After more than two decades in prison, a second chance

Juvenile life without parole is banned in the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been ratified by every single country in the world except three: Somalia, South Sudan and the United States. In Somalia and South Sudan, there are no known cases of people serving a life without parole sentence for a crime committed as a minor. In the U.S., there were around 2,500 as of 2008, according to a Human Rights Watch tally.

In 2012, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and bar associations from Japan to South Africa filed a joint amicus brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to outlaw the practice as cruel and unusual. Last summer, the Supreme Court did just that, concluding in Miller v. Alabama that it was unconstitutional for a child’s crime to automatically trigger a life without parole sentence. Now, courts have to take mitigating circumstances into account.

But it was left to the states to decide whether this ruling applied retroactively, and the results have been mixed. Davis' case comes before the Illinois Supreme Court in December, and if the court accepts the ruling as retroactive, Davis could be resentenced and released as early as next year.

Davis’ childhood was anything but easy. His father was absent and his mother was a drug addict. His grandmother, who was also caring for a bedridden husband, a son with mental disabilities and other grandkids, became his primary caregiver.

“My grandmother, my heart,” Davis told Putzel. “She took care of me and everybody else, you know. But she couldn’t keep an eye on me a lot, or pay as much attention as I needed at the time. So it led me to the streets.”

Davis had his first brush with the law at the age of 9, when he was hanging out at the gas station, trying to pump gas for money. Customers weren’t coming, and he was so hungry it hurt. When a little girl came out of the gas station store with a bag of food, he tried to snatch it. Instead, he only managed to scrounge $0.75 and $3 worth of food stamps that fell to the ground in the scuffle. Police found him soon after in a nearby restaurant.

Some juvenile offenders serving life without parole are callous murderers. Jennifer Bishop-Jenkins believes that the boy who brutally killed her sister while pregnant falls into that category, and as the president of the National Organization of Victims of Juvenile Lifers, she’s a leader for efforts nationwide to defend life sentences for juveniles.

“The 17-year-old who killed my family members was not a child,” Bishop-Jenkins told America Tonight back in September. “He planned the murder for months in advance, months. He was not a poor kid from a gang-infested neighborhood. He was a white rich kid, who lived in a $3 million house, and he did this because he was bored and was thrilled by violence and evil.”

Bishop-Jenkins advocates on behalf of victims’ loved ones, who may be traumatized by the fear of an offender being released again. She thinks it’s impossible to reopen all these decades-old cases and recreate due process. But keeping these individuals behind bars also comes at a cost.

“It boggles my mind,” said Stevens, “that anyone would choose to use Illinois' limited resources to keep Adolfo Davis in prison for more than he's already been in prison.”

Davis has had more than two decades to stomach his life sentence. He told Putzel that his greatest fear is still dying in prison. But he admits that the idea of reentering the outside world is scary.

“All the terror that you feel trying to come to prison, it’s like reverse for me,” he explains. “Like, this is all I know.”

Davis is confident about the first thing he’d do if he ever gets out: He’s heading to Disneyland. Whether that day might be coming, however, is still not a given.

“I don’t want this to be the last thing I see,” Davis said. “It’s a whole beautiful world out there and me dying in here, it’s like a nightmare.”