DAVE DAVIES, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies.
Nobody wants to go to jail or see a loved one taken there. They're crowded, unpleasant, and sometimes dangerous. But we generally expect that the incarcerated will get the basics - a bed and toilet, three meals a day, and health care. But our guest, New Yorker staff writer Sarah Stillman, begins her latest article with the story of a woman in her 60s who died of protein-calorie malnutrition, the apparent result of prolonged starvation, during her four-month stay at a Tucson, Arizona, jail. Stillman finds that starving in jail is far more common than you might think. The victims are often mentally ill people who were arrested for minor crimes and then languish behind bars, untreated and unable to make bail. Lawyers and activists say the problem has increased with the practice of counties granting contracts to private companies to provide health care to the incarcerated. Stillman interviewed many surviving relatives and reviewed countless records of disturbing cases for her article titled "Starved In Jail."
In addition to her work for The New Yorker, Sarah Stillman teaches journalism at Yale, where she also runs the Yale Investigative Reporting Lab. Stillman won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for her article about the little known but widely used legal doctrine of felony murder. That's a subject we'll get to a little later.
Well, Sarah Stillman, welcome to FRESH AIR. You open your story about starvation with the case of Mary Faith Casey, a woman in her 60s, who was arrested and taken to a county jail after something that - I guess it was a parole violation, technically a failure to register address, something relatively minor. Before we get to what happened to her there, just tell us something about her life before she entered the Pima County Jail.
SARAH STILLMAN: Well, Mary, like many of the people I wrote about for this piece, was a very vibrant and very loved person. She had a life with two kids who she loved dearly. She was always the kind of very nurturing mother who would, you know, sew their Halloween costumes by hand. And at some point, as she got older, she developed some serious mental health issues and slid into addiction. I think it's a story that many, many people can relate to. And shockingly, by the time she was in her 60s, she often found herself unhoused, and she actually wound up in the Pima County Jail because of a probation violation tied essentially to being unhoused because she had to register her address and she didn't have one.
DAVIES: And what were her diagnoses?
STILLMAN: She had struggled with schizophrenia, and she had a diagnosis also of bipolar disorder. So very common things that so many families struggle with.
DAVIES: Her children and siblings had struggled to get her help, you know, through mental illness and homelessness and previous arrests over the years. Very difficult, of course. And you describe in this piece her son, Carlin, driving to the hospital, where she had finally been taken after about four months in this county jail. What did he see when he entered this hospital and saw his mom in a bed?
STILLMAN: Yeah. Her son Carlin was completely shocked. He saw a woman who looked utterly different than when he had last seen her just a few months before. She was essentially - just as he described it, skin and bones. She was extremely thin. She was wearing a diaper. She just was unrecognizable and looked like she had aged many years, which, of course, prompted the question for him of, like, what on Earth happened to you? And he decided he was going to investigate and try to get to the bottom of it.
DAVIES: And generally speaking, what did they learn about her experience in those four months in the jail?
STILLMAN: So they really started digging into the jail conditions, and what they found is that many people who have mental health disorders, including Mary, when they're put in these kinds of conditions they become really terrified and sometimes have fears that their jailers are trying to poison them and they cease to eat. And so, Mary, although when she had arrived, she had immediately articulated that she is someone who needs psychiatric medications, at least as far as we understand it from the documents, but she didn't receive those, didn't receive, at the start, any chance to see a psychiatrist or get the kind of treatment that she needed and waited quite some time for that.
Again, mind you, she's waiting there actually pretrial, like the vast majority of the people that I reported on for this piece and wound up not being brought to many of her jail hearings because of the fact that she had psychologically decompensated, which was actually how this piece was initially pitched to me. The attorneys had brought it to me saying many, many people are being deprived of their civil rights by virtue of the fact that they're being detained pretrial for things they haven't even yet been found guilty of and then not being brought to their court hearings because they're having mental health issues that they're not being treated for in the jail, and so people in the jail are determining that, you know, they can't even bring them to the hearing to get them out because so many of these people had charges that ultimately would have been dropped, as was ultimately the case for Mary, when a judge saw her months later, looking emaciated.
