HAGERSTOWN, Md. | A weeping 16-year-old girl was sentenced Friday to 10 years in prison for soliciting her father’s murder after a prosecutor portrayed her as a cold-hearted gangster.
“She was a thug, in with a bunch of thugs, and she was determined that her father be killed,” Washington County Deputy State’s Attorney Joseph S. Michael said.
Danielle R. Black declined to address the court but defense attorney Mary Drawbaugh said the girl was sorry for asking a friend on a school bus to “take care of” Billy Lee Black - even though she maintains she never meant for him to be killed.
“She is a very bright and articulate young girl,” Ms. Drawbaugh said in asking for leniency. “She has a bright future ahead of her.”
But Circuit Judge M. Kenneth Long Jr. said Danielle had set her father’s murder in motion, an offense warranting substantial prison time. He suspended the remainder of a life sentence and ordered her placed on five years supervised probation after her release.
“You’ve got to be careful who you hang around with. And talk is cheap, but you’ve got to be careful what you say,” Judge Long said.
The emotional hearing, with Danielle’s friends and mother filling one side of the courtroom and her father’s family on the other, came nearly a year after Black was fatally stabbed on Halloween in an alley behind the family’s home in Hagerstown, about 70 miles west of Baltimore.
A jury in July convicted Danielle as an adult for soliciting school friend Matthew Gray to kill her dad to end the beatings she claimed to have suffered, but which she now admits never happened. Matthew refused; another of Danielle’s friends, 20-year-old Alec Eger, is scheduled to stand trial in February for first-degree murder in Mr. Black’s death.
Danielle faced the possibility of life imprisonment - a sentence her stepmother, Andrea Black, said would have been fair for robbing her of “the most kind and caring man I ever met.”
“He just wanted you to go school and stay out of trouble,” Mrs. Black said in a tearful courtroom statement.
She said Mr. Black had tried to keep Danielle from hanging with a bunch of neighborhood children who, according to Danielle’s photos and journal entries, were into drinking, drugs, sex, “goth” attire and street-gang attitudes.
The prosecutor made much of the tenuous gang connection, which included a photo of Danielle, her blonde hair dyed black, spelling out the word “blood” with her fingers.
“This is not kid stuff,” Mr. Michael said. “She’s one of them.”
Ms. Drawbaugh denied that Danielle was a gang member. She also said that while Danielle admitted she wasn’t physically abused, she still contends her father mentally abused her.
“Not everyone who’s been abused is able to report it,” Ms. Drawbaugh said.
Danielle lived with Mr. Black, a tree-maintenance worker, after he and her mother divorced when she was 2. Mr. Black remarried in 2007.
A social worker wrote in a report in May that Mr. Black had quit drinking several years before his death after threatening to shoot himself in front of Danielle and her older brother.
Danielle suffered symptoms of depression and anxiety at age 12, began cutting herself at 13 and at 14, ran away and overdosed on prescription drugs, the social worker found.
Danielle’s writings revealed unhappiness - “My life is crumbling around me” - but also her desire for harm to come to her father. “If you do it again, you won’t have a life to live,” she wrote.
Ms. Drawbaugh maintained the writings were the overwrought product of a teenage imagination.
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