about at all." "MARY:" "My daughter started telling me about this weird kid in her geometry class and she said he dressed like a hippie and she said he was nice but a little odd." "And then the day of the murders she said," ""Jacob Ind killed his parents."" "And I said, "Is that the kid you were talking to me about?"" "And she said, "Yes." And that's how Jacob Ind came into my life because I couldn't get him out of my mind and I kept thinking," ""What would make a 15-year-old kill his parents?"" "CHARLES:" "He would have us get undressed, then tie us, start to masturbate, and after he was done he would get dressed" "and say," ""You're so fucking dirty." "Go and take a fucking shower."" "JACOB:" "How do you treat a kid like a piece of shit?" "How do you do that to him?" "I can't wrap my brain around that, just the cruelty of it." "My mom used to give me enemas when I was like four or five years old for reasons that didn't make any sense." "And when you think back it's like," ""I don't... that's odd."" "MARTY:" "In traumatized children, as they become adolescents, we often see the remains of the trauma if it has not been treated, in the form of depression, aggression, somebody does something to them and having been victimized before, they overreact it and harm the person" "who victimized them." "JACOB:" "My stepdad was the source of terror, slamming me up against a wall and telling me he'd crush my head in." "But that was more tolerable, really to me, than the cruelty and coldness in my mom." "That filled me with more despair than anything else." "I could put up with getting beat up." "That's nothing;" "that hurts a little while and then it goes away." "But being berated for three hours at a time, four hours at a time, being told how you're worthless, how you deserved what you got." "When I was a little kid, and this is when I was getting molested and probably the worst abuse, my mom told me never to tell the cops anything because if I ever called the cops they would come and give them a medal because" "I was such a horrible, rotten kid who deserved what they gave me." "And that stuck with me." "I spoke up as much as I could." "With as weak as I was at the time I thought I was screaming from a mountaintop, though objectively I was making tiny whimpers." "But I raised every red flag I could and no one paid attention." "I don't know; it put me in a very deep, dark place where I didn't see an option." "MARY:" "We live in a very, very conservative community." "A lot of people said, "Well, he killed them because he didn't want to take out the trash or whatever." That is not what happens in parricide cases; 90% of these kids are badly abused." "Jacob tried to get help." "His brother tried to get help." "Nobody listened to them, so Jacob is serving a life sentence for the sins of our community." "Nobody helped him." "SEAN:" "I joined the Bloods at around the age of 14, and as a Blood it didn't really mean much of anything except selling crack, getting into some fights here and there with the Crips." "But eventually it became more serious, as they started shooting at us more, we started shooting at them more often." "And the first time that I ever shot a gun..." "I killed someone," "a young man who was just walking home from work." "We said to that man that day, he was walking down the street, we said, "Hey, what's up, Blood?"" "He said, "I don't gangbang."" "One of the people I was with jumped out of the car and said, "I didn't ask you if you gangbang." "I said, 'What's up, Blood?" "'"" "And that young man took off running." "We laughed, "Look at him, he's running."" "That man got back in the car, we circle around, we're going home, we were about to go home, we weren't even thinking about this guy anymore." "But then we saw him running to a house." "And when he got to that house he knocked on that door and three Crips came out of that house." "and that's how the whole incident started." "That's when I made the decision that I'm going to shoot a gun at these guys' house to scare them." "SHANNON:" "He was just a kid." "At 16 years old, he was very easily influenced by his friends." "Torey is much more of a follower than a leader." "TOREY:" "Yeah, who I was at that point and who I am now, it's like totally different people." "SHANNON:" "But who Torey was at that age, at 16, he still didn't commit this crime." "He's not saying that, he's not saying that." "TOREY:" "I'm saying I was..." "I made some mistakes and I learned from them." "SEAN A.:" "But your mistakes weren't anything you were charged with." "They weren't for murder and conspiracy." "TOREY:" "Yeah." "SEAN A.:" "That was Brian." "It must be harder, because