DAVIES: Yeah. Or would stay in jail much longer than they would have, had they actually been sentenced for their alleged crimes.
STILLMAN: Exactly.
DAVIES: She eventually ends up in this hospital, and what happened from there?
STILLMAN: So, ultimately, the very sad reality that I didn't know when I began reporting this is that if you've not eaten for many months or been dehydrated for many months, oftentimes, medically, you can't fully be revived. So the doctors met and made the decision that there was nothing that could actually bring Mary back to a capacity and decided she could be released to hospice care to die. So ultimately, the autopsy ruled it to death by protein calorie malnutrition, as you said, which was a term I'd never heard. I mean, the really sad thing for me in reporting this was just learning so many of these terms that pertain to people who because of being malnourished or dehydrated in the jails died of a whole slew of causes that could have been so easily prevented. Unlike, you know, I think so often about we've heard about police violence of the sort that happens in an instant or in a moment. Like, we think about George Floyd, and then I also now have a new category in my brain that's these types of deaths that happen across many weeks or months, even, where everyone is looking and seeing a person grow more and more frail and not take their food trays day after day and still be allowed essentially to waste away.
DAVIES: You know, there's a history worth recalling here about how mental health care changed in the 1960s when many, many more people were institutionalized. Do you want to just remind us of that?
STILLMAN: Yeah. It's a big set of intersecting histories, I think, 'cause we've got the big history of deinstitutionalization. So people may be familiar with the idea that for a long time, many Americans who were struggling with mental health issues were held in psychiatric facilities that were often also very heinous conditions without the right kind of treatment, and there was a rightful outcry about that. And then instead of finding a genuine solution to the problem, what we decided to do as a country is, you know, make a big, sweeping promise that, you know, we would take people out of these facilities and then provide actual mental health care in communities. And then that type of community care never really got resourced. And instead, what we did is take off on the trajectory of mass incarceration. So, seeing the increase of criminalizing people for being poor, criminalizing people for their addictions. And so at that same time that we saw many, many people released from these psychiatric asylums that had been abusive, they basically just got reswept up in the net of county jails and prisons and other places that weren't really well equipped to heal or even remotely address the realities of mental health.
DAVIES: Well, you have this striking fact that the three largest mental health providers in the country are the county jail systems of New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.
STILLMAN: Exactly. And I think many people don't know about the difference between a prison and a jail. A jail typically having been designed to be a short passing through space while you're either serving out a short sentence or awaiting trial. And what we've seen also in this time period is just a massive surge in pretrial detention, people waiting, sometimes, not just months, but literally years just to have their day in court. And people with mental health issues, they've found, have a much greater chance of spending quite some time in these facilities, which, as you can imagine, are one of the worst places to try to get mentally well, and to the contrary, especially for the folks of whom there are many who are put in solitary confinement or other very isolated conditions. We all know the facts of that. It's not surprising to hear that that is not a way to mentally heal.
DAVIES: Now, another big part of this story is the privatization of health care, generally, including mental health care in correctional institutions. You know, it's not so easy to treat people with these difficult and often, you know, multiple diagnoses, even in a good clinical setting. What drove this trend towards having private companies come in to manage health care for the incarcerated?
STILLMAN: I think there are a lot of factors there. One is just a big sweeping trend in American life to increasingly privatize services that might fundamentally be public ones. And I think the provision of actual care, mental health care and medical care in jails is a good example of where introducing a profit motive can be problematic. I mean, I've come to view it as quite complicated. I don't think it's as simple as, you know, many of the people who work on this have told me. It's not as simple as just eliminating privatization from the sphere and everything would be fine. I mean, I don't think county sheriffs are terribly well incentivized either to provide really quality mental health care, even though our communities are incentivized to have that.
Because, you know, if we actually treated this moment as a chance for public health intervention instead of as a chance to incarcerate, I think the outcomes for communities would be good. But in the context of the privatization, a lot of what many of the lawyers I spoke to have argued is that they've seen the way the contracts are constructed as contracts that have essentially a capped cost, so that any further money they spend on care of incarcerated people becomes money out of their own pocketbook. You can imagine how that would incentivize things like the tremendous understaffing I saw while reporting on this issue.
