13 year-old-spook raped 72-year-old White woman

[Rasp]

13 year-old-spook raped 72-year-old White woman

A Life Term for Rape at 13: Cruel and Unusual?

WASHINGTON — In 1989, someone raped a 72-year-old woman in Pensacola, Fla. Joe Sullivan was 13 at the time, and he admitted that he and two older friends had burglarized the woman’s home earlier that day. But he denied that he had returned to commit the rape.

The victim testified that her assailant was “a colored boy”� who “had kinky hair and he was quite black and he was small.”� She said she “did not see him full in the face”� and so would not recognize him by sight. But she recalled her attacker saying something like, “If you can’t
identify me, I may not have to kill you.”�

At his trial, Mr. Sullivan was made to say those words several times.

“It’s been six months,”� the woman said on the witness stand. “It’s hard, but it does sound similar.”�

The trial lasted a day and ended in conviction. Then Judge Nicholas Geeker, of the circuit court in Escambia County, sentenced Mr. Sullivan to life without the possibility of parole.

“I’m going to send him away for as long as I can,”� Judge Geeker said.

Mr. Sullivan is 33 now, and his lawyers have asked the United States Supreme Court to consider the question of whether the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment extends to sentencing someone who was barely a teenager to die in prison for a crime that did not involve a killing.

People can argue about whether the punishment in Mr. Sullivan’s case is cruel. There is no question that it is unusual.

According to court papers and a report from the Equal Justic
e Initiative, which now represents Mr. Sullivan, there are only eight people in the world who are serving sentences of life without parole for crimes they committed when they were 13. All are in the United States.

And there are only two people in that group whose crimes did not involve a killing. Both are in Florida, and both are black.

Joe Sullivan is one; Ian Manuel, who is in for a 1990 robbery and attempted murder, is the other.

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Photos courtesy of Florida Department of Corrections

[Gman]

It is cruel to put a negro in prison for life for a rape. That nigger should have been hung when it was convicted!!@#@#@#@!!!!

[Tuffy]

Amen Gman!

Talk about a real silverback. Pics prove it!