you're innocent, to be facing it." "TOREY:" "Yeah, I guess." "BRIAN:" "It's unusual that he would have that response and his parents having that response." "It's a lot to deal with." "You have to accept the societal brand that you are a convicted murderer, and that is a very scary term to have affixed to your name." "And so it's really hard." "He wants to please his parents, he wants to go home, and his kind of behavior is really common and it's ordinary," "I think." "I think what... makes somebody extraordinary is when they face everything and just kinda... accept it." "It's a hard thing to admit I killed Cassie Stoddart." "I stabbed a 16-year-old girl to death, that's pretty hard to say." "SEAN:" "Life never gets so serious until something like that happens." "I was a 17-year-old kid;" "I didn't take anything serious." "I hardly ever went to school." "I was always skipping class, smoking weed, getting drunk, that's all I ever did, sell drugs." "Life wasn't serious." "Nothing was serious... until I took someone's life." "Man, I wanted to get out of the gang right then and there, you know?" "BRIAN:" "When I first got here, I tried to blame others." "And I met this individual in here and he asked me what happened in my crime, and I told him, "Oh, I'm not exactly sure what happened." "They said I killed her," "I'm not even sure if I did or not." And he sat me down and he's like..." ""Stop giving me a whole bunch of bullshit, okay?" "If you want my help you have to completely be honest with me."" "And he taught me about how I owe a tremendous debt to Cassie Stoddart, and the only way that I could even start paying that is to first of all tell exactly what happened to her and... do not dishonor her in anything that" "you do in your life." "And I've tried that; it's very hard, it's very hard, but I think that... that's all I can do and" "I have the obligation." "I have to do that or I'm... a monster, I guess." "SEAN:" "When I got to prison, I still got myself involved in certain situations that were gang related." "Still, even then, I felt like they were... it was like clothes that didn't fit." "It just wasn't me, and it only took one incident in prison for me to say," ""I'm living the same ridiculous way I was living before I got locked up." "Man, I got to stop this."" "A friend of mine got into a fight with a Crip and" "I went to retaliate, after it was over with I just lined all of my friends up in the gym and I told them, "I'm out."" "I'd been studying Islam anyway, and I told them that" "I'm going to take this way of life called Islam;" "I'm going to take it serious." "And in order to take it serious, I can't live two lives because Allah didn't make two hearts in one breast." "So I chose to live the life of a Muslim and I left the life of a Blood behind me." "JACOB:" "When I first went to solitary confinement I was 17." "I was stuck in a cell and I couldn't run away from who I was." "In solitary, that's where all the worst of the worst are which, at the time, I thought the greatest convicts, the tough guys are, the real guys are." "But eventually," "I had to decide whether I wanted to be like those around me or if I want to be the type of man" "I idealized in my brain." "And then I started looking at myself more in depth and said," ""I don't want to be who I am right now either." "I don't like who I am right now." So I started just going layer by layer through who I was, through how I thought, what my outlooks on life were, characteristics." "And if I didn't like it I'd work on it, work on that one thing until I got rid of it, move to the next item." "And as I learn new lessons from my studies, I've learned to apply it into my life." "Forgiveness is one of them, be a more forgiving person." "To try and have empathy with others, and to empathize with where they're coming from and from their situation rather than solely from my own, from judging from my own experience, which is definitely a radical change in thinking for most" "people." "It really changed how I looked at the world and how I viewed human interactions and dealt with people and to me it's one of the most important lessons I've learned so far in prison." "JENNIFER:" "One of the reasons why life without parole is given as a sentence is because courts find that certain offenders are so dangerous that they can never be allowed to walk among us again, and that's a hard calculation to make." "Life without parole is a very rare sentence across the country; it's very rarely given and the standards are really high for any age offender to ever receive it, as it should." "But one of the reasons they do it is because they have found time and time again that