At Seventeen

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Laura Berry was no beauty queen. At seventeen, in 1985, she was convicted by an Arkansas jury of the murder of her great-aunt. She hadn’t touched her relative, wasn’t even there when her boyfriend beat the woman to death with a crowbar, a cooking pot, and his fists.

But under the felony murder rule, she was seen as guilty as he was, because she knew he planned to rob her aunt, and because she helped hide one of the murder weapons and fled with him.

So at seventeen she learned the truth, of life without parole. Thirty-two and a half years of it, and not just of valentines she never knew. She was raped in prison by one of her guards, sued him and won, yet bore his child and called the baby boy her saving grace.

In 2012, the United States Supreme Court decided that a life sentence, without the possibility of parole, for a juvenile, is cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. Four years later, it made that decision retroactive.

Arkansas in response changed its law, and Laura Berry won release from prison.

The Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, which helped pass the law, was kind enough to introduce me to Laura.

Laura says that, a year later at fifty-one, she gets up “really early” every day to watch the sun rise. “I have so much I wanna do,” she says, “so much that I missed.”

Like eleven thousand eight hundred seventy sunrises, because of a mistake she made, at seventeen. Talk about your vague obscenities.