Conservative politicians and prosecutors champion life without parole sentences for juveniles contending teens who commit heinous crimes must be held strictly accountable.
However, data indicates that many of the teens slammed with these walking-death-sentence terms are not cold-blooded killers -- the type of criminal projected as most deserving to die in prison.
In Pennsylvania approximately 26 percent of juvenile lifers did not commit a homicide themselves -- receiving convictions under legal measures mandating mandatory sentencing for anyone involved in a felony murder irrespective of their level of participation in that crime.
Further, almost 60 percent of Pa's juvenile lifers where first-time offenders -- not the habitual violent offenders normally considered legitimate candidates for the medieval-like until-they-die imprisonment.
Anita Colon said that many of the politicians and prosecutors she's talked with hold grave misconceptions about juvenile lifer laws.
"Many of the legislators' in Pennsylvania that I've talked to don't even understand that life in prison means spending the rest of your life in prison. They've told me these sentences don't exist," Colon said.
"Even many prosecutors say these sentences are only for the worst of the worst. But my brother was a first time offender."
In Michigan, for example, which holds the nation's second largest teen lifer population at 350+ about half of those convictions were for aiding and abetting murder not committing the murder itself.
Given the pervasive race bias in America's criminal justice system it's not surprising that most teen lifers are African-American.
"Two-thirds of Michigan's juvenile lifers are African American," Detroit Free Press columnist Jeff Gerritt wrote following the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling.
Gerritt criticized Michigan legislators for lacking the "courage and compassion to strike down the state's draconian juvenile lifer law."
In Pennsylvania, 70 percent of the juvenile lifers are African American and nine percent are Hispanic.
That percentage of black juvenile lifers in Pa's prison system exceeds the percentage of black adult lifers (62%), according to statistics compiled by Bradley Bridge, a lawyer for the Defender Association of Philadelphia who's litigated juvenile lifer cases since 2005.
Over half of Pa's 480 juvenile lifers come from a single jurisdiction -- Philadelphia, the city/county that sends the highest percentage of people to Pa's death row.
Philadelphia lawyer/writer David Love said too few people look at the "reality" of incarceration costs of juvenile life sentences.
Pennsylvania spends in excess of $15-million annually to incarcerate its juvenile lifers. That dollar figure increases annually as young inmate's grow older resulting in soaring costs for medical, security and other services required for elderly inmates.
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