Justice Under Siege in Colorado

Conn Carroll / March 29, 2011

For at least the past five years, anti-incarceration activists, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Human Rights Watch (HRW), and Amnesty International (AI), have been waging a disinformation campaign designed to free juvenile killers from prison. The latest battleground is Colorado where the Grand Junction Sentinel reports: “Three state lawmakers are hoping to overturn the life sentences of 48 juveniles who were tried as adults and convicted of murder. The bill, which is to be heard in a House committee this week, would allow those juveniles, who are now adults, to become eligible for parole after they’ve served 40 years of their life terms.”

Retroactively throwing out valid life convictions is terrible public policy. Worse it feeds a movement that spreads false statistics and misleading legal claims. For example, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch partnered in 2005 to co-author a bogus “study” that, among other misstatements, asserted that there were 2,225 juvenile felons serving juvenile life without parole (JLWOP) sentences in the United States. This statistic has since been repeated many times by the media and lawmakers. The problem is, it is just not true.

In a report titled Adult Time for Adult Crimes: Life Without Parole for Juvenile Killers Heritage Foundation Senior Legal Fellow Cully Stimson details how Amnesty International/Human Rights Watch manufactured this claim: (more…)