DAVIES: Now, in Pima County, Arizona, which was where Mary Casey was incarcerated, the health care was provided by a company called NaphCare . Am I saying that correctly?
STILLMAN: That's right.
DAVIES: And her children decided they wanted to have a lawyer look into the possibility of litigation. And when they went to this firm who'd done this work, they said, yeah, we're familiar with him. What did it tell them about their practices and results over the years?
STILLMAN: Well, the law firm to whom they went, they had sued this company before, as have many others, because there's been quite a range of jail deaths tied to negligence, as well as other kinds of medical health crises. In fact, just in this past month, there was a big settlement reached in regard to someone in a Washington State jail who basically had his leg rotting off, and it wasn't treated or attended to. So they found a law firm, Budge & Heipt in Seattle, that had done a lot of jail death litigation. Because I think it's really important to emphasize it's not just NaphCare. I mean, there's quite a number of companies operating in this space, and many of these companies have been providing care in instances where there was actually deaths of pretty astonishing neglect.
DAVIES: One detail kind of stuck out to me when, you know, the attorneys looked at Mary Casey's experience at this jail, and they looked at the intake form when she was admitted to the prison, and what was missing? Tell us about that.
STILLMAN: Yeah, in her intake form, there were supposed to be, as the lawyers saw it, a space for the medication she'd previously been on, and she did articulate her need for those, but simply just didn't see a mental health provider in a timely fashion. And she's not, of course, the only one at that jail who needed such services. A lot of those positions went unstaffed for basically the majority of time that Mary was in the jail. And I should say, too, the lawyers who are representing the family, they had worked on many of these cases, and a lot of them involved much younger people, like literally, in one case, an 18-year-old, Mark Moreno, whose story really stood out to me because it was really a story of how we criminalize people for their mental health issues instead of providing the treatment at the front end.
This was a young kid whose father had actually taken him to a local mental health crisis center during the midst of a serious episode. Mark had been, like, talking to angels and was clearly in the throes of something. And instead of receiving treatment there, what happened is that he was turned over to police who were supposed to take him to the hospital, and instead, they found that he had two misdemeanor warrants for traffic violations. And based on those misdemeanor warrants, he was instead taken to the county jail, where he wound up dying eight days later of dehydration. So it could happen not just to someone like Mary in her 60s, but also to teenagers, multiple teenagers.
DAVIES: We're going to take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Sarah Stillman. She is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her new article about mentally ill people who suffer from dehydration and malnutrition in county jails is titled "Starved In Jail." We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with Sarah Stillman. She's a staff writer from The New Yorker. She has a new article about mentally ill people who suffer from dehydration and malnutrition in county jails. It's titled "Starved In Jail." You know, you write that there are hundreds of hours of abusive neglect captured on video and preserved in these cases, many of which you reviewed. What did you see?
STILLMAN: Well, one of the lawyers did warn me in sending me a video. He said, you know, this will stain your brain. And that was an accurate statement, for sure. I mean, it was the kind of slow-motion harm that is just unlike anything I've seen before, just watching people who are in very profound distress, sometimes seeking help, and not receiving it. And then correlating that to - or cross-checking that against the documentation often at these sites, which sometimes had jail staff or medical staff saying that they were checking in on someone every day, that they looked totally fine, and it was OK. And in fact, in some cases, they were literally already dead. So I think about Larry Price in Arkansas, who died in solitary confinement and the essential alleged fabrication of records, where you see all these jail cell checks that say that he was doing fine, and he's literally there in his cell no longer alive, having starved.
DAVIES: At the risk of being overly graphic, you noted that the records also contain cases of people who suffered from insect infestation or even rodent activity?