if you release certain kinds of offenders they will re-offend and very violently." "And that's what recidivism is, is the violent re-offense that happens when you let an offender out who is just not safe to be released." "I started teenkillers.org as a blog where people have come in from the outside and posted their comments, and there's a posting by an attorney in California," "Daniel Horowitz, whose wife was murdered by a juvenile lifer." "DANIEL:" "If you are willing kill before you're even 18, you are so broken inside that unless you have some miraculous healing, unless something almost extraordinary happens, all you're going to do is gain control mechanisms." "You're going to learn how to walk and talk like a regular person, as do many serial killers," "but ultimately sieving underneath is that same sickness that erupted at least one time as a juvenile, incapable of feeling genuine compassion." "JACOB:" "For me, one of the biggest aspects of life without parole for a juvenile is that it automatically negates any chance for rehabilitation, automatically says," ""What you've done at this early age completely makes anything you can do from that point on immaterial." "You've thrown away your life, you're worthless, you're trash, we don't want you."" "BRIAN:" "I want to have a chance at a life." "I understand that Cassie can't, and..." "I never ignore that." "She's dead and not anything is going to change that." "I did something terrible and there has to be consequences for that." "Everything we do in life, there are always consequences." "Oh, man, my consequence hurt my dad, my grandma, my aunts, even my friends and neighbors at school," "I had no concept that what I was doing was going to hurt so many people." "I was completely clueless about it and that's it's hard for me to build up much sympathy for my mom and stepdad, though I did originally right off the bat." "But for all the innocent people that were hurt, like my brother, and like my family," "it's almost unforgivable." "And it's a weight that I tried to avoid, tried to keep off my shoulders for years." "Now... that I have embraced it, my driving factor is I have to make it up to them." "They're the only thing in this world I give a damn about anymore, and they're the reason I want to be the best person" "I can be and make something of myself is to make it up for them." "I don't know." "I have a lot of ambitions, and if I were to get out I'd know exactly what I do with my life." "But being in here, if that's all I have is just these... it feels like all I have is just to sit here and rot and there are no redeeming qualities." "There's nothing I can do really to alleviate any..." "I don't know." "It's like just watching yourself decompose." "It's just horrible." "He's been in prison six years, and he's still on his first day." "He hasn't progressed at all and it's going to hurt him in the end, either psychologically, if he has a conscience, or in courts." "They don't want to hear that you're completely innocent." "He's not innocent, he's not, I'm not innocent," "I'm guilty and he's guilty, and that's where we all should start at." "SEAN:" "Twenty years." "I would say about 20 years after that incident I began to try to put a plan in motion to instead of feeling bad, feeling down, feeling depressed about what I did, to try to help people," "starting with the people that I was around." "I didn't have to reach out to the free world." "There is a bunch of gangbangers in prison." "So I reached out to them, let them know," ""Hey, there is a better life to live for you." "There's a life that makes more sense."" "I had a lot of good, positive mentors in prison, and they would always hand me a book." "They would always say," ""What have you read today?" "Well, I haven't read anything today. " " Well, good because I have something for you, here." And I came up like that in prison." "I grew up like that in prison." "I began to educate others and I began to pass on those same things that those men taught me." "I started feeling like, "This is what I'm supposed to do." And I wrote" "Governor Ritter, I didn't write and beg him to let me out of prison;" "I wrote him and asked him would it be okay with him if" "I were put in a position where I could try to keep young people from doing the same stupid thing that I did." "MAN:" "My wife's son was convicted of first-degree murder when he had just turned 17." "Brian just wasn't mature enough." "WOMAN 2:" "I thank God that I'm not judged permanently on how" "I acted when I was 16." "We need to fairly assess mitigating factors in some of these juvenile cases and we need to fairly assess who that person is today." "MARY:" "If