Little Kid, Life Sentence

Pennsylvania has more juvenile lifers than any other state in the union. Stacey Torrance knows. He's been in jail since he was 14.

by Matt Stroud

By: Evan M. Lopez

Stacey Torrance was 14 years old and knew exactly what he was doing when he and his 23-year-old cousin plotted to rob Alexander Porter in North Central Philadelphia. But Torrance says he had no idea their crime would lead to kidnapping. And he certainly had no idea it would lead to murder.

After the robbery, his cousin and two co-conspirators — ages 19 and 28 at the time — took Torrance home and dropped him off. The co-conspirators then drove Porter to a secure garage in Germantown and brutally tortured him for nearly 24 hours without Torrance's knowledge. They beat Porter mercilessly and nearly smothered him to death by wrapping him in a thick blanket, pinning him into and locking the trunk of his own car. Because Porter was almost dead (the medical examiner's 1988 report listed a contributing cause of death as "strangulation"), their options had run out. They drove Porter to an isolated road in Chestnut Hill, shot him dead and left him to rot. Torrance had no idea.

Twenty-one years later, Torrance is an inmate at the Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution at Chester (SCI Chester). Though he didn't pull the trigger — and maintains he had no inkling that Porter's life was in danger — he's serving a murderer's sentence: life in prison without the possibility of parole. He is one of the youngest criminals ever to receive such a harsh sentence in the state of Pennsylvania.

Opposition to juvenile life without parole has finally, after years of forceful campaigning from advocates and prisoners alike, become a resonant political and legislative issue. In June, the House of Representatives heard the latest testimony in a series of hearings about the Juvenile Justice Accountability and Improvement Act, which seeks to "enact laws and adopt policies to grant child offenders who are serving a life sentence a meaningful opportunity for parole."

Also, this October, the U.S. Supreme Court will make decisions on two cases (Sullivan v. Florida and Graham v. Florida) challenging the constitutionality of parole-free life sentences for kids under 18. Norris Gelman, a Philadelphia lawyer who has advised Torrance on appeals over the last decade, believes these decisions will play a large part in determining whether Torrance ever leaves prison: "[They] will either open the door to his release," he says, or they'll determine once and for all that "he may be screwed."

In sum, this is Torrance's year. He has a court date on Aug. 20 to argue for a new trial with his newly court-appointed attorney, Samuel Stretton. He can also hope legislative or Supreme Court action will help aid his escape from the system. But if any or all of those options don't pan out, he may, in fact, be screwed — relegated to a permanent existence inside Pennsylvania's prison industrial complex.

In the summer of 1988, Stacey Torrance lived in his mother's house on 17th Street between Master and Jefferson in North Central Philadelphia. On a sweltering afternoon, he received a visit from Henry Daniels, his 23-year-old first cousin.

INSIDER: Stacey Torrance, pictured here in 2008, has been in jail since he was 14. He says, "I knew something bad was going down. I knew someone was getting robbed. … But I had no idea anything beyond that would happen." (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

They talked about a conspiracy — a robbery. Daniels knew Torrance was friends with a local girl, Sarita Porter, and that he was occasionally seen with Sarita's 16-year-old brother, Alexander. Daniels had recently been released from an eight-month prison term for robbery in California. Broke and on the lookout for an easy score, he had moved back to Philly to start again.

Daniels and Torrance believed that the Porters' father was a big-time drug dealer — a fact that was heavily disputed at trial. Sometime in the next couple of months (Daniels would let him know when the time was right), Torrance would bring Alexander Porter to 20th and Nicholas. From there, Daniels would somehow snatch Porter's keys. Then he would break into Porter's father's apartment and steal whatever cash was inside. They would split the score.

Months later, midafternoon, Sept. 1, 1988, Torrance told Alexander Porter that a man named "Harry" wanted to ofter Porter $1,000 and an ounce of cocaine to get him started in the drug trade. Torrance and Porter drove in Porter's car to 20th and Nicholas. There, they met Daniels — posing as "Harry" — and another accomplice who Torrance didn't know.

Daniels and his accomplice told Torrance and Porter to follow them to a house in Germantown. When they got there, they parked on the street. Both pairs walked to the front door.

