CRJ 485. 61 Research Paper PDF

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Research paper on juvenile criminal justice...

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The Case of Leo Gordon Little III

The College at Brockport CRJ 485. 61 Dr. Kowalski May16, 2021

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ABSTRACT

In the Netflix TV series documentary titled “I Am A Killer,” the case of Leo Gordon Little III was shown. He was a juvenile who was sentenced to the death penalty for robbery and murder. Throughout this paper, the details surrounding Leo Little’s case and sentence will be inspected. This includes an illustration of his background and details surrounding the robbery and murder of Christopher Chavez. Followed by the four societal risk factors of anti-social behaviors, divorce, family structure, and association with deviant peers that may have reinforced his criminal acts will be explored. Along with three U.S. Supreme Court rulings about the death penalty’s reinstatement in 1976, the death penalty reform for mentally disabled people in 2002, and the reform to the death penalty towards juveniles in 2005 and their significance in Leo Little’s case. Culminating with changes and developments within the legal system that could benefit him now or in the future, such as youth courts, parole, and protection of offender’s identity.

3 Background Leo Gordon Little III was born on July 14, 1980, in San Antonio, Texas. He was born into a middle-class family, with his father being a bus driver and his mother an insurance worker. When he was a little boy, people around Leo, such as his former principal, described him as a lost young boy who was an average student. It was not until he was around 9 - 10 when his mother and father divorced and Leo described his father's absence as a noticeable vacuum. This is when he began to act out at school and demonstrated a lack of discipline. Leo would say he started skipping school, shoplifting, trespassing and smoking marijuana at this time. Then through the ages of 13 - 17, he said he began to be influenced by gang culture and gangsta rap because the aggressiveness of the music spoke to him. This led him to join an imitation version of the Crips and into doing hard drugs. Leo explains that his need for drug money led him to begin robbing, and that's why on January 23, 1998, Leo and his accomplice Jose Zavala robbed and murdered Christopher Chavez. On that night, Christopher Chavez was leaving church service, and when he got into his car, Leo put a gun to the back of his head and robbed him of 300 to 400 dollars that Christopher had collected from his congregation. After forcing Mr. Chavez to drive outside the city, Leo made him get out on an empty road and initially considered abandoning him and taking Christopher’s car but Leo shot him in the head instead and drove off. Leo was arrested two days later after a friend he bragged to make an anonymous call to the police. Leo was charged with capital murder and sentenced to death. While on death row, Leo Gordon Little III became a minister. Due to a new ruling handed down in 2005, Leo's death sentence was commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

4 ID Factors Based on the background and commentary provided by Leo Little throughout the documentary, several identifying factors have contributed to his legal mishaps. They were individual factors such as antisocial behaviors. There were also family factors such as family structure and divorce. Then there were peer factors, specifically his association with deviant peers. Antisocial behavior was an identifying factor because it is considered one of the top signs for delinquency at a later age, and Leo Little presented with all the behaviors "including various forms of opposition of rule violation and aggression such as theft, physical fighting and vandalism." (Reed, 2021) When it came to Leo Little's household, he expressed how his parent's divorce and his father's absence in the home affected him, and both of these fall under the two risk factors addressed earlier. Divorce is a risk because the study found that divorce has been shown to affect boys more and "caused them to develop continuing problems with antisocial coercive and noncompliant behaviors through 10 (Hetherington,1989) more so than boys of married parents. Whether divorce alone is a decisive enough precipitating factor on its own is disputed. However, compared with other factors such as low income or family structure the second factor discussed earlier, divorce becomes much more substantial. The risk factor of family structure could lead to legal mishaps because "children from single mother households are at an increased risk for poor behavior outcome."(Reed, 2021). As stated throughout the documentary, Leo frequently addresses how his father's absence affected him. Along with his home situation and antisocial behaviors, he did not keep the best company which falls under the risk factor of association with deviant peers. Through research, it

5 is understood that "association with deviant peers is related to increased co-offending and in the minority of cases, the joining of gang since a 1931 report showing that 80 percent of Chicago juvenile delinquents were arrested with co-offenders, empirical evidence has supported the theory that that deviant peer association contributes to juvenile offending. (Shaw and McKay, 1931) In the documentary, Leo Little is a self-proclaimed Crip gang member and describes the group of peers he hanged around with as mutual criminals and drug addicts. These drug habits and the need to live up to what he perceived to be a gang lifestyle caused him to Rob and eventually kill Christopher Chavez. Law Reforms Several laws were reformed by the Supreme Court that had impacted Leo Little's case both positively and negatively. The first reform that had a significant impact on his case was the Supreme Court's ruling in Gregg v. Georgia back in 1976. The Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in a judgment referred to as the "Gregg's decision," which held that the updated statutes in Texas, Florida, and Georgia regarding the death penalty were constitutional. When citing their reasoning for reinstating the death penalty, they said it was because "the imposition of the death penalty for the crime of murder has a long history of acceptance both in the United States and in England[.] At the time the eighth amendment was ratified, capital punishment was a common sanction in every state."(Gregg v. Georgia, 1976) This decision affected Leo Little because it allowed him to be charged with capital murder and face the death penalty in Texas. Whereas if the supreme court found the death penalty unconstitutional in 1976, he would have initially received a more lenient sentence.

