‘Extreme injustice’: Homeless man with untreated schizophrenia fights 150-year sentence

The crime that Jared Stephens committed is not in dispute.

The question is whether he should die in prison for it.

On a stormy September day in 2016, Stephens — a former wrestler at Arizona State University who became homeless after years of untreated schizophrenia — walked into a Best Buy in Sweetwater.

He snatched a $399.99 laptop, stuffed other merchandise totaling $157.96 into a brown Publix tote bag and tried to walk out without paying. Confronted by employees, he resisted, then pulled his own laptop out of a backpack and did something extraordinarily irrational.

“Look, I have child pornography!” he declared.

He was telling the truth.

Stephens, then 25, marched in and out of the store with his laptop playing a video of child abuse, tilting his computer screen so it was visible to a surveillance camera, according to an arrest report. He proceeded to lie down between two sets of sliding doors at the store’s entrance, perusing illicit images as shoppers flowed by, until police arrived and hauled him to jail.

That unhinged act sent Stephens on an odyssey through the criminal justice system, resulting in a sentence that has no parallel in local courts for a similar crime: 150 years in state prison — to be followed by a 120-day stint in the Miami-Dade County jail.

The sentence — handed down by Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Veronica Diaz in 2018, with a minimum of public explanation — was 147 years longer than the three-year term state prosecutors initially proposed in a plea deal and 129 years longer than the 21-year term the state asked for at sentencing. It was also dozens of times greater than the typical sentence for possession of child pornography.

Now, Stephens’ sentence is being reconsidered by a different Miami-Dade judge, William Altfield. It’s Stephens’ last chance at a reduced term, after his lawyers exhausted other avenues of appeal.

At a recent hearing, prosecutors with the office of State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle suggested they may be open to Stephens’ sentence being reduced if he agrees to receive mental health treatment, which he has so far resisted in prison. But they also reminded Altfield that no new evidence has been presented and that Diaz had previously denied a similar request based on the same set of facts.

The question of whether Stephens should spend his life in prison is a test for a justice system that must take into account the universally acknowledged horrors of child pornography, the searing lifelong trauma it inflicts on victims and the reality that few prosecutors or judges want to be seen as soft on any crime, much less this one.

But courts are also grappling with questions of basic fairness when it comes to punishing people with severe mental illness.

Stephens, for instance, made outlandish claims in open court at his criminal trial, asserting he could command African armies and shut off electricity to Russia with the power of his mind. He largely refused to talk to his lawyers, much less cooperate in his defense.

Court-appointed psychologists diagnosed him with schizophrenia, a serious mental illness that can affect how a person thinks and feels, often causing them to behave as if they have lost touch with reality. (People with schizophrenia are generally not violent and respond well to treatment, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.)

He had also suffered his own shocking trauma as a child — a fact that went unmentioned at his sentencing because he never told his defense lawyers.

Fan Li, a private attorney now representing Stephens, said that courts are ill-equipped to handle people experiencing mental illness, leading to widespread “unjust prosecutions and sentences.”

“The excessive sentence in this case is an extreme example of injustice,” Li said.

A former public defender, Li said his clients struggling with mental health often ended up in prison instead of getting desperately needed treatment in psychiatric facilities.

“The problem is there’s not enough beds around,” he said. “So prison is this storage room that we as a society decided we’re going to put all the people that could be rehabilitated.”

Stephens’ presumptive release date is July 4 — Independence Day — 2166, when he would be 175.

He did not produce or distribute the illegal images, which would typically lead to a longer sentence.

Eunice Sigler, a spokeswoman for the local state courts, noted that a state appeals court upheld the punishment meted out by Diaz.

Still, the court labeled the sentence “quite harsh.”

‘Trial tax’

Stephens, now 32 and confined in one of Florida’s most feared prisons, checked many of the boxes that hamper defendants from getting a fair shake in court, according to criminal justice advocates: He was homeless, poor, Black, mentally ill and cut off from friends and family.

Had he gone along with the state and accepted a plea deal when it was originally offered, he could have gotten just three years in prison, as well as treatment in a program for “mentally disordered sex offenders.”

That sentence would have been in line with those given to other, similar offenders, according to court documents submitted by his lawyers.

Instead, he chose to fight the case.

State prosecutors responded by upping the charges from one count of child porn possession — with a maximum of five years in prison — to 30 counts, with a maximum of 150 years, based on a forensic analysis that found a cache of illegal images on his computer.