STILLMAN: Yeah, a really alarming thing to me was places where this was pretty widespread. So I think about the Fulton County jail, where President Trump was actually booked in. And that very same jail, we have seen well documented that in the mental health ward, 90% of the people were malnourished, and according to the private health care company's own records, internally, 100% of the people were essentially affected by some type of insect infestation or some type of parasite. So, yeah, I mean, in some cases, I found cases where people were literally - the autopsy report showed people who were - had rat bites on them. There was lice. There was scabies. I mean, I have to be honest, when they brought me this story, I thought, I don't know if this is where I really want my mind to be. And then I really thought, I don't want to live in a world where we don't care and notice and take the time to document and listen when this has happened to someone. And sadly, it's not just someone. It turns out it's a great many people.
DAVIES: Right. You say that after years of studying these deaths, you find it hard to describe as anything but a pattern of widespread torture of people with mental health issues. That's strong language, but it's more akin to what we see in situations of torture than situations of incarceration.
STILLMAN: You know, I think I can stand behind that 100%, and I wish I couldn't. But the sad thing, having seen so many of these videos and looked so closely at these cases, I think what I've seen again and again is that in some of them, it actually was ruled a homicide because of that specific type of long-scale neglect. Every day, someone was coming in and noticing this person hadn't had a drink of water. In some cases, in cases that were found homicides, the people actually, at the jail, had shut the water off to the cell.
I mean, I'm thinking about a young man named Keaton Farris. He grew up right near where my parents live. My parents live on Orcas Island, off the coast of Washington state. It's a really beautiful place, and Keaton really loved it. He always was writing on social media about his love of the ocean and of nature. And then he wound up in a jail in the midst of a mental health crisis where the jail officials actually cut the water off to his cell for four days. And in his case, ultimately, the sheriff did apologize when he died to the family. But they had to protest for, you know, almost every day outside the jail. And there's a big community movement kind of speaking up about this in his case, but also a great many others.
DAVIES: You know, an important element of holding jail-keepers and private health providers accountable is maintaining records of treatment and making them available to investigators. What was your experience in seeking public records about these cases?
STILLMAN: Well, in a shocking number of the lawsuits, records were actively destroyed. In some cases, judges found in regard to some of the companies that records had not just been accidentally discarded, but there were problems with the choice to not retain records, even in the context of litigation where a teenager had died. And so that was a major issue I found, and then even just trying to get the basics on, like, who's dying in jails and of what.
We found that often when we asked for records, first of all, the jails don't keep good records on the specific category of death. The categories often, we found, were people were said to have had a, quote-unquote, "natural death." And these were people often in their 30s or 40s or, again, even their teens who had died of starvation, which doesn't seem terribly natural, but that's how it's classified most of the time in the records.
DAVIES: What do county coroners do when they find these folks who have, you know, been under the care of prison health officials for weeks or months and die under these circumstances? How do they rule the deaths?
STILLMAN: It really runs the gamut. I mean, I found a case in Florida of a young person in his 20s that was classified as a suicide, and the cause of death was described as fasting. And in other cases, as I mentioned, sometimes it is actually found to be a homicide because these people were in the care of a facility that didn't care for them. And then in other cases, it is listed as exactly what it was but classified as natural. So it really - you see the full range.
DAVIES: And that makes a difference when civil litigations occur, what the coroner says?
STILLMAN: I believe so. It makes a difference, too, to what the public knows and doesn't know. I mean, I think we haven't really understood this to be a pattern for quite some time because it's hard to surface it. And I think there's many, many more cases than we know of because many of the cases I was able to find, I found through the painstaking process of looking for litigation and doing these record searches. But one has to imagine there's many cases we never find out about because people like the main woman I wrote about, Mary Casey, she actually died in hospice care, not in the actual jail itself. So she would never be counted as a jail death.
And I think it's also important to note, I mean, most of these cases are people who the jail wasn't always the one depriving them of food and water. I mean, much of the time, it was people who just were being untreated for their mental health issues, often placed in solitary and ceasing to eat - which I think it's not intuitive to many people, and it wasn't intuitive to me when I began, that that's actually a common predictable symptom of certain mental health disorders.
DAVIES: Because they believe that the food may be poisoned? Or...