6 However, law reforms pre-dating Leo's crime have also worked in his favor. In 2002, 26 years after the “Gregg's decision”, four years after Leo Little committed his crime in the case of Atkins v. Georgia, the Supreme Court reversed a ruling finding that it was unconstitutional to sentence mentally disabled people to death. They based this decision on research that stated, "60 percent of the states did not allow for the execution of the mentally retarded (which includes the 12 states that did not allow for the death penalty at all,) this provided powerful evidence that today our society use mentally retarded offenders as categorically less comfortable than the average criminal." (Atkins v. Virginia, 2002) This impacted Leo Little's case because the conclusion of the US Supreme Court that mentally disabled people are less culpable left the door open for defense claims that juveniles are not legally culpable. After all, they are not fully mentally developed as well. This argument and the precedent set in Atkins v. Virginia was used in the case of Roper v. Simmons. The last case and Roper v. Simmons aided Leo Little's case. After all, on March 1, 2005, the US Supreme Court made a ruling in agreement with the Missouri Supreme Court that found children cannot be held to the same standards as adults because they are not equivalent mentally. The US Supreme Court reasoning for this decision is that juvenile offenders are "vulnerable to influence and susceptible to immature and irresponsible behaviors." ( Roper v. Simmons, 2005) Making the death penalty unjustified as a way of receiving retribution. Eventually, this ruling was used in his appeal that led to his death sentence being committed to a life sentence. Reforms to Justice System

7 The first reform that would have been beneficial for Leo Little and juveniles like him would be to make it mandatory for minors to go through youth courts. The reason why it would be more beneficial for juveniles to go through youth courts is that they "are designed to deal with children, particularly in courtroom design, personnel and the safeguarding of privacy." (Lynch, 2018) A youth court is specifically designed to deal with the offender's ages and focus on rehabilitation. In contrast, adult courts are more focused on retribution and punishment because the adult offender is more culpable and knowledgeable of their actions than juveniles. Another reform that could be beneficial to Leo Little or juveniles in a similar situation would be making parole mandatory for all juveniles. This reform can evoke change in a positive way because when "children have spent considerable time in detention, they may not have the resources or skills to make the necessary case to be released. Children may have particular difficulty in gaining parole,due to not having much 'life' time before sentencing." (Lynch, 2018) Juveniles need to be able to gain parole because the goal is not to have juveniles become acclimated to a lifestyle of incarceration but to rehabilitate them so that they are fit to re-enter society and for them to do that, re-acclimation needs to be a reality which is not possible with life without parole. Furthermore, to better acclimate back into society, one more reform juveniles need is to be protected from the media. A child's identity needs to be protected from the public, news, and publications because if they are not, then the child's "prospect [of reintegration] are likely to be severely compromised by name publication and associated publicity on his release." (Lynch, 2018) Learning about a juveniles past or it being available to the public would mean there would be no way for a child to get back to normal and be received by society favorably because all they

8 would remember is the "time when he was open to suggestive and compulsive behaviour and in a state of developmental immaturity," (Lynch, 2018) making him a pariah. In conclusion, Leo Gordon Little III displayed several risk factors in his background, starting with antisocial behaviors. Including his parent's divorce and absence from the home and his affiliation with gang activity and drug abuse that aided in him committing the acts of robbery and murder led him to obtain the death penalty for a crime, he committed at the age of 17. However, because of his age at the time of the crime and several reforms to law by the U.S. Supreme court, mainly the rulings in Atkins v. Virginia and Roper v. Simmons, led to his death sentence was commuted to life without parole. However, researchers believe that there is a better way to handle juveniles like Leo Little than giving them life without parole. This includes trying the case in youth courts which is aimed more at rehabilitation and not retribution. As well as making parole and protecting the offender's identity mandatory because it makes assimilating back into society easier and promotes true justice.

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References Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304, 350, 122 S. Ct. 2242, 2266, 153 L. Ed. 2d 335 (2002) Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153, 96 S. Ct. 2909, 49 L. Ed. 2d 859 (1976) Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551, 623, 125 S. Ct. 1183, 1226, 161 L. Ed. 2d 1 (2005) Hetherington, E.M.1989. Coping with family transitions: Winners, losers and survivors. Child Development 60: 1-14. Reed, R. (2021). The Juvenile Justice System (Preliminary Edition ed.). San Diego, CA: Cognella Academic Publishing. Shaw, C.T., and McKay, H.D. 1931. Report on the Causes of Crime, vol.2. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office...