I could say something, all of this makes it sound as if we're making excuses." "A life was taken." "We cannot mitigate that, and we cannot say," ""Somehow it's okay because whether this kid was 15 or they're 35, somebody was killed." But I think we have to look beyond that, and that's where Sharletta comes in." "Sharletta Evans lost her 3-year-old son, Casson, to two juvenile lifers in a drive-by shooting." "Let Sharletta tell her story." "SHARLETTA:" "Hello." "Thank you, Mary Ellen." "Seventeen years ago, my three-year-old son," "Casson Evans, was killed in a drive-by shooting." "Twenty-one bullets were fired." "One bullet entered the back window, entered into his temple, and shattered his brain stem." "So the paramedics showed up." "Right when they came into the house where we were standing," "Casson took his last breath in my arms." "I was overwhelmed with grief and sorrow, not knowing what to feel, not knowing to sit down, stand up, go to sleep, or stay up." "You're just consumed with sorrow." "I knew they were teenagers but I wanted justice." "Years are going by, one of the shooters, his mother came to me after 11 years and asked me would I beg her pardon." "Would I pardon her son and her for these deeds that they've done?" "And I'm like, "Wow, are you kidding?" "You know?" "No."" "And I just walked away." "I began to argue with God," "I began to cry and argue with God like," ""What is wrong with these people?" "They still don't get it."" "I would not forgive anybody and" "I'm angry about this." "Right there, I recognize the presence of the Lord, the spirit of God, saying," ""Would you forgive?" My heart began to soften and have compassion where I found myself crying and praying and literally weeping for who they really were and what has happened to them in their lives that caused this act of violence, this emptiness within" "themselves." "This could actually be my very own son." "My surviving son was at this time 16 and 17, and this could very well have been him." "So, I pretty much put myself in the place of the offender and the offender's family." "The guilt and the shame is there for the offender's family." "AMBER:" "My whole family, we won't ever be able to understand what the victim's families go through but our whole family... hurts." "MARY:" "Are we as a society, are we grown up enough and spiritual enough to say, "Okay, there is redemption and rehabilitation for some of them?"" "AMBER:" "And does this person deserve a second chance at life?" "Has he shown a remorse?" "What does that look like?" "JOSIAH:" "I made terrible decisions then." "They're the worst I've ever made and I've had to live with those ever since." "There are so many things that" "I should have done differently." "I'm so sorry about what happened to them." "I don't know." "INTERVIEWER:" "What if you're wrong?" "AMBER:" "What if Josiah shot the two victims?" "Wouldn't change how I love him." "It would inevitably change some things on how I feel about him but it wouldn't change how I love him." "I..." "I can't..." "I can't... stomach the thought of him dying in prison." "BRIAN:" "After the crime had happened, I had horrific dreams, bad dreams, where she was there and just graphic, gruesome dreams about her dying." "I would wake up in the night and I would be scared, terrified." "Now I have dreams of her at school and everything is good." "She is always smiling but I always know in the dream that I killed her, and those dreams are... even worse." "And now it's like the only thing I can do is hurt myself." "It takes away the pain of... just knowing what I did." "JACOB:" "Remorse equals pain." "You're feeling pain for what you've done to someone else." "And it's very easy to deny pain and run away from pain, and I did it for a long time." "And then I started becoming aware of everyone else who was hurt and feeling remorse for that and then running away from that pain as soon as I realized it." "I said, "Whoa, whoa, I don't want to feel pain." "So, no, it's not my fault that all those people are hurt." "I'm going to still put it back on my parents." "If they didn't do all that to me well then these people wouldn't have been hurt either."" "And it took... probably close to a decade before I could have the strength to stop and say, "No." "My fault."" "What makes so much of it worse now, thinking back at my childhood, is now that I'm a grown man, I've seen kids." "I've seen how the relationship is supposed to be with your parents." "Obviously, they had to have been mentally ill." "They're passing down garbage from their past." "It's a cycle." "They had their own issues that led into it that lessened their culpability." "And