STILLMAN: Also because of severe depression, because of all the things that happen to you when you're placed in solitary. You know, I talked to this one professor, Craig Haney, who's an expert on these things across many decades. And he does a lot of jail visits. And he said, look, you have to imagine that even as a healthy person, he goes into many of these solitary cells and instantaneously gets overwhelmed by the despair of it. And so you can imagine if you already have a preexisting mental health issue that it could be a place where you might cease to have any hope and any will, and that can sometimes include the will to want to take care of yourself and want to eat and to drink.
DAVIES: We're going to take another break here. We are speaking with Sarah Stillman. She's a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her new article about mentally ill people who suffer from dehydration and malnutrition in county jails is titled "Starved In Jail." She'll be back to talk more after a short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. We're speaking with New Yorker staff writer Sarah Stillman about her investigation into the disturbing pattern of people with mental health issues being arrested and dying from starvation and dehydration in county jails. Her new article in The New Yorker is titled "Starved In Jail." Stillman won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for an article about the little known but widely used legal doctrine called felony murder.
Why did the lawyers approach you for this story about Mary Casey?
STILLMAN: Well, you know what's interesting to me? I was looking back the other day at the original email they'd written me to pitch me on this story, and I realized they'd actually pitched it as a story about how many people are deprived of their right to get a hearing before a judge, simply because they're actually being detained often because they're being criminalized for being homeless or because they're being criminalized for a mental health issue, and then they're not being treated. And so they're decompensating and being in a situation where the jailers then say they can't bring them to court because they're not mentally well enough. So it's this weird paradox where people are falling into this bizarre legal black hole and not having the right to go to trial or go to a hearing with the judge. So that's how it was actually brought to me. And at the end, they mentioned, you know, and she starved to death. And to me, of course, my eyes popped out, and I said, OK...
DAVIES: What (laughter)?
STILLMAN: ...She starved? Like, that was just - was shocking to me. So I thought, OK, yeah, I'll look into this. And I thought I'd just write a short piece about Mary, and that was my intention, but then I started digging and found another case like that and then another case. And then it turned out that firm alone had actually taken on a bunch of starvation and dehydration death cases. So, yeah, that was a complete shock to me that there were so many cases to uncover, so many more I still haven't uncovered.
DAVIES: You know, you worked with the Yale Investigate Reporting Lab and identified, you write, more than 20 private companies providing care in jails where alleged deaths from neglect occurred. I'm wondering what you heard from those companies, particularly NaphCare, which was the provider in the case of Mary Casey, the woman that you write so much about.
STILLMAN: Well, I really, really respected that the head of that company, Brad McLane, was willing to talk with me. And I thought he made some really important arguments about the fact that he does seem to believe that it's important that people get mental health care in their communities first before they're even sent to jail, and that they provide it once they're in jail and actually have the resources to do so. I think what's devastating is that it's just hard to look at so many instances where this did happen. Again, not just with NaphCare but also many other companies. And also, some counties that didn't privatize also had these deaths.
And so it's sometimes hard to figure out how to bridge the disconnect between the rhetoric around the care we, as a society, want to provide and the rhetoric many of these corporations say they are committed to providing. And then I'm seeing these outcomes in what I recognize is a very, very, very hard environment in which to do this work because, again, I think that's the fundamental core problem here, is the wrong decision to be criminalizing people for their mental health issues and keeping them detained far too long pretrial.
DAVIES: You know, you make the point that cash bail is an important part of this. I mean, when people can't make bail to get out of jail, if they have mental health issues, it's going to get worse - and particularly if they're denied medications and treatment - will get worse quickly and continue to get worse. There are some states that have experimented with eliminating this - I think New Jersey. Do they have better records as this issue goes?
STILLMAN: Because, again, the recordkeeping is so bad to begin with on this type of death, I think we don't really have clear data on that. But I think what we do know is that a wealth-based detention system fundamentally ends up discriminating against people, not on the basis of anything other than their wealth. And so in assessing whether someone should be locked up for so long - I mean, we're also just paying a tremendous amount as a society to lock people up for their mental health issues, again, on things that judges, once the people get their day in court, often wind up dismissing or giving a lesser charge to anyway.
