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| Source:Camila Orti- convicted murderer Jason Golka being interviewed for this piece. |
"A legislative bill in Nebraska is attempting to make the state compliant with a Supreme Court ruling that says automatic life imprisonment without parole for juveniles is unconstitutional.
Production and videography by Camila Orti"
From Camila Orti
Just to answer the question of one of the victim rights advocates who was interviewed for this piece: juveniles don't have the same mental capacity as adults. They're not as capable of looking at the consequences of their decisions the same way as adults. Which is why they shouldn't be treated as adults.
You take any hope of a 16 or 17 year old adolescent away from ever even having any shot at freedom in life, even 30, 40 years down the road, then what reason do they have to even continue on. You also make it more difficult to incarcerate that person, even once they're moved to an adult prison to serve the rest of their sentence because you've taken away anything that they could possibly have to lose.
I'm not saying we should release juvenile murderers. I'm saying they should have a shot at getting a parole date, And even before that, they would have to meet certain conditions, just to be eligible for a parole hearing:
confessing to their crime or crimes
being seriously apologetic about what they did
getting their high school diploma and even a college degree while in prison
and be able to convince the parole board that they would be able to function on the outside on their own and no longer be a threat to society.
They would need to meet those conditions just to be eligible for a parole hearing, under my policy.
