It's time to rethink what's just, what keeps us safe

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Steven Markey's death was an unimaginable tragedy. Steven's family and community deeply loved him, and they have suffered an immeasurable loss. To avoid adding to their pain, we at the Hennepin County Attorney's Office have kept relatively silent about the case, speaking for the most part only in court. We believe, however, that it is important to be transparent about why we reached the outcome we did in Husayn Braveheart's case, and in other cases involving young people.

Our job is to make a just decision in each case. The voices of victims and their families are important in the process, but we do not represent victims in any case. We represent the public, which means we have a responsibility to do what we can to ensure we are keeping the community safe. Ultimately that is what led us to the result in Braveheart's case and is what drives decisions in all our cases.

Prison is our muscle memory in this country, but it has not made us safer. An extensive and ever-growing body of research demonstrates that incarceration does not improve public safety and may increase the risk of the person committing another crime. Sending young people to adult prison is simply not the best way to rehabilitate them. This has been demonstrated repeatedly by national research and is also supported by data from the Minnesota Department of Corrections which found that since 2002, nearly 80% of people sent to adult prison as youths were sent back to prison after their initial release.

If we truly want to improve community safety and reduce recidivism for youth, research is very clear on the path forward. It requires carefully tailored interventions and accountability measures focused on rehabilitation, mental health support, building career pathways, community connections and developing independent living skills. Much of the rest of the world has already implemented this approach, with significantly better outcomes. And this is the approach that is now recommended by the federal Department of Justice.

There were a handful of times in the last year that we recommended prison for individual youth because immediate safety concerns outweighed the negative impact of incarceration. Braveheart's case was not one of those times.

Braveheart experienced abuse and neglect during his childhood that was so severe that it would be incomprehensible to most of us. At the time that he and a co-defendant engaged in a series of carjackings, Braveheart was 15 years old and living on the streets. During one of these carjackings, Braveheart's co-defendant, Jared Ohsman, shot and killed Steven Markey. Braveheart shot at the car as it was driving away.

Braveheart has been in secure correctional facilities ever since and is now 20 years old. During these nearly five years in secure facilities Braveheart received the intensive therapeutic treatment that two expert psychologists said was needed to address his severe history of abuse and neglect. Although Braveheart's improvement was not without setbacks, as one would expect with a teenager grappling with his trauma in a secure facility for nearly five years, he did exceptionally well, showing strong rehabilitative progress over time.

Braveheart's trauma history does not excuse his behavior. But it does provide important context when determining what accountability measures will be most successful and protect community safety.

In deciding how to resolve Braveheart's case, we faced a critical choice. We could recommend a sentence of nearly 22 years in prison. With credit for time already served, Braveheart would be back in the community in about 10 years, not having received the continued rehabilitative services he needs. Or we could recommend a sentence that permitted him to continue the remarkable progress he has made engaging with the services recommended by experts and provided to him over the last five years in secure juvenile facilities while his case worked its way through the system.

We chose to recognize where he is today and agreed to support his continued rehabilitation. After he completes an additional year in the Adult Corrections Facility, which will serve as a transitional period, Braveheart will have been in secure custody for almost six years and will then be supervised by probation for an additional four years. If he violates the terms of his probation, he faces going to prison for an additional 54 months (a sentence that would have been 261 months under the original sentence rejected by the court).

When Braveheart completes the terms of his sentence, he will have been under the jurisdiction of the court for approximately a decade. To many, a decade seems like a short period of time, but that will be almost half of his life. Perhaps it is time for us to recalibrate how we view both what is just and what keeps us safe. We have sent children to prison for life sentences and we still have guns, we still have crime, we still have tragedy. It might be time to change what is in our muscle memory.

None of us have the ability to predict the future with certainty. But we do have extensive research and evidence that tells us community safety and improved youth outcomes are inextricably connected. We are deeply committed to both, and that is why we agreed to an outcome for Husayn Braveheart that gives both him and our community the best chance at success.

This is the balance we seek to strike in every case that comes before us as we pursue true community safety.

Sarah Davis is deputy county attorney and director of Children & Families Division, Hennepin County Attorney's Office.