So I think if we could find other systems, even at the front end for dealing with police calls - I mean, I think one thing that's being explored very productively is that the alternative to locking someone up in such an instance could be having a mental health team arrive. And instead of armed officers, who are not necessarily trained to help someone in the midst of a mental health crisis, having people for whom that is their expertise be the ones responding, I think, can also really help this issue at the front end before someone's even facing the question of whether they can afford cash bail.
DAVIES: When you dive deeply into a case like this, in which so many people have suffered and continue to suffer and the issues really aren't resolved, is it hard to move on as a journalist to the next project?
STILLMAN: I think this one's going to haunt me for a long time. I think in part because it's so many layers of our collective failure, and I wish it could just be one thing that I - my intention was to set out finding one thing that we could change. Instead, I found this cascade of things, I mean, starting with, like, why are so many people unhoused, and what would it really take to address that?
And, you know, one of the things I'm most drawn to in journalism is, you know, in a world of just so many overwhelming and intractable social problems, it does feel like there's times when you see things, where there's just a very clear room for change. And I think when it comes to the idea that - like, yes, it's hard to figure out, how do we truly address the roots of the mental health crisis we're in? But it feels like a thing I deeply believe is doable, is ensuring that people are not dying - teenagers, elderly folks, all kinds of folks - of starvation and dehydration in our county jails and our own communities. And I feel like having communities take a closer look at what's happening - in spaces that have been kind of held from the public's eyes - to some of the most vulnerable people who deserve the most rudimentary treatment, at the very least - I really do feel like that is something we are societally capable of in this moment and something that I hope reporting can be a part of bringing about.
DAVIES: Sarah Stillman is a staff writer for The New Yorker. We will be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with Sarah Stillman. She's a staff writer for The New Yorker. She recently did an article about people with mental health issues who suffer from dehydration and malnutrition in county jails. In 2023, she wrote an article about a legal doctrine called felony murder, and that was honored with the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting.
So I want to talk a bit about that, Sarah Stillman. This legal doctrine, felony murder, kind of sounds weird because everybody thinks, well, surely, murder is already a felony. I mean, what is the idea here?
STILLMAN: Basically, it means that people can be, in many states, prosecuted for murder, and in some cases, first-degree murder, if they were along in the commission of a felony where someone died, even if that was not their intention. So to break that down, what that could mean and does mean in some places is that some teenagers broke into a house and thought they were going to steal an Xbox, and the police arrived at the scene and shot one of the kids, and another of the young people there was charged with the murder of the friend that the police had actually shot and killed. So the basic idea is to hold people accountable for knowing they went into dangerous situations, but it can lead to surprising stretches of what we think of the concept of murder as meaning.
DAVIES: Well, let's talk about the case that you cite, which is sort of your vehicle for exploring this. This is an event in August of 2012. What happened on the ground? What actually occurred?
STILLMAN: Well, so I wrote about the case of a young man named Sadik Baxter in Florida, and he had made the bad decision to go out gambling with his friend, and he and the friend had, after losing a bunch of money, gone and started to jostle the car handle doors of unlocked vehicles and take loose change. They took a drum set. They took a number of other things from these unlocked cars. A neighbor called the police, and Sadik was actually arrested and placed in handcuffs. And he thought that would be that. And it turned out his friend had been around the corner in his vehicle and had tried to flee the scene when the cops arrived, and he wound up being chased in a high-speed chase by law enforcement, and ultimately miles away from where Sadik was, wound up tragically hitting and killing two bicyclists. And it turned out that Sadik then wound up being prosecuted on two counts of first-degree murder, which it's important to note, in Florida carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole. So that is ultimately what Sadik was convicted of.
DAVIES: So the title of your article is "Sentenced To Life For An Accident Miles Away." So Sadik was in handcuffs, but the guy who he had robbed cars with fled and killed these two bicyclists in a car accident. And he was arrested and charged with felony murder. And as is typical in these cases - right? - was offered a plea deal. This is something I gather that is more attractive to prosecutors about felony murder. It allows them to exert more pressure on a defendant.