Plea deals are the grease that makes the gears of America’s criminal justice system run, for better or worse — and usually worse, at least according to defense attorneys, criminal justice reformers and numerous academic studies.

Stephens’ lawyers say prosecutors retaliated against Stephens for exercising his constitutional right to a trial. They said that increasing the charges after their client turned down a deal amounted to a “trial tax”: Make the state go to the bother of putting you on trial and you risk paying a steep price. It’s a serious incentive for even the innocent to plead guilty, research has shown.

Ed Griffith, a spokesman for Fernández Rundle’s office, said prosecutors acted appropriately.

“Almost every plea bargain offer involves a reduction in the number of charged criminal counts in exchange for a guilty plea,” Griffith said in an email. “A rejection of a plea offer would almost invariably lead to the charging of criminal counts which could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.”

He declined to say whether prosecutors would support or oppose reducing Stephens’ sentence.

In past hearings, prosecutors focused on the grievous harm done to children abused in pornographic videos.

“What happens to these young girls is completely perverted. They are lured into engaging in sexual acts with adult men,” Assistant State Attorney Kevin Gerarde told Diaz at Stephens’ sentencing. “These young girls are criminally exploited for the benefit of people who want to film this and people like the defendant who download this type of stuff, who seek this out, who prey on child pornography.”

Competent to stand trial?

At trial, Stephens’ public defenders argued that their client — alone in court, his family back in Michigan having no idea where he was — lacked the mental capacity to understand the case against him

Stephens claimed he was facing federal treason charges and had been convicted of crimes against humanity in Central America.

A battery of licensed psychologists initially agreed that he was incompetent. But they said that his schizophrenia could be treated. After several months, he was deemed capable of standing trial.

Following a five-day trial in 2017, a jury found him guilty on all 30 counts of child porn possession, as well as petit theft and disorderly conduct, acquitting him of strong-arm robbery.

Prosecutors then asked Diaz to sentence Stephens to 21 years in prison, based on state guidelines — a term the judge exceeded by nearly 130 years. (She tacked on the 120-day stint in county jail for the theft and disorderly charges.)

Diaz did not explain her reasoning, other than to say that a jury of the defendant’s peers had pronounced him guilty.

A former Miami assistant city attorney with a law degree from the University of Florida, Diaz won her first election to the 11th Circuit Court in 2014, becoming the first Colombian-born judge voted onto the bench in Miami-Dade.

Many of her fellow lawyers had expressed reservations about her candidacy.

In a pre-election poll conducted by the Miami Dade Bar, only two judicial candidates out of more than 50 received a greater portion of “unqualified” ratings than Diaz. (One of them was her opponent, Renier Diaz de la Portilla, a former Miami-Dade school board member.)

However, another six years on the bench improved opinions of her performance. In a 2020 bar poll, the number of respondents who rated her as “qualified” or “exceptionally qualified” nearly tripled. She won reelection unopposed.

Diaz has since rotated out of criminal court and now tries family cases, leaving the Stephens case in Altfield’s hands.

‘Throw him away’

In court, Altfield will consider data submitted by Stephens’ lawyers showing that his sentence was far out of line with the norm.

His main offense was possession of child porn, a third-degree felony, rather than production or distribution.

Between 2000 and 2017, Miami-Dade judges decided that nearly one-third of defendants who, like Stephens, possessed child porn — without producing it or passing it around to others — should not be sent to prison, according to data from the Florida Department of Corrections.

Those sent to prison received a median term of three years, according to the data, which was submitted in a court filing by Stephens’ defense team.

Only one other local case resulted in such a lengthy sentence: Adonis Losada, a former performer on the longtime Univision show “Sabado Gigante,” received a 153-year term. The trial for Losada was later ordered redone, resulting in a sentence slashed by two-thirds.

Florida judges are guided in sentencing by a “point” system that takes into account the severity of a crime, the harm to victims, the defendant’s record and other factors. Stephens’ total points were in line with other offenders, court records show, although that didn’t stop Diaz from sentencing him to a far-longer term.

The disparity in his sentencing cannot be explained by a lengthy conviction record. Despite Stephens’ psychosis-induced claims, his actual rap sheet was sparse. While he had been arrested several times for petty crimes often associated with being homeless, he had been convicted in Florida only once, for a misdemeanor of resisting arrest without violence.

In a more than 900-page motion to “correct” Stephens’ sentence, his lawyers do not claim racial bias affected Diaz’s decision.

