In reviewing his case, the U. Supreme Court banned mandatory life without parole sentences for juveniles — saying judges and juries should consider the special factors of youth — a decision that eventually led to inmates across the country getting a chance at release. In this Oct. The Decatur Daily via AP, file.
But Miller will not get that chance. A judge on Tuesday handed down a second life sentence without possibility of parole. Lawrence Circuit Judge Mark Craig ruled that Evan Miller, despite being a young teen when he committed his crime, met the legal criteria to be sentenced to life in prison without the chance of parole.
Joe Ligon spoke to BBC World Service about spending nearly seven decades in jail, why he waited so long for freedom, and how he intends to spend the rest of his days. I prefer to be alone as much as I possibly can. Being in prison, I've been in a single cell all this time, from the time of my arrest all the way up until my release. When we were allowed to have the radio and TV - that was my company. It's perhaps fair to say that prison life rather suited Joe Ligon, to a degree.
It allowed him to keep his head down, his mouth shut and out of trouble - all lessons, he says, he has learned in his 68 years behind bars. And when it came time to retire to his cell at the end of the day, it didn't bother him there was no-one else there. In fact, keeping his own company was something of a considered choice. I had no friends outside. But most people that I associated with… I treated them as though they were a friend.
And we were cool, we were alright with each other," he says. And a lot of people say that [if you're a] friend… you can be making a big mistake. Ligon has, by his own admission, always been the solitary sort. Growing up in the country with his maternal grandparents in Birmingham, Alabama, he didn't have many friends and instead remembers fond times with his family, such as the Sundays they spent together watching his other grandfather preach in a local church.
He was 13 when he moved from the deep south to Philadelphia to live in a blue-collar neighbourhood with his nurse mum, mechanic dad and younger brother and sister. He struggled in school and could neither read nor write. He didn't play sports and as for friends, they weren't much of a feature.
I was the type of person that had one or two friends, that was it for me - I didn't go for crowds. When Ligon "got into trouble" on a Friday evening in , he didn't really know the people he was with then either. He had met up with a couple of people he knew casually and as they walked around the neighbourhood, they bumped into some other people who were drinking.
He trails off. But he admits the night ended in a stabbing spree in which he was involved, violence which left two people dead and six injured. Ligon was the first to be arrested. At the police station, he says he quite truthfully couldn't tell officers who he had been with that night. Ligon says he was taken to a police station far from his home in Rodman Street and held for five days, without access to legal help. He says he was angry for a long time that his parents were turned away when they tried to visit.
That week, the then year-old was charged with murder - an accusation he has always denied although he has since accepted in an interview with US broadcaster CBS that he stabbed someone who survived and has expressed remorse.
I didn't murder anybody. Pennsylvania is one of six US states where life imprisonment carries no possibility of a parole. Ligon faced what was called a degree of guilt hearing, where he admitted to the facts of the case, and the judge found him guilty on two counts of first degree murder.
The teenager wasn't in court to hear he had been given mandatory life without parole - not unusual given the sentence was a foregone conclusion at the time. Both episodes start with someone being sentenced and end with someone getting released. For more than two years, exec producer Nicole Kleeman held meetings with the Scottish Prison Service to discuss what might be achievable.
Six months prior to taking in the cameras, series producer Liam McArdle started visiting Shotts and two other prisons to find inmates and officers willing and able to take part in filming.
We spoke to well over prisoners to find the 12 that made it into the series. Getting their stories onto TV involved all kinds of compliance, legal, and ethical issues. The most important related to victim notification. How can we justify potentially causing further distress to a bunch of people and their families who have already had their lives turned upside down by some of the worst of criminal behaviour? Prison docs are popular for obvious reasons — and important too.
Any publicly funded organisation needs to be transparent and to be held to account so that its strengths and weaknesses can be seen and talked about. We need to ask questions about how the system can be improved, and to create debate about what happens to the most serious offenders our society creates and what we call justice.
Rehabilitation is important and should be strived for. Whether that is always achievable is a matter of opinion. The prisoners all had their own reasons for agreeing to take part in our series.
Some wanted to highlight the failures of the regime they live in.
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