STILLMAN: Exactly. So he really believed he was innocent of the charge of murder. He immediately accepted that he had done a wrong thing by taking from the unlocked cars, so he pled guilty on that charge, which in Florida, actually did carry, I believe it was something like 25 years or something of the sort. So it was already a quite lengthy sentence. And he thought, OK, I'll take the other part of this, the murder part, to trial. But it turned out he didn't realize the way felony murder works. It actually meant that - the judge basically said my hands are tied. Like, you know, pled to this felony, and that means that you are de facto guilty of first-degree murder, since that's the way the felony murder doctrine works in Florida. So the judge in the sentencing stage said, really, I don't think there's anything I can do. You just are going to be sentenced to life in prison without parole.
DAVIES: You know, one of the remarkable things about this story and this use of felony murder is that the son of one of the bicyclists actually felt that Sadik Baxter had been treated unfairly. Tell us that story.
STILLMAN: Yeah, but actually, one of the main things that drew me to Sadik's story was really actually the children of one of the victims, Dean Amelkin, who sounds like he was just a truly remarkable person. And he had these three kids who had a really wonderful relationship with him, who were obviously incredibly devastated when their dad died. But then what they told me was that they were even further devastated when they found out that two other people were also going to be losing their children in another way, which is going to prison for life for the death. So, Ian Amelkin, the son of Dean Amelkin actually spoke with me in depth, as did his two sisters, really describing how they felt the sentence for Sadik and Obrian, the other person who was sent to prison for life for this, was just not only unjust, but also just another source of pain for them. It wasn't what they wanted to see in coping with the grief of losing their father.
DAVIES: And all three of these kids became public defenders, is that right?
STILLMAN: Yeah, that's right. They're a very unusual, very smart and compassionate family. So I think they really stand out to me, having, you know, written a letter to the judge on Sadik's behalf and really clearly articulating their stance as people who know the legal system, and saying, like, we really think this is an overextension of what is appropriate.
DAVIES: You know, there's a legislative debate about this - right? - in states, and one of - some argue that felony murder is a deterrent because it shows that if you go out to do some bad stuff, even if you don't think you're going to kill somebody, it can work very badly for you. You say studies show that's really not the case because nobody knows about this until they're caught up in such a case. Are there movements to change the law here? Are some states experimenting with doing it differently?
STILLMAN: I've been amazed that all around the country there are movements. And again, sometimes those movements among the voices within them are actually the families of the victims who have been speaking up, saying, like, this - we don't believe this serves us. This is not our sense of justice. Minnesota, I met some really incredible mothers whose daughters had been incarcerated on these charges for something, a murder that they themselves did not commit, that they had no idea was going to take place. These two moms, Linda and Toni, they knew nothing about the criminal justice system. One of them was working as a real estate agent. They were just living their lives. Their daughters were quite young and had gone along on a situation where they had suffered a lot of trauma in high school. They had wound up using drugs.
Someone had, I believe, like, taken some drugs from them, and they went with some guys to try to get it back or something along those lines. And then when they arrived at the house, one of the guys they'd gone with wound up suddenly becoming violent, and they themselves were terrified, and this man ended up killing one of the guys there, and the girls who had had no idea that was going to happen and who were actually being threatened in the process and who were scared for their own lives, they wound up being due to the felony murder doctrine prosecuted for and found guilty of murder.
DAVIES: Tell us about Minnesota, 'cause they've made some changes, right?
STILLMAN: Yeah. So those - the two moms I just mentioned, they did a lot of work, and then, I think, last year, they brought about a significant legislative change that actually got their own daughters out of prison and also many other people who are in the process of appealing their convictions based on that change. And they got bipartisan support for that bill because it is an issue that I found there is a lot of room across political divides to make changes around.
DAVIES: Yeah, I can imagine some people who are listening who are thinking, well, look, if you go out and you rob a store and you know that people are going to be armed, you're engaging in something with the risk of lethal violence. I mean, what's the distinction here with felony murder?
