Wisconsin Making More Murderers: Juvenile Sentencing Demands Scrutiny
From: Louisa Schein, Bee Vang and Pao Lee Vue
Wisconsin Making More Murderers: Juvenile Sentencing Demands Scrutiny
As our nation agonizes over another spate of police abuses and untoward extrajudicial deaths, has enough attention been paid to how thug profiling produces rough handling not only by the police, but also in carceral decision-making? In the Marathon County jailhouse of the small city of Wausau, Wisconsin, a 16-year-old Hmong boy, Dylan Yang, sits in a solitary cell awaiting an October 19th sentencing – two days from now.…
For a fatal stabbing on February 27, 2015, in which Dylan seized a knife to defend against a group of boys in front of his house brandishing what looked like a real gun, the then 15-year-old was designated an adult with bail set at $1million, locked up in de facto solitary for a year, then tried and convicted as a murderous gangster for “reckless homicide.” Dylan’s upcoming sentence could be for a term of up to 60 years, effectively his whole life.
Despite occurring in Wisconsin – the state recently made notorious by the hit Netflix documentary “Making a Murderer” – Dylan Yang’s juvenile justice experience has evaded greater scrutiny. Indeed, in mid-August, the conviction of teen Brendan Dassey was overturned amidst calls for a “new paradigm on how to handle juvenile interrogations.” Dassey had been interviewed alone, made false promises by police, and had eventually delivered a reluctant “confession.” The reversal rested on the recognition that Dassey’s constitutional rights had been violated.
On what had Dylan’s conviction rested?
The conflict had involved six or seven boys arriving at Dylan’s home with multiple knives in the car. They were kids who had been in repeated conflicts with Dylan and his friends. One began shooting off a BB gun, but Dylan didn’t recognize it as such. Moreover, he and his two Hmong friends were badly outnumbered. He ran into the house, where he grabbed a knife from the kitchen. When he got back outside, his friend was pinned under the shooter. Perhaps fearing for his friend’s life, he inflicted two knife wounds that resulted in the tragic death of 13-year-old Isaiah Powell.
The boys in question – Hmong, black, Latino – had had a history of antagonism in school. The school had purportedly made gestures to intervene, but with social media in the mix, the kids had continued to spar with each other in cyberspace. Much masculine posturing had ensued in the form of inflated provocations and verbal scuffling. That the content of the antagonism was racial, and that it led to threats involving “gangs,” was off the radar for the adults in charge…
Not so after the incident, when the boys, the “weapons,” and the longstanding conflicts morphed in meaning.
Cops had showed up at Dylan’s house that harrowing afternoon, after his mother had returned home. Could they ask the boy some questions? Yes of course, she consented, not knowing they were going to load him into their vehicle to go to the station. Could she come along? No, she couldn’t, they replied, flaunting procedural bravado. Read his Miranda rights at the station, lawyerless and motherless in the face of the law, Dylan sat alone for a taped interrogation.
After multiple denials of any formal membership, he seems to have capitulated, saying he was “sometimes in a gang, sometimes not.” Caught! The ensuing trial proceeded as if to confirm Dylan’s image as a “monstrous thug.” The tape was played in entirety during the trial. The all-white jury had no trouble convicting this latest “hardened criminal.” Never mind that right up the road, and in the national media, a white teen’s solo interrogations had been made scandalous through the exposé that was “Making a Murderer.”
Wrestling with Monsters
Dylan’s mother Annahli recalled: “Right after the hearing, Dylan called me up from prison. He was crying and confused. ‘Mom,’ he asked, ‘they make me sound like a monster. I feel like a wild animal that they have to cage up. I turn around and there are bars all around me.
“Am I really that bad? Am I a monster?’”
Like so many mothers of color giving their boys ‘the talk,’ Annahli struggled to steady her teen, to steel him for what he would have to remember: “At least you recognize that that’s not who you are.”
The Costs of Juvenile Solitary
Solitary confinement, as perhaps the most brutal form of the slow death that imprisonment brings about, was for Dylan an artifact of the carceral caprice that places boys standing trial as adults into adult facilities. Such penal procedure, in which juveniles need to be cordoned off from their fellow inmates for their protection, garnered President Obama’s attention just this past summer. Banning the use of solitary for juveniles in federal prisons, the President touted research suggesting that “solitary confinement has the potential to lead to devastating, lasting psychological consequences…. and the potential for violent behavior… Prisoners in solitary are more likely to commit suicide, especially juveniles.”
After only a month, Dylan had already captured his struggle to hold on in a letter to his family, shared with us by his mother:
“Dear Mom and Dad, (…) It’s Monday night and I can’t sleep… I miss everyone and I’m crying… … I hate it here… I’m sorry for everything.… I’m scared to death… I wish I could go back in time and change it… but I can’t… I really miss you guys… Write back, I love you guys.”
Now going on twenty months, what long-term toll will it take on Dylan’s psyche that he was designated an adult and gangsterized to feel like an animal? Indeed, what if the upcoming decision turns more than a dozen months into dozens of years?
Last May, at a Minneapolis defense fundraiser on Dylan’s behalf, spoken word artist Peng Sue Rabbit Vang captured the extremity of the situation: “Dear mother, is this what it feels like to die? Dying in the arms of a sentence meant for taking a life…”
Bemoaning the fact that one loss of life must translate into two, for all are guilty in the court of profiling, he mused, still in Dylan’s voice:
“Who’s to say that only one life was taken that day?
Did I not die on that day as well?
…. being alive does not mean that we’re living.”
Since the gunning down of Trayvon Martin in his hoodie, the typing of young men of color as menacing for their style, their look, their self-expression, has been increasingly on the table in national discussions. Yet amidst a chorus of protests – from Obama to spoken word artists – the unequal justice of punishing boys like they were men somehow manages to persist. Sentencing decisions grow longer when guilty verdicts align with thug profiling. And the youth in question – largely boys of color – confront carceral futures that are no longer lives.
In the Hollywood film Gran Torino, Clint Eastwood’s character puts a stop to gang violence and ostensibly saves the day by insuring that the bad boys will go to jail. Along the way, and justifying his intervention, one character generalizes that for Hmong youth, “(t)he girls go to college and the boys go to jail.” This kind of self-fulfilling prophecy shapes the life chances of all boys of color and facilitates the school to prison pipeline. As police mishandling gains more visibility on the national radar, what happens on the other end of the court proceedings – especially when juveniles are involved – deserves greater scrutiny as well.
Pao Lee Vue teaches in Sociology and co-directs Women and Gender Studies at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, NY.
Bee Vang recently graduated from Brown University with a degree in Geopolitical Epistemologies.
Louisa Schein teaches Cultural Anthropology as well as Women’s and Gender Studies, Asian American Studies and Critical Sexuality Studies at Rutgers
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