CHICAGO » Adolfo Davis admits he was a swaggering thug by the age of 14 as he roamed and dealt drugs with a South Side gang.

He also describes a childhood of emotional and physical deprivation: a mother fixated on crack, an absent father, a grandmother’s overflowing and chaotic apartment.

From the age of 6 or 7, he often had to buy his own food or go hungry, so he collected cans, pumped gas for tips and shoplifted. At 10, he went to juvenile hall for wresting $3 worth of food stamps and 75 cents from a girl. At 12, he fell in with the Gangster Disciples.

"I loved them, they protected me, they were my family," Davis said.

At 14, in 1990, he was out with two gang members when they robbed a rival drug house and shot the occupants, leaving two dead. Now 38, he has spent the last 24 years in prison on a mandatory sentence of life without parole.

But his future will be reconsidered in a new sentencing hearing here Monday. It is one of the first such proceedings in Illinois to result from the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Miller v. Alabama that juvenile murderers should not be subject to mandatory life without parole.

The exact role of Davis, then known as Spooncake, is disputed. He said he had stood guard at the doorway and had not pulled a trigger; prosecutors suggested otherwise but did not prove it. In any case, he shared culpability for what were essentially executions. Tried and convicted as an adult, he received the automatic penalty at the time for a double murder, a term of "natural life without parole."

In the 2012 ruling, the Supreme Court did not say life terms were never appropriate. But, building on earlier rulings that "children are different," and citing research on brain development, the court said sentencing must take account of mitigating factors like the offender’s background and age, and consider the potential for change.

Davis was one of about 2,500 prisoners across the country at the time who were serving life without parole for juvenile murders, most of them as a result of mandatory sentences that gave judges no leeway, according to the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, an advocacy group.

The 2012 decision did not say whether the new rules should apply retroactively, to cases long closed. Since then, state and lower federal courts have disagreed, creating drastic differences for prisoners depending on where they live.

Ten states, including Illinois, are applying the standard to pre-2012 cases and have started the process of resentencing. Four states — Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania, with about 1,130 prisoners who could be affected — have refused to make the ruling retroactive.

The Supreme Court is expected to clarify the issue next fall, when it hears the appeal of a convict in Louisiana.

In Illinois, Davis’ suit was one of several that led the Illinois Supreme Court to rule in favor of retroactive application to the roughly 80 state prisoners who received mandatory life for crimes committed as juveniles. The state attorney general disagreed and appealed to the federal Supreme Court, but in December, the court declined to take the case.

Here and around the country, victim rights groups have strongly opposed the reopening of past sentences.

"The families of the victims will suffer the most," said Jennifer Bishop-Jenkins, a co-founder and board member of the National Organization of Victims of Juvenile Murderers.

She became a champion of victim rights 25 years ago when her pregnant sister and her sister’s husband were murdered in Winnetka, Ill., by a 16-year-old who received a mandatory life sentence.

"When I started thinking of the possibility that we’d have to go back to court, I couldn’t sleep for four months," she said. "Our mother was devastated."

A new sentencing hearing in that case is scheduled for this month. While Bishop-Jenkins feels confident that the killer, because of the particulars of his acts, will have a life sentence renewed, she noted that the transcript of his original sentencing hearing was missing and that key witnesses were dead or gone.

Re-creating a fair sentencing process is often impossible in old cases, she said, and there are ample existing ways to pursue what seem to be unwarranted life sentences, such as executive clemency or other petitions.

Davis’ supporters said they had not been able to find any relatives of the two murder victims in his case; none have come forward to comment on his resentencing.

In the interview at the Cook County Jail, Davis spoke of his childhood and what he describes as a profound personal breakthrough that occurred during a four-year stay in a maximum-security prison, sitting in a cell 23 hours a day.

His story suggests multiple failures: of his family, of the child-welfare system, of the juvenile-justice system and, he admits now, of a boy who valued toughness over empathy.

His life sentence put him in a succession of juvenile and adult prisons where gang rivalries festered. He continued to lash out, getting into fights and committing other violations that led the authorities to send him, in 1998, to the "supermax" prison, now closed, in Tamms, Ill.

Davis and his supporters in his new appeal, including a priest who has known him for 24 years and a therapist who treated him at Tamms, describe a changed man — a claim that Cook County prosecutors challenged when they successfully opposed his clemency bid in 2012.

The solitude at Tamms was almost unbearable, Davis said. He spent hours playing games of four-handed spades. But the unaccustomed quiet time also led to insight, he said, and his first appreciation of human contact and trust.

"When I got out and got hugs from my family, I cried," he said. "I hadn’t realized how important that was."

"I understood why women say they like to cuddle," he said sheepishly.

As part of his therapy in the supermax, Davis started to write poetry, much of it, initially, outpourings of rage toward his absent parents. "How could you bring me into this world when you knew you wasn’t ready?" one of his first poems asked.

By 2003, his writings, which circulated in prison magazines, focused more on the daily horrors of prison and offered warnings to others: "Young blood, you think it’s cool," he wrote, but you’ll end up "dead or in the pen."

In 2005, he even started to forgive his mother, though she never visited him in prison, writing, "I never felt your pain, because I was dealing with my own pain."

Before the hearing Monday, Davis’ lawyers — Patricia Soung of the Loyola University Law School in Los Angeles and Rachel Steinback, a lawyer with the civil rights law firm Loevy & Loevy in Chicago — prepared a sentencing memo calling for his release because of his remorse, his growth and his mentoring of others while in prison.

The Cook County prosecutors have not prepared a written statement, but they are expected to argue for a new life sentence. Opposing the 2012 clemency bid, the prosecutors said young Adolfo had been "an active and willing participant in the murders" and "was not simply a naive child being led astray by older friends."

Though it was never established in court, the prosecutors said there was evidence that he had fired a gun that night and that he did not dispute that he had carried one to the scene. They cited his lengthy juvenile record and disputed the claim that he had become an exemplary prisoner, noting that he was caught receiving marijuana from a visitor in 2006. Davis called that a "stupid decision."

"Petitioner may have been 14 years of age at the time of the murders but packed a lifetime of experience as a criminal and gang member in that short amount of time," they wrote.

The two sides will present their cases orally before Judge Angela Petrone of Cook County Circuit Court. During or after the hearing, the judge could order anything from a new life term to an immediate release for time served.

After emerging from the supermax, Davis signed up for a correspondence course and earned a high school diploma. He became a teacher’s aide in basic education classes, and started mentoring troubled young men, some in prison and some outside, by telephone, working through the Rev. David Kelly of the Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation, who counsels offenders, victims and families on the South Side.

In a letter to the court, Kelly said that of hundreds of youths he has worked with, "Adolfo Davis stands out" for his seeming transformation and desire to help at-risk youths.

If Davis is released, Kelly said, his group will give him a full-time job as a counselor.

Erik Eckholm, New York Times

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