STILLMAN: Yeah, I think it does make a lot of intuitive sense that people need to be held accountable for the things they do and the cascade of events that can unfold when you choose to engage in something dangerous. I think the question is, is our current system, as it's set up, pushing - due to these hyper-punitive sentences that really kind of came out of the war on drugs era - these crackdowns of such extreme sentences? Even just the construct of mandatory life in prison without parole, without any capacity to have discretion about what really took place, what really was the fact pattern at play here - I think most people who look at a case like Sadik's think that it is not serving us as a society. Even just the costs alone to incarcerate a man for the rest of his life, to take him from his family for something that he was not even present for - it just doesn't really ring as justice to most people that I've spoken with across the aisle, really.
DAVIES: Sadik Baxter - actually, before his trial, he noticed in another case about - involving felony murder, where a judge had sentenced somebody to life in prison for felony murder but had said, look, if there were a circumstance where the person were literally in police custody, in a police car or in cuffs while their confederate went and committed a murder, it might be different. He hoped that this would be a basis for him avoiding this fate. It wasn't. But he stayed at it, didn't he? He became a serious jailhouse lawyer.
STILLMAN: Yeah. He learned at the very beginning of the process, right? When he got locked up, pretrial, he - there was a man, Erik Redeemer (ph), who was there in another jail cell, who decided to basically offer almost, like, a law class inside the jail, where he was showing, here's how I fought my case. Here's how you can fight your case. And so Sadik became very disciplined about, you know, studying the law, studying his rights and bringing these legal filings. So when I first found him, I mean, I found a lot of handwritten legal filings 'cause he doesn't have access to all the different legal resources that you or I might have as a free person. But he would systematically, each day, go to the law library and download what he could get and come up with legal theories. And he's still pushing, and he has been for years. And now he finally does have a shot.
DAVIES: And do we know how many people are in prison around the country from this doctrine?
STILLMAN: Another wild thing about our system is that we really do not, as a public, have a transparent window into who is locked up for what and why. I would have thought that's one of the more basic pieces of information in the criminal justice system. But what I found in looking at felony murder, I thought - I very naively thought at the beginning, oh, I'll just file some FOIA requests. I'll get these public records. I'll find out how many people are locked up across America on a felony murder conviction. Instead, what I found is many states said they kept no records on this. Many states, like Florida - they would actually change the charge on the books.
So if you look at what Sadik was originally charged with, it says, you know, first-degree felony murder. But then when you are convicted, it just becomes first-degree murder. So a lot of the people I spoke to who were incarcerated on this charge also felt just, like, the pain of knowing that when someone looks at their case, it looks like they made an intentional decision to murder, which is, I think, what most of us think the word murder means. But in the records, that's simply not how it's kept. And we do not have any idea how many people are in for this charge, but it's a great many.
DAVIES: And in Sadik's case, do you think it'll matter that the three children of one of the victims in this case feel passionately that this was unjust that he was given life in prison for this?
STILLMAN: Well, the way they felt is that - in the state of Florida, there's a great degree of emphasis put on what victims' families want. And interestingly, actually, Ian Amelkin said to me he actually didn't think that was the way justice should be administered. But in light of the fact...
DAVIES: That's one of the sons. Right. Yeah.
STILLMAN: Yes. Ian Amelkin, one of the sons. That's - he felt that that's not how justice should be administered, but he actually said, if that's how Florida feels, then I hope they'll take my feelings into consideration. Because he felt as if sometimes the prosecutor wanted a particular outcome, and if he was willing to say that thing, then he was useful to them, and if he had a different thing to say as the victim of this particular harm, then he felt unheard. And I think I've talked to many victims' families who felt that way and wish their voices were taken more into account.
In a world of many just complex things regarding our criminal justice system, I think there's a lot of people who made very good arguments for the idea that felony murder could simply be abolished altogether or narrowed in ways that make it much more accountable to what most of the public would perceive as justice.
DAVIES: Well, Sarah Stillman, thank you so much for speaking with us.
STILLMAN: I really appreciate it. Thank you.
DAVIES: Sarah Stillman is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her new article is titled "Starved In Jail." Coming up, we'll remember renowned jazz critic and a friend of FRESH AIR, Francis Davis. This is FRESH AIR.
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