They talked. Discussion turned to argument. Uncertainty transformed into anger. Daniels told Porter that Torrance had "ruined the drug deal." Daniels and his accomplice were much older and much bigger than Torrance and Porter, so they pinned the boys to the ground. They bound Torrance, gagged him, and threw him into the back seat of Porter's car — a ruse to trick Porter into thinking Torrance was uninvolved in the robbery, and that he would be killed for spoiling the transaction. Then they took Porter's keys and sneakers, tied up his hands and feet, wrapped him in a blanket, stuffed a sock in his mouth, and threw him into the trunk of his own car.

This was where Torrance says he extracted himself from the crime. He didn't know what was going on, and when he went to trial, the district attorney acknowledged that Torrance was involved in the planning of an initial robbery and nothing more. For years, Torrance has insisted that he didn't even know he was to be tied up. But he was. And he was driven home in silence.

At Torrance's mother's house, Daniels unbound his young cousin and let him out of the back seat. Torrance walked up the front stairs and looked back, confused and dazed.

Daniels and his accomplice drove off. They headed toward a third accomplice's garage. There, they got out of the car, and left Porter tied and muzzled in the dark trunk.

Daniels telephoned Torrance that evening to inform him they were preparing to burglarize Porter's father's apartment. Torrance didn't ask questions and didn't go along. Later that night, Daniels and his two accomplices burglarized Porter's father's apartment, as well as Porter's mother's house in West Philadelphia.

The next morning, unbeknownst to Torrance, Daniels and his two co-conspirators returned to Porter's car. They heard him yelling inside. They opened the trunk. Porter was still alive. He had somehow removed the blanket from his body and the sock from his mouth. One of the co-defendants — it's not clear who — then beat Porter, re-strapped the sock in his mouth, and wrapped him again in the blanket. They wedged two milk crates around him to secure his body in one tightly bound spot. Again, they slammed the trunk's lid closed.

Sometime after dark, Daniels and his accomplices drove Porter's car to the remote, tree-lined brush by 7600 Navajo St. in Chestnut Hill. They removed Porter from the trunk, dropped him face-down on the pavement, and shot him four times in the back and neck with a .25 caliber automatic handgun.

About a week passed. Torrance heard nothing. He was nervous, but he knew not to ask around. Then on Sept. 6, 1988, Torrance's mom, Barbara, read a newspaper article announcing that 16-year-old Alexander Porter had been found dead. She asked Torrance if he knew the boy. He looked at her in shock. Then he simply said, "Yes."

The next day, she was contacted by Philadelphia police. Would she and her son, Stacey, go to police headquarters at Eighth and Race to inspect Porter's car and answer some questions?

When they got to the station, Torrance was separated from his mother. She was left in a waiting area while Torrance was taken to an interrogation room. There, Detective Paul Raley, who had information about an alleged drug dealer named "Harry," was relentless. Raley asked — and Torrance will later say that he remembers Raley yelling, repeatedly — "Who is Harry?" Torrance's "expression changed completely," according to Oct. 24, 1989, post-trial opinion notes. "[H]is head went down, his jaw dropped, and his eyes widened." Raley then asked if Torrance knew who killed Porter. Torrance simply told him "Yes." The notes say Raley then stopped the interview and brought Torrance's mother into the interrogation room. They were advised of their rights. They signed a statement confessing to Torrance's involvement in Porter's murder. "The questioning ceased when Torrance's mother requested counsel."

Today, Torrance's mother lives in a two-story house off Lancaster Avenue just northwest of Drexel University. She's 64 years old with six children and so many grandchildren and great-grandchildren she can't remember exactly how many. On the morning of July 2 this year, when I visit her, she actually leaves the living room to get a notebook that lists, on its last two pages, more than 30 names with birth dates, some with years included, some without. She points to one of the names on the list, "Jamil" — birthday Nov. 20, 1973 — and starts talking about his case. I haven't met Torrance yet, so I ask if Jamil is Stacey's middle name.

"That's his Muslim name," she says. "They all have Muslim names and, all our family and friends, that's what we call him."

I ask her what I, personally, should call him.

She says, "You can call him Stacey."

