Ruling over adult trials for teens resonates in high-profile Sacramento slayings

California’s highest court has upheld a contentious law that barred 14- and 15-year-olds accused of violent crimes from being tried as adults and that loomed heavily over a pair of high-profile Sacramento-area murder cases, ending an emotional legal fight over the statute.

Thursday’s ruling by the state Supreme Court centered on a Ventura County case involving a 15-year-old charged with robbery and a pair of murders in a case filed just days after Senate Bill 1391 was enacted in 2019, but the decision resonates in Sacramento where the deadly shooting of a popular Grant High School student-athlete became an early test case for the new law.

Criminal justice reform advocates hailed the decision as an important evolution in how California treats its juvenile offenders.

“This is a really important ruling that treats children like children. What we learn from this ruling, we as a state had led with punitive measures such as ‘Three Strikes.’ Now there’s a drumbeat to evolve. We’ve led our way out of that. It’s a really important time for our state. We need to assist in helping (youths) find a path forward,” said Cristine DeBerry of the progressive Prosecutors Alliance, a group of reform-focused district attorneys across California. “The hard work is to ask, ‘What do we want to achieve?’ When you take a young person and put them in an adult penitentiary, we’ve stunted the possibility of them returning to society.”

But the ruling was met with bitter resignation in Sacramento where Dr. Nicole Clavo’s son Jaulon Clavo was 16 when he was shot dead by then 15-year-old Keymontae Lindsey near Grant Union High School in 2015. Dr. Clavo, a vocal opponent of SB 1391, now works to end violence as head of the city of Sacramento’s Office of Violence Prevention.

“I really feel that it’s a disservice and an injustice for victims. We want for these people accused of these heinous crimes to be sentenced” to prison terms, Clavo said Thursday following the ruling. “To have lawmakers come and create new laws that send us back in time — it’s not fair to victims, friends and the families who’ve suffered at the hands of these individuals. Because of their age, they’re given a blanket pass.”

The Sacramento courts were among the earliest battlegrounds in the fight over the new law and the young Clavo’s murder was one of its earliest tests.

Then-Sacramento Juvenile Court Judge Alyson Lewis upheld SB 1391, ordering Lindsey, who had turned 18 by the time the case reached Lewis’ courtroom in January 2019, to stand trial in juvenile court in Clavo’s killing.

Two other Sacramento Superior Court judges, Judy Hersher and James Arguelles, who presided over the murder case of a then 14-year-old Rocklin boy who fatally bludgeoned his sister, found the statute unconstitutional.

The Sacramento-based 3rd District Court of Appeal reviewed the Clavo murder case before allowing it to continue in juvenile court. Keymontae Lindsey ultimately was ordered to serve his sentence in juvenile custody to be freed no later than his 25th birthday.

Lindsey would have faced a life sentence in Clavo’s murder had he been convicted as an adult.

SB 1391, signed in 2018 by then-Gov. Jerry Brown, was championed by reformers for its goals of reducing the numbers of young people behind bars and its focus on rehabilitating instead of incarcerating juvenile offenders, returning them to their communities and a productive life on the outside.

“You can’t build a system around a uniquely bad case,” said Sue Burrell, policy director at the Pacific Juvenile Defender Center, said Thursday. Many juvenile offenders, she said, “don’t end up being adult criminals. They shouldn’t be in a system that interferes with their becoming functioning adults. Are they better off in state prison for decades at a time or returning to their communities where they can deal with what they’ve done?”

But prosecutors and crime victims’ groups were vociferously opposed to the new law. Prosecutors saw the reform-minded legislation as unconstitutionally lenient on violent youth offenders calling 1391 a dangerous threat to public safety that defied the will of California’s voters. Crime victims said their voices were ignored by lawmakers. Cases were challenged in juvenile courts across California.

In the Ventura County case, prosecutors argued SB 1391 unconstitutionally stripped juvenile judges’ power to decide whether the 15-year-old should be tried as an adult and a Ventura appellate court agreed, declaring SB 1391 invalid even as appeals courts across the state and in Sacramento had upheld the new law.

But state Supreme Court justices firmly rejected the appellate ruling Thursday.

Senate Bill 1391, the justices ruled, extended the criminal justice reforms won at the polls with 2016’s Proposition 57 that gave local judges the authority to determine whether 14- and 15-year-olds charged with serious crimes be tried in adult courts by barring youth under 16 from being tried as adults at all — the law of the land in California for more than three decades before the 1995 “tough-on-crime” law that allowed 14- and 15-year-olds to be tried in adult criminal courts.

In the years since, more than 1,500 14- and 15-year-olds have faced transfer to the adult system, according to Human Rights Watch, the international human rights organization.

State Supreme Court Judge Joshua P. Groban wrote in the court’s 31-page opinion that SB 1391 “furthers Proposition 57’s fundamental purposes of promoting rehabilitation of young offenders and reducing the prison population,” calling the appellate ruling “at odds with every other Court of Appeal decision to have addressed the issue.”

The opinion was joined by six other justices including Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye.

In Davis, Victoria Hurd and Sarah L. Rice, the daughter and granddaughter of Claudia Maupin, blasted the decision. Maupin, 76, and husband, local attorney and musician Oliver Northup, 87, were murdered and mutilated in their Davis bedroom in 2013 by a then-15-year-old Daniel Marsh of Davis. Hurd and Rice, like Clavo, have been vocal in their opposition to SB 1391.

The teenage Marsh was 17 when he was sentenced as an adult in Yolo County in the mutilation murders of the Davis couple and continues to serve a life sentence for the slayings in a California prison.

But in 2018, an adult Marsh was ordered by a state appeals court to return to a Yolo County courtroom for a judge to determine whether he would be retried as a juvenile. A judge ultimately upheld Marsh’s prison term in October 2018, calling the crimes’ harm “incalculable.”

The shocking violence meted out on Maupin and Northup by a boy still in high school; and Jaulon Clavo’s deadly shooting in a car with his Grant High football teammates hours before a playoff game at the school were prime examples, the law’s opponents said, of SB 1391’s fatal flaws.

Rice, in a statement to The Bee on Thursday, said the ruling “marks yet another day in which the justice system has failed the victims. ... It’s never been about the victims and justice for the victims. It has always been about the justice and well-being of the criminal, who committed the most heinous of all crimes,” Rice stated.

“That was the hope that we had in fighting against SB 1391; hope that our loved one didn’t die in vain; hope that the criminal would do the time intended for his crime,” Rice wrote.

Criminal justice advocates say they empathize with victims, but also say that decades of research show that prosecuting 14- and 15-year-olds as adults has weakened instead of enhanced public safety; and that youth in juvenile custody are less likely to reoffend once their terms end than juveniles in the adult penal system.

“It’s hard. These are real people who are hurt,” DeBerry said of crime victims. “As a larger society, we have to think about what our responses are — how to create sustainable safety. We have to have a judicial system that California can stand behind.”