Free Human Trafficking Victim Sara Kruzan

Free Sara Kruzan

There are approximately 225 juveniles in California

serving a life without parole sentence. California has the
worst racial disparity rate in the nation for sentencing
juveniles to life without parole. Black youth are given
this sentence at 22 times the rate of white youth.

A number of California cases have recently been

highlighted in the media due to the background of the
juveniles who received the sentences, and the
circumstances surrounding their crimes. One such case
involves Sara Kruzan, now 31. She was raised in
Riverside by her abusive, drug-addicted mother. Sara met
her father only three times in her life because he was in prison.

Since the age of 9, Sara suffered from severe depression for which she was hospitalized
several times. At the age of 11, she met a 31-year-old man named G.G. who molested
her and began grooming her to become a prostitute. At age 13, she began working as a
child prostitute for G.G. and was repeatedly molested by him. At age 16, Sara was
convicted of killing him. She was sentenced to prison for the rest of her life despite her
background and a finding by the California Youth Authority that she was amendable to
treatment offered in the juvenile system.

“Life without parole means absolutely no opportunity for release,” said Senator Yee. (of
California) “It also means minors are often left without access to programs and
rehabilitative services while in prison. This sentence was created for the worst of
criminals that have no possibility of reform and it is not a humane way to handle
children. While the crimes they committed caused undeniable suffering, these youth
offenders are not the worst of the worst.”

“As a society we’ve learned a lot since the time we started using life without parole for
children,” said Elizabeth Calvin, a children’s rights advocate with Human Rights Watch.
“We now know that this sentence provides no deterrent effect. While children who
commit serious crimes should be held accountable, public safety can be protected without
subjecting youth to the harshest prison sentence possible.”

*Written by Michelle Quann

See Sara’s story on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2Aa4uMIm8c

From http://www.freesarakruzan.org/
16-Year Old Got Life Without Parole for Killing Her Abusive Pimp
-- Should Teens Be Condemned to Die in Jail?
By Liliana Segura, AlterNet
Posted on October 31, 2009, Printed on December 3, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143635/

This article is the first in a two-part series about juveniles and harsh sentencing.

Sara Kruzan was 11 years old, a middle school student from Riverside, Calif., when she
met a man -- he called himself GG -- who was almost three times her age. GG took her
under his wing; he would buy her gifts, take her and her friends rollerskating. "He was
like a father figure," she recalls.

Despite suffering severe bouts of depression as a child, until then, Kruzan was a good
student, an "overachiever" in her words. But her mother was abusive and addicted to
drugs; as for her father, she had only met him a couple of times. So, more and more, GG
filled in.

"GG was there -- sometimes," she said. "He would talk to me and take me out and give
me all these lavish gifts and do all these things for me …" Before long, he started talking
to her about sex, giving her his expert advice on what men were really like and telling her
that she didn't "need to give it up for free."

Unbeknownst to her, GG was grooming Kruzan to be a prostitute. When she was 13, he
raped her. "He uses his manhood to hurt," Kruzan recalls, "Like, break you in. I guess."

Kruzan worked for GG as a prostitute for three years. The hours were 6 p.m. until 5:30 or
6 in the morning. She and "the other girls" would come back and hand over their earnings
to him. "He was, like, married to all of us I guess," she says. " … Everything was his."

After years of prostitution and sexual abuse, when she was 16, Kruzan snapped: She
killed GG, was arrested and convicted of first-degree murder. Despite attempts by her
lawyer to have her sentenced as a juvenile, the judge described her crime as "well
thought-out" and sentenced her to life without parole.

"My judge told me that I lacked moral scruples," she recalls, a term she did not know the
meaning of.

But the meaning of her sentence was all too clear. Life without parole, she says, "means
I'm gonna die here."
'These Children Were Literally Lost In Adult Prison'

A few years ago, Sara Kruzan's story grabbed the attention of California State Sen.
Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, who introduced legislation to abolish the sentence of life
without the possibility of parole for youth offenders. The bill was no get-out-of-jail pass;
under his legislation, a juvenile who committed a felony before the age of 18 would serve
a minimum of 25 years before being eligible to go before a parole board (also not a get-
out-of-jail pass).

Yee is also a child psychologist. When it comes to judging the actions of teenagers versus
those of adults, he argues, "the neuroscience is clear; brain maturation continues well
through adolescence, and thus impulse control, planning and critical-thinking skills are
still not yet fully developed."

Condemning teenagers to die in jail, then, means curtailing the lives of potentially
productive members of society. "Children have a greater capacity for rehabilitation than
adults," Yee said. Anyway, didn't California's prison system rename itself the California
Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation?

In politics, however, punitive almost always wins out -- particularly in California, where
"three strikes" laws have led to a prison crisis unparalleled anywhere else in the country.
Yee's bill met intense political resistance and eventually died.

This past February, he introduced a new, watered-down bill that, instead of eliminating
life without parole for juveniles would provide a review of a youth offender's sentence
after 10 years.

In 2005, Human Rights Watch published an unprecedented study, "The Rest of Their
Lives: Life without Parole for Child Offenders in the United States," which found "at
least 2,225 people incarcerated in the United States who have been sentenced to spend
the rest of their lives in prison for crimes they committed as children." Today, the number
is even higher: 2,574.

It's only recently that the plight of juveniles serving life in adult prisons came across the
national radar. Alison Parker, deputy director of the U.S. Program of Human Rights
Watch told AlterNet, "these children were literally lost in adult prison. Nobody paid
attention to the fact that they were under 18 at the time of their offense."