Mrs. Torrance confirms that they were living at 17th between Master and Jefferson in 1988. She says, "Our lives were in danger after it happened. Stacey was locked up and we were getting threatening phone calls." So, she says, she and her family moved. She doesn't remember how long that took. She remembers being upset because her address was listed in the newspaper.

I ask her about Torrance's police interrogation. She remembers it slightly differently than reports indicate. She and Torrance were separated, she remembers, and then she remembers being called into the interrogation room where Stacey was being held. She says Torrance's eyes were red and he had been crying. The detective asked Torrance to say it again, in front of her — that he knew who killed Alexander Porter. She stopped them — "it sounds like my son is being implicated in the commission of a crime," she recalls saying. "I want to see a lawyer." She says Detective Raley told her, "We don't have lawyers down here, ma'am." So Stacey confessed, without counsel, that he knew who killed Alexander Porter.

Raley, now retired, was unavailable for comment, but at trial, he stated under oath that he advised Torrance of his Miranda rights — including his right to an attorney — in the presence of Barbara Torrance. He also indicated that the only reason he separated Torrance from his mother was because he had information implying Torrance was involved in a drug deal with Alexander Porter. Raley felt that "Stacey would be a little put off talking in front of his mother" about a drug deal.

In response, Samuel Stretton, who will represent Torrance at his upcoming Aug. 20 court date, says, "That would usually be illegal. I would think there would have been more of an ironclad law that would require the mother to give permission before an interrogation went forward." (Cathie Abookire, director of communications at the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office, would not comment on the case, stating that while Torrance himself had filed a petition, his attorney had not. Abookire says the DA's office doesn't comment on cases unless an attorney has filed an official petition with the city. Stretton's office says a petition is forthcoming.)

After that, Barbara Torrance says, they incarcerated her son in a juvenile detention center for 14 months.

By: Jessica Kourkounis Like a Nightmare: "Those were the two worst days of my life," says Barbara Torrance (above) of hearing her son convicted and sentenced from the courtroom.

I ask her how that felt, and she says it was horrible, but she still had hope at the time. She says she visited Torrance every day.

She says she was the only family member at the actual trial — a 12-day testimonial marathon between Oct. 16 and Nov. 9, 1989. She listened to Stacey take the stand. She listened to the conviction and the sentencing, handed down on two consecutive days. She says the swelling awareness that her son would be in prison for life struck her like a nightmare. "Those were the two worst days of my life," she says.

Torrance had been sentenced in accordance with Pennsylvania's "accomplice liability" and "felony murder" laws. Transcripts show that the DA implied Torrance may have concocted the scheme to burglarize Alexander Porter's father's apartment, but that he was unaware of a second burglary*^{(this line has been modified from its original published version)} and unaware of any plot to murder Alexander Porter.

Ultimately this didn't matter, though; after closing arguments, the jury was instructed:

"Under the law of Pennsylvania you may find a defendant guilty of a crime without finding that he personally engaged in the conduct required for commission of that crime or even that he was personally present when the crime was committed. ... "

Torrance participated in a felony — burglary, regardless of whether he helped plan it — during which a homicide occurred, so he is guilty of second-degree or "felony" murder. Furthermore, because the homicide occurred "in furtherance of the felony" he agreed to help plan, he is liable as an accomplice. These offenses — by themselves or in tandem — carry a mandatory life sentence without the possibility of parole in Pennsylvania.

At the 1989 trial, Torrance's court-appointed lawyer, Thomas A. Bello, repeatedly referred to Torrance as "a 14-year-old boy" to arouse sympathy in the jury. In response, assistant district attorney Edward Cameron said, "Just because he's 14, just because you may feel sorry for him, is not a reasonable doubt. ... Sympathy and that age has got nothing to do with [assigning guilt in this crime]." Bello lost the argument. Pennsylvania has no minimum sentencing age, and all murder charges are automatically heard in adult court. Attorneys have the right to a "decertification" hearing that could send a case to juvenile court, but Bello didn't pursue one.

From the visiting room at SCI Chester, Torrance tells me the court proceedings were a nightmare for him, too — their conclusion shifting his mind from a belief that he was inside some horrifying unreality to something worse, a moment of clarity, a concrete understanding that he was 15 and his life was over.

I ask Torrance about his final day at trial, when the presiding judge read him his sentence.

