CHICAGO (AP) - An Illinois judge on Monday resentenced a convicted killer to the same life term without the possibility of parole that he received at age 14, saying he had grown from a boy who took part in a double murder into a dangerous and violent adult.
Adolfo Davis, 38, is the first Cook County inmate sentenced as a minor to life without parole to be re-sentenced since the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed mandatory life terms for juveniles in 2012.
Judge Angela Petrone said Davis’ original sentence was the correct one. Davis was convicted in a 1990 gang-related double murder on Chicago’s South Side.
“The defendant’s acts showed an aggression and callous disregard for human life far beyond his tender age of 14,” Petrone said during the televised hearing. “The defendant was not merely … a lookout, he was a willing shooter.”
The judge said years of vicious attacks and threats to the lives of fellow inmates, guards and a prison warden, and Davis’ continued involvement in gang activity and drug dealing added up to clear evidence that the sentence he received as a teenager “is necessary to deter others (and) is necessary to protect the public from harm.”
Davis put his head on the table and was comforted by his attorneys while Petrone spoke at length about why she didn’t believe that Davis had reformed. To the contrary, she said Davis has repeatedly shown himself to be so dangerous that for more than four years, he was housed at a now-shuttered prison reserved for the what Davis called the “worst of the worst.”
After the judge rendered her decision, Davis told WGN-TV he had been hopeful but had doubts about Petrone’s openness to his attorneys’ arguments.
“I felt she already made her decision a long time ago,” he said.
In overturning mandatory life terms for minors, the Supreme Court pointed to brain research that shows juveniles do not always have the ability to resist peer pressure. Petrone said that Davis both planned and carried out the slayings, but that he was “not a child who was misled.”
She said Davis could appeal her ruling. His attorneys told the TV station that they had multiple grounds for an appeal and were deciding how to proceed.
“I believe in my heart my time will come soon,” Davis said.
Davis is among an estimated 80 Cook County inmates who were given mandatory life terms as juveniles and who qualify for new sentencing hearings. Illinois is one of ten states that are applying the new sentencing rules retroactively. Four other states have declined to apply the Supreme Court’s ruling retroactively, including Michigan, where the state’s high court ruled last year that such inmates do not qualify for new sentencing hearings.
That issue could be decided later this year, when the U.S. Supreme Court hears an appeal in a case out of Louisiana.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.