New York Times
LA BELLE, Pa. — To this day, Maurice Bailey goes to sleep trying to
understand what happened on Nov. 6, 1993, when as a 15-year-old high
school student he killed his 15-year-old girlfriend, Kristina Grill, a
classmate who was pregnant with his child.
“I go over it pretty much every night,” said Mr. Bailey, now 34, sitting
in his brown jumpsuit here at the Fayette State Correctional
Institution in western Pennsylvania, where he is serving a sentence of
life without parole for first-degree murder. “I don’t want to make
excuses. It’s a horrible act I committed. But as you get older, your
conscience and insight develop. I’m not the same person.”
Every night, Bobbi Jamriska tries to avoid going over that same event.
Ms. Jamriska, Kristina’s sister, was a 22-year-old out for a drink with
friends when she got the news. Ten months later, their inconsolable
mother died of complications from pneumonia. Weeks later, their
grandmother died.
“During that year, I buried four generations of my family,” Ms. Jamriska
said at the dining room table of her Pittsburgh house, taking note of
her sister’s unborn child. “This wrecked my whole life. It completely
changed the person I was.”
When the Supreme Court in June
banned life sentences without parole
for those under age 18 convicted of murder, it offered rare hope to
more than 2,000 juvenile offenders like Mr. Bailey. But it threw Ms.
Jamriska and thousands like her into anguished turmoil at the prospect
that the killers of their loved ones might walk the streets again.
The ruling did not specify whether it applied retroactively to those in
prison or to future juvenile felons. As state legislatures and courts
struggle for answers, the clash of the two perspectives represented by
Mr. Bailey and Ms. Jamriska is shaping the debate.
Resentencing hearings have begun in a few places, but very slowly.
The governor of Iowa commuted the mandatory life sentences of his
state’s juvenile offenders but said they had to stay in jail for 60
years before seeking parole, which critics said amounted to life in
prison. Some Iowa resentencing is starting in courts despite that
proclamation.
In Florida, a few hearings are in early stages even though an
intermediate court ruled that juveniles serving mandatory life terms did
not have the right to be resentenced. In North Carolina, life without
parole has been changed from a requirement to an option, with a 25-year
minimum sentence for those seeking parole.
Here in Pennsylvania, which has the most juvenile offenders serving life
terms — about 480 — the State Supreme Court is examining retroactivity
while the legislature works on a bill that would put felons like Mr.
Bailey behind bars for a minimum of 35 years.
The United States Supreme Court decision said that sentences of life
without parole for juveniles failed to take account of the role of the
offender in the crime (killer or accomplice), the family background
(stable or abusive) and the incomplete brain development of the young.
Recent research has found that youths are prone to miscalculate risks
and consequences, and that their moral compasses are not fully
developed. They can change as they get older.
Mr. Bailey was a good student with no criminal record. He is black and
Ms. Grill was white, and many classmates thought of them as a chic
couple.
“Reese was someone everyone wanted to be friends with, and so was
Krissy,” said Shavera Maxwell, a former classmate, using the couple’s
nicknames. “They were deeply in love, and she wanted to keep the baby.
He didn’t.”
Kristina’s father, who did not live at home, was known for a bigoted
attitude, so Kristina kept her relationship with Maurice secret from
him.
Maurice’s father, an electrical engineer who had tensions with white
co-workers, also disapproved of the interracial romance. One day when he
came home early, he caught the couple in bed. He threw her out and beat
Maurice, knocking his head into a wall.
Maurice’s mother, Debra Bailey, felt differently. She welcomed Kristina
into her home. “Krissy’s 15th birthday was celebrated with a barbecue in
our backyard,” said Ms. Bailey, a database coordinator at Carnegie
Mellon University, who is now divorced from Maurice’s father. “Her
family didn’t come. Those two were too young to be doing what they were
doing, but I told her that if she got pregnant, we would deal with it.”
Kristina told a friend, Pamela Cheeks, the night before she was killed
that she was about to tell her family about her pregnancy and that she
was meeting Maurice the next day to discuss their future, Ms. Cheeks
said in an interview. In her diary, Kristina wrote that Maurice “better
show up” at their agreed time and place.
Maurice did meet Kristina that Saturday afternoon at an elementary
school playground. He came with a knife, stabbed her repeatedly in the
neck and upper body and left her on the ground. Before leaving, he told
the police at the time, he zipped up her jacket in a vain effort to stem
the bleeding.
He hid the knife in the woods and went home. In the prison interview, he
said he remembered very little of the event except that right after
stabbing Kristina, her mother, whom he had never met, suddenly came into
his mind. When he returned home, the first person he saw was his
father. He said he felt an odd sense of relief that the source of
tension between them was gone.
Neighborhood youngsters came upon Kristina’s body. Police officers went
to her home, where they found her diary with detailed entries of her
relationship with Maurice. When the police went to the Bailey home in
the middle of that night and woke up Maurice, his mother recalls that he
said to them, “I figured you’d come.”
Maurice’s legal defense was built around the pressures he had faced. His
father testified in court that he had told Maurice that if Kristina got
pregnant, he would kill him. Maurice’s grades were declining as he
spent more time with Kristina; he was trying unsuccessfully to break up
with her, losing control, growing afraid.
His petition for a new hearing will argue that the pressures he felt as a
15-year-old — a violent father, a pregnant girlfriend — are unique to
youth and therefore covered by the Supreme Court ruling. An adult, his
lawyers will argue, would have reacted differently.
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