"The judge said, 'You are sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole' and 'Do you have anything to say on your behalf?' I didn't even say 'no,'" Torrance says. "I just shook my head."

After sentencing, Torrance was sent back to the Youth Study Center — the maximum-security juvenile detention center where he had been housed for 14 months — for two nights. He was told he was headed to SCI Graterford, one of Pennsylvania's harshest prisons. "That scared me a lot," he says. "I had heard bad things about that place, that you do hard time in there." Torrance remembers that sheriff's officers retrieved him on Nov. 12, 1989, around 3 a.m., and that, despite Graterford being only 30 miles northwest of Philadelphia, he wasn't processed until nearly 6 a.m. "I saw the huge gray walls," Torrance says. "I couldn't stop looking at the walls." They booked him and put him into general population. He says the guards kept telling him, "We don't know why you're here. You're just a kid."

Torrance says prison administrators decided to keep him in protective housing, but, "all that means is that they kept me alone." It was like solitary confinement, he says. "They call it '22 and two,' which means 22 hours in your cell, alone, two out. I was locked up like that for a week with no books, no conversations with anyone." Torrance turned 16 at Graterford. Then he was transferred to Camp Hill, a medium-security facility just a few miles southwest of Harrisburg. Weeks prior, Camp Hill had experienced one of the worst riots in Pennsylvania correctional history — 123 guards and inmates were injured on Oct. 25 and Oct. 26, 1989, after inmates seized control, " ... terrorizing guards, taking several hostages and setting fire to buildings in the 52-acre compound," according to a New York Times article from Nov. 26, 1989. The riot caused $15 million in damages and ensured that every prisoner in the facility would be locked down in their cells for an indefiniteperiod of time.

"They took everything from us," Torrance says. "No phone calls, no visitors, nothing to read, no one to talk to. Twenty-four hours per day for 45 days." At Camp Hill, after the riot, he says, "They delivered our food in brown paper bags,and because we were unable to contact anyone, I couldn't contact my family. They had no idea where I was or if I was OK. That was the worst part — that I couldn't call my mother and tell her where I was. I was afraid and miserable. We didn't have soap, no deodorant, no anything. I remember everything was burnt. I was just existing and praying," Torrance says.

"Finally my mother came to visit me — found out where I was somehow — and she broke into tears, said I was unrecognizable. Which I imagine I was," he says. "I didn't have hair on my face yet — couldn't grow a beard — but I hadn't combed or groomed or properly washed myself in a long time. I had a big ball of dirty hair on top of my head. I hadn't seen the sun in months. She said my skin was ashen."

Torrance remained at Camp Hill another two months until March of 1990, when he was transferred to SCI Rockview.

"At Rockview," Torrance says, "I met a lot of good older men, particularly the man who was my mentor for many years. His name was Askia," Torrance recalls. "That was his Muslim name — Askia S. Askia. His real name was Stephen Hudson."

Askia took Torrance under his wing, got him a job as a mail runner. "These were my formative years," Torrance says. "I was 16 when I arrived and spent eight years there. I grew up there. Became a man there." At the urging of Askia, Torrance enrolled in school, stayed away from drugs and other vices, and got his GED at 18.

"I've stayed in school since then," he says. "Always taken classes in whatever subject I could, all because Askia showed me this was the best way. He got out while I was in Rockview. Went into the world and started a business selling dentistry equipment." Torrance kept in touch until Askia died of a heart attack in 2002. "He lived a privileged and blessed life on the outside," Torrance says.

At 25, Torrance transferred to Chester. Chester is a facility built primarily for short sentences, for prisoners in on drug charges and other nonviolent offenses. Cost per inmate at Chester exceeds $30,000 per year, which is consistent with state averages.

The correctional officers I spoke with at Chester said Torrance is a model prisoner. And a source inside tells me Torrance has a clean disciplinary record going back at least 10 years. Torrance says he's "a veteran of the system now — I've been in prison for a long time — and so I get involved with therapeutic community groups to encourage people to stay out of trouble. I like that — I like helping the younger inmates when I can."

Torrance says Chester was a welcome change from Rockview. It's closer to home, first of all, so it's easier for his family to visit and stay in touch. Rockview is in Bellefonte, Pa., nearly a four-hour drive from West Philadelphia. "I can keep in contact easier, know what's going on," he says. "It's difficult, though, sometimes, because lots of the inmates and COs are new. They're always changing. There's always high turnover. So sometimes new staff conflict with old prisoners."