Still, Adam Saper, one of the public defenders who represented Stephens at trial, said he thought race played a role.

“I think what the judge saw was a young, mentally ill Black man in handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit with no family and friends,” Saper told the Herald in an interview. “Let’s throw him away because we are so afraid of mental illness that we would rather just bury him in the corner of society until he dies rather than trying to get him some help.”

There is strong evidence that judges do not treat all defendants equally. According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, Black defendants in federal court receive longer sentences than white defendants who commit the same crimes. State courts in Florida follow that trend, studies have shown.

At sentencing hearings, defense lawyers typically present “mitigating” circumstances that could lead a judge to hand down a reduced punishment. But because Stephens would barely talk to his lawyers, they were hamstrung. They didn’t know who he was, where he was from or the extent of his mental illness.

And Stephens’ life story — if Diaz had heard it at his sentencing — might have led the judge to temper the de facto life sentence she handed down.

‘Haunted him for years’

Born in Alabama and raised in Southfield, Michigan, Stephens was by all accounts a happy child.

The fire changed everything.

On Feb. 5, 2000, his family’s apartment erupted in flames.

Two younger brothers — Brandon, age 6, and Xavier, age 3 — died in the blaze, according to a Detroit Free Press news story from the time.

The fire department determined that the blaze had exploded out of control when 9-year-old Jared and his stepfather opened the door to the apartment after the stepfather frantically tried to save the youngest members of the family.

“Once they opened that door, the fire spread rapidly because it was fueled by the oxygen coming in from the door,” a local fire chief told the Free Press.

Jared and his older brother, LeMarcus Thomas, survived, along with their stepfather.

Thomas said he and Jared watched outside in subfreezing temperatures as “the firemen pulled Brandon and Xavier’s tiny bodies from the rubble,” according to an affidavit filed by defense lawyers.

“Jared stood in his underwear on the front lawn crying,” Thomas said.

Stephens blamed himself for their deaths, his friends and family agree.

“He was a bright, fun, happy kid before the fire,” his mother, Jennifer Lynn Stephens, said in an affidavit.

His high school psychologist, Louis Pryzbylski, believed the trauma tortured Stephens.

“It must’ve haunted him for years,” Pryzbylski said in an affidavit.

Still, Stephens succeeded, both as a student and a wrestler. After graduating, he earned a spot on the wrestling squad at Arizona State.

But his mental health deteriorated, with his college coach — who praised his intelligence, natural ability and drive — expressing concerns about Stephens’ sometimes “delusional” behavior. He dropped out of college and moved back to Michigan around 2010.

Stephens was in his early 20s by this point — a time when the onset of schizophrenia typically occurs among men, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Research has found that childhood trauma is often linked to the development of schizophrenia later in life.

Back in Michigan, Stephens began talking to himself. Once, Stephens started stealing from a convenience store. Confronted by the shopkeeper, he began urinating in the middle of the floor, all in front of his older brother.

“It was totally out of character for him to break the law,” Thomas said. “Something had really gone wrong. … I’m not sure if he knew what was happening to himself.”

After that, Stephens disappeared, eventually ending up homeless on the streets of Miami-Dade, where he was first arrested for petit theft by Doral police in 2015.

His family and friends wouldn’t hear from him again until he’d been sentenced.

‘Taken aback’

After years of not being in touch, Stephens wrote his mother a letter informing her of his sentencing.

Stunned, Stephens’ family leaped into action.

Finally equipped with more information, his attorneys sought numerous legal remedies to amend his sentence. But Diaz refused to budge and a state appeals court would not intervene.

Now, Stephens has one last chance. His attorneys are asking Altfield to reduce his sentence.

So far, Altfield is declining to rule on the motion until he can speak with Stephens in court, which may happen next month. He has also ordered a psychologist to evaluate Stephens’ mental health.

Li, Stephens’ lawyer, said he believes Stephens has served enough time and should be released to his family, now living in Arizona.

At a recent hearing, Altfield expressed concerns about Stephens’ mental health and said he believed his 150-year sentence was excessive.

At one point, he questioned Assistant State Attorney Katharine Moore about Diaz’s decision.

“Do you believe that a 150-year sentence is appropriate, in light of all of the relevant circumstances?” the judge asked.

“I can tell you,” she replied, “that I remember … [being] taken aback.”

Miami Herald Information Services Director Monika Leal contributed to this report.