In 1989, someone raped a 72-year-old woman in Pensacola. Joe Sullivan was 13 at the time, and he admitted that he and two older friends had burglarized the woman’s home earlier that day. But he denied that he had returned to commit the rape.
Judge Nicholas Geeker sentenced Sullivan to life without the possibility of parole. His attorneys, 20 years later, have asked the United States Supreme Court to consider the question of whether the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment extends to sentencing someone who was barely a teenager to die in prison for a crime that did not involve a killing.
According to the article, Sullivan is one only eight people in the world serving sentences of life without parole for crimes they committed when they were 13. Only two people in that group whose crimes did not involve a killing. Both are in Florida, and both are black.
There was biological evidence from the rape, but it was not presented at the trial. When Mr. Sullivan’s new lawyers recently sought to conduct DNA testing on it, they were told that the state had destroyed it in 1993.
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