In what way?

"It's just that I've been here a long time. There are other lifers here, too, but not many. And sometimes it feels like we have to show the COs how things work, when to be calm." He pauses, then demurs: "I don't know. I just try to go with the flow. That's my personality. I've never run into any trouble as a prisoner, really, and I feel very blessed by this. Seems to me that if you keep your nose clean, you can avoid unfortunate situations."

"None of our groups disagree that the crimes done by some of these juveniles are in fact hard crimes and that some of them are in fact heinous crimes," says Anita Colon, a Philly-based Pennsylvania state coordinator for the National Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth. She also represents Fight for Lifers locally, and her brother, Robert "Saleem" Holbrook, is serving life without the possibility of parole on a felony murder rap from his 16th birthday. "We don't sit there and say that everyone [who has] been sentenced to life without the possibility of parole should be paroled at any time. The issue instead is that they deserve the opportunity for review."

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HALF OFF DEPOT

Why live life at full price?

Sarah Morris, who represents the Youth Art & Self-empowerment Project (YASP) and Education Not Incarceration-Delaware Valley (ENI-DV)*^{(this line has been modified from its original published version)} and who organized a recent panel discussion on what she calls the "School-to-Prison Pipeline in the Delaware Valley," agrees, but puts a stronger political slant on the issue: "Legislation is passed to get people elected, not to address public safety."

"It is not a good idea to try juveniles as adults because their minds cannot handle the consequences that they're being put up against," says Rashida Ingram, a social worker for youth in the Philadelphia Prison System. "What I mean by that is that juveniles are very immature. They just don't have the cognitive abilities to think things through. And when you sit down with them to talk about the crimes they're accused of committing ... you see what the breakdown is. Sentencing kids to life without parole is just throwing these kids away."

"And it's not just damaging to individuals," says Morris. "It's damaging to communities, too. The goal isn't to lock people up, right?" We go over some of the most basic [juvenile life without parole] stats and assumptions: The United States is one of very few nations that allow people under 18 to be sentenced to life without parole. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International released The Rest of Their Lives last year, which is perhaps the most incisive and well-circulated report on the issue, documenting more than 2,000 "juvenile lifers" currently serving prison time. The rest of the world, according to the report, contains only 12. Pennsylvania has the most documented juvenile lifers of any state in the union, with 444. Among other ideas, the report argues that kids aren't as psychologically capable of understanding crime and punishment as adults are (" ... adolescent thinking is present-oriented and tends to either ignore or discount future outcomes and implications ... ") and that trying juveniles as adults is counterproductive because adult prisons encourage punishment over reformation: "Most prisons pay nominal attention at best to improving inmates' skills and lives, regardless of their sentences," the report says.

"I've met some very talented young people in [Philadelphia's adult jails]," says Morris.

"When you work with these kids," Ingram says, "you find out that if you give them some attention, you can actually see that there's a human being there — that it's not just some monster in a young person's body, that there's actually someone there."

Researching this story, I tried to contact various Porter family members via an insane number of phone calls, electronic notes directed to Facebook and MySpace accounts, e-mails to not-quite-random addresses, ads posted on Craigslist and literal knocking on doors. Someone named Sarita Porter, who either is or shares a name with the deceased Alexander Porter's sister, responded to a Facebook message, but only to say she wasn't interested in commenting.

I contacted Dana DiFilippo, a Daily News reporter who, through exhaustive attempts not dissimilar to my own, found and spoke with Charles Porter — the deceased Alexander Porter's brother —in February 2006. The number she had for Mr. Porter has since been disconnected, and the address she provided turned up nothing. In the absence of an actual quote from the Porter family, however, I asked Torrance about an incisive passage from one of DiFilippo's 2006 Daily News stories, which says:

... Alex's family scoffs at Stacey's claims of innocence.

"Nobody put an ad in the paper saying: 'We're looking for guys to kidnap.' They could have robbed and killed anyone, but because of Stacey, they robbed and killed Alex," said Charles Porter, now 39. "Without him, there couldn't have been no murder. He delivered Alex to his death."