But this could soon change. Next month, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in
a pair of cases -- Sullivan v. Florida and Graham v. Florida -- that will decide whether
life sentences for juveniles violate the Constitution's ban on cruel-and-unusual
punishment.

These cases follow the Court's landmark ruling in Roper v. Simmons four years ago,
which struck down the death penalty for juvenile defendants on Eighth Amendment
grounds. Echoing the opinion of Yee, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority
that juveniles have an "underdeveloped sense of responsibility" that leads to "impetuous
and ill-considered actions and decisions," as well as being "more susceptible to negative
influences and peer pressure."

Civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson, the lead attorney in Sulliivan, argues that
sentencing children to life without parole makes no more sense than sentencing them to
death. In court filings for Sullivan, he writes, "The essential feature of a death sentence or
a life-without-parole sentence is that it imposes a terminal, unchangeable, once-and-for-
all judgment upon the whole life of a human being and declares that human being forever
unfit to be a part of civil society."

Stevenson is the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama, a nonprofit
that provides legal representation to indigent defendants and prisoners, including
juveniles. According to EJI, out of the prisoners serving juvenile life without parole,
more than half are first-time offenders. At least 74 involve defendants who were 14 years
old or younger when they committed their crime.

"Almost all of these kids currently lack legal representation, and in most of these cases
the propriety and constitutionality of their extreme sentences has never been reviewed."

'Beyond Help'

Among these 74 is Joe Sullivan, the defendant in Sullivan v. Florida. Sullivan, who is
reportedly mentally disabled, was 13 years old in 1989 when he was accused of raping an
elderly woman after a burglary carried out by an older group of teenagers. The older
teenagers confessed to the burglary but pinned the rape on Sullivan, a charge he denied.

The older boys did time in juvenile prison and were then freed. Sullivan became the
youngest prisoner to be sentenced to die in prison for a crime other than murder. "I am
going to try to send him away for as long as I can," his trial judge said. "He is beyond
help."

At 14, Sullivan was sent to an adult prison, where he was repeatedly sexually assaulted.
Sullivan now is 33 years old. Stricken with multiple sclerosis, he is confined to a
wheelchair.

Sullivan's case is emblematic of a number of problems when it comes to juveniles

sentenced as adults, not the least of which is the phenomenon of youths either being
coerced or getting caught up in criminal situations orchestrated by older teenagers or
adults.

Among juvenile offenders, many have participated in violent crimes as a result of their
relationship with a grown-up. Incredibly, this can mean getting a harsher sentence than
the adult in question.
"There is this tendency to point the finger towards the younger co-defendant, sometimes
because of the perception that the younger person will get a lesser sentence," says Alison
Parker. "There's still this perception out there that kids will be treated differently, but the
reality is that kids are treated like adults."

Another major factor is race. During Sullivan's trial, "the prosecutor and witnesses made
repeated, unnecessary reference to the fact that Joe is African American and the victim
(was) white," according to EJI. "One witness repeatedly said the perpetrator of the assault
was a 'colored boy' or 'a dark colored boy.' "

It is not news that the American criminal justice system disproportionately targets people
of color. But when it comes to juvenile offenders, Alison Parker calls the disparities
"absolutely shocking." On a national level, "African American youth are serving the
sentence at a rate of about 10 times that of white youth," Parker told AlterNet. "In some
states, the rate is even higher."

In both cases before the Supreme Court, the defendants were sentenced to life for crimes
that fell short of murder, a phenomenon that is especially prevalent In Florida, where the
number of prisoners who will die in jail for non-homicide crimes hovers at 77.

Terrance Jamar Graham, the defendant in Graham v. Florida, was 17 years old and on
probation for a crime he committed when he was 16, when he took part in an armed
burglary. His co-defendants got minor sentences. He was slapped with life without
parole.

"Mr. Graham, as I look back on your case, yours is really candidly a sad situation," the
judge told him. "The only thing that I can rationalize is that you decided that this is how
you were going to lead your life and there is nothing that we can do for you."

This is classic "three strikes" logic, which, along with the conspiracy and felony murder
statutes have led teens to be sentenced to life for crimes in which they played only a
minor role.

Take Christine Lockhart, the first female juvenile to be sentenced to life without parole in
Iowa. She was 17 years old and sitting in a car when her boyfriend killed someone during
an armed robbery. Today, she has been in prison for more than half her life.

Lockhart, along with Sara Kruzan are a relative minority, two out of some 175 women
serving life without parole for crimes they committed as teenagers. But their stories
reveal how young people can get caught up in dangerous, harmful, and ultimately deadly,
situations often simply by being with the wrong people at the wrong time.

"Sara's story is compelling," says Parker. "But it is really one that is shared across the
country. There are many, many people with similar circumstances who are serving life
sentences without any possibility of parole."
Kruzan, in fact, is one of the lucky ones. She now has attorneys who are working on
appealing her sentence, pro bono. Most other prisoners serving life without parole for
crimes committed as juveniles have no post-conviction representation at all.

Today, Kruzan is 32 years old and described as a "model inmate," despite any real lack of
incentive. ("Who wants to excel in prison?" she says.) Asked what she would say if she
had a chance to appear before a a parole board, she says that she believes she can now be
of some value to society, perhaps even a "positive example."

Also, she says, "I've learned what moral scruples are."

Liliana Segura is an AlterNet staff writer and editor of Rights & Liberties and World
Special Coverage. http://twitter.com/LilianaSegura

© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/143635/