when you start thinking about that it's like, "Wait a minute, they didn't deserve what happened to them that caused them that way." And it starts feeding into itself and it's like, "Wow." If I'm going to say, "I deserve" "another shot because I was screwed up and I didn't..." "I was made to be who I am," then I have to have the same amount of empathy for them and what they went through that made them into who they were." "NEWS MAN 6:" "A decision just released by the U.S. Supreme" "Court will change the way juveniles are sentenced." "NEWS 6:" "There was another ruling that you need to know about." "The justices ruled five to four that life without parole sentences are cruel and unusual punishment for juvenile offenders." "That's anyone under the age of 18 regardless of the crime." "NEWS MAN 7:" "The ruling could affect as many as 38 states where laws allow life without parole for teenagers." "JACOB:" "At first when they came on they just said, "Life without parole for juveniles has been abolished." I was so happy because they didn't put any caveats in there, no stipulations." "And, man, I was jumping up and down in the cell I was so happy." "NEWS MAN 8:" "What the court held by five to four, Justice Anthony Kennedy joining the four liberals said that, "It is unconstitutional for a law to say a juvenile convicted of murder must automatically serve life without parole." "The judge or jury has to make a separate determination about whether the individual should serve life without parole." "JACOB:" "And the next hour when the news came on again they threw in the little limitations." "Mandatory life without parole was unconstitutional and that they could still gives kids life without parole." "And it tempered us a little bit but that's the ruling that we expected all along." "So, we're still very happy and we still actually can tangibly see light at the end of the tunnel." "MARTY:" "Judges will have to face that question of," ""Are there children who should be in the adult system for long years, or for life?" "And how do we identify which children those are?"" "They have, on the one hand, a terrible offense, victims whose lives will never be the same, the community that's harmed by feeling unsafe when a crime of this sort occurs." "And on the other hand, a young person who is childish, damaged by trauma, whose never been arrested before, who's never had counseling services before, and is amenable to rehabilitation." "From my experience, the number of kids who cannot be rehabilitated is very small." "SEAN:" "On January 8, 2011, one of the sergeants in my cell house called me into his office and spun his computer around and said," ""Do you recognize this name?" It was the governor's website and I said, "Yeah, it's my name." He said, "What does it say?"" "I said, "It says Sean Taylor... sentenced in 1990 to life for first-degree murder has had his sentence commuted... to parole."" "I started crying immediately." "Went back in the cell house and hugged all my friends and everybody." "Everybody just was standing around crying... praising God." "Everything feels beautiful out here, man, but I never try to lose focus." "I say, "Even though I've been blessed and" "I'm enjoying my life out here, there's still always the mission to make sure that I can do whatever I can do, whatever I can do... whatever I can do to stop some young person from doing something like" "I did." Messing up their lives and messing up someone else's life and causing grief to someone else's family," "I'll do whatever I have to do to stop that." "JACOB:" "I fully believe, 100%, that I'm going to get out, especially with the Supreme Court case that came down." "But the pragmatist in me, about half of me, says it's going to be a couple more years, ten more years, who knows how long, but it's going to be a while." "[PHONE RINGING]" "BRIAN'S FATHER:" "Hello?" "BRIAN:" "Hello." " BRIAN'S FATHER:" "Hi." " BRIAN:" "Hey, Dad." "BRIAN:" "I knew that the truth was terrible." "And I was really scared of coming clean." "Years after this happened, we were visiting and I was like, "No, I am not innocent, Mom." "I had a part in this." "I knew it was going to happen and I went along with it."" "And she was devastated, of course." "She had to accept that her son had a part in this horrible crime." "I have personally seen my dad cry two times, and the first time was when I won a scholarship for a science project I did and the other time was when he was on the stand in court and he was crying because I hurt him so much." "Your parents, they love you so much and then you show them this by destroying them." "I got special parents." "I just wish I could go back in time."