Because the crime took months to plan and involved so much risk, Stacey is "either lying or retarded" if he didn't foresee it ending in homicide, Charles Porter said.

Torrance's response follows:

I read that, too. I was shocked by that quote ... I was naïve. I was naïve to the street. I had never been in a life of crime. I was just a child. It's like I stepped off my mother's front porch and into prison. I knew something bad was going down. I knew someone was getting robbed, and I have been punished for those crimes. I am sorry for those crimes. Deeply sorry. But I had no idea anything beyond that would happen. And I don't think you necessarily make that conclusion — that a robbery equals someone dying — especially when you're 14 and don't know any better. I feel empathy for Charles Porter. Believe me, I do. Alex was his brother. And there's not a day goes by I don't think of him and that family, of their loss. Charles Porter holds on to that anger, though, and I think that's where that quote came from — from the hurt he still feels. That bitterness. I didn't know Alex was gonna be killed. I really didn't. And I've been trying most of my life to prove it. It just doesn't seem to matter to most people.

I ask him if he's ever contacted the Porter family to express regret.

"When it happened," he says, "when I was in the Youth Study Center, I sent a letter to Sarita to tell her how sorry I was. I've never wished bad upon anybody. But I never heard anything back from her. There really is not a day that goes by without thinking of them. I used to have nightmares after it happened. For a long time I had nightmares. I would see Alex's face in my sleep and it haunted me." He pauses, looking down at his brown, paper-thin DOC uniform, his brown slippers, his white socks. "It still haunts me," he says. "Every day it haunts me."

In Pennsylvania, if you are under 18 and charged with murder, it is extremely rare that you will not be tried as an adult. But since Torrance was so young in 1988 — and since he, himself, didn't actually commit murder — one would think his court-appointed attorney, Thomas A. Bello, would have moved to decertify Torrance's case to the juvenile justice system. But he didn't. In a letter written from Bello to Torrance on Oct. 4, 1990, Bello writes: "I did not go forward with a decertification hearing due to the fact that the people that I spoke to informed me that there was no juvenile institution that would receive you due to the nature and facts of the crime involved."

Torrance has claimed, in multiple unsuccessful appeals over more than 20 years, that Bello's decision to eschew a decertification hearing raises the issue of ineffective counsel, and Bello himself doesn't deny the charge. "The way you get a case like this decertified is to find a youth center that will hold a juvenile convicted of murder. I asked around [in 1989] and I couldn't find one, so we were out of options." Bello goes on to explain his defense in 1989: "We argued two separate conspiracies. [Torrance] set up a friend of his to be abducted. The other [conspiracy] happened later, when the other boys decided to bind and gag and murder [Alexander Porter]. Two separate crimes." But, says Bello, "that didn't hold up. So if [Torrance] wants to pursue ineffective counsel, he's more than welcome."

At Chester, I ask Torrance if he's scared of his uncertain future. He tells me no.

"I was scared when I was 15," he says. "I was a pawn back then. Daniels used me to get to Porter's family. I didn't know what to do. I had nowhere to turn. "

Torrance's co-defendants in 1989 were Kevin Pelzer and Eugene McClure — who Torrance had never met — and Henry Daniels, his cousin. Two of the three were initially sentenced to death; after appeals, all three ended up with life sentences. I ask if Torrance has maintained any kind of communication with these three men. He tells me inmates are not allowed to correspond with inmates in other facilities. "So I haven't talked to them since the trial."

If you could talk to them, what would you say?

"I don't have anger or animosity toward them," he says. "But I want to know why they killed [Porter]. Why they made that decision."

"Porter's death was a tragedy," he says. "Why did they use me to do what they did?" He pauses to look around Chester's bustling visiting room, filled with inmates and their kids, their wives, their friends. "Those guys destroyed two lives, really. My situation is an injustice on top of a tragedy. I don't know if it's ever been told to them that way."

Much of the research for this story was supported by the Innocence Institute of Point Park University in Pittsburgh. The Innocence Institute investigates claims of wrongful conviction from incarcerated individuals mostly within 100 miles of Pittsburgh, and farther away in special circumstances. Matt Stroud is a reporter and graduate assistant there. For more information, contact him at mstroud@pointpark.edu.