The moment Terrell Carter learned the death sentence he received decades ago would end, he was filled with extreme happiness and intense sorrow.
Carter had spent 30 years of his life in prison without parole for second-degree murder he committed in Pennsylvania, one of six states in the US where there is no possibility of parole when sentenced to life. In July, after Governor Tom Wolf commuted his sentence, Carter, now 53, regained his freedom after a nearly three-year process petitioning with the state board of pardons. Still, he said he felt “survivor’s guilt”.
“It shows me the other guys who were just as deserving as I was couldn’t make it not because they are not worthy but because the process is super arbitrary,” Carter told the Guardian from a halfway house just a month after his release. “The system doesn’t allow room for a person to seek redemption.”
A coalition of civil and human rights organizations on Thursday filed a complaint urging United Nations special rapporteurs to declare the United States’ longstanding practice of subjecting people to life sentences, including without possible release, “cruel, racially discriminatory” and “an arbitrary deprivation of liberty” that violates incarcerated people’s rights.
They argued that “death by incarceration” – a term describing life sentences without parole coined by Carter and other members of the Right to Redemption Committee, a group of incarcerated people seeking the abolition of the practice – amounted to torture. In their complaint, the civil rights organizations asked the international watchdogs to pressure the United States, who leads the world in sentencing people to life imprisonment, to abolish the extreme practice altogether. They proposed instead to impose maximum sentencing laws that would eliminate the practice of “virtual life” sentences – those longer than a person’s remaining years of life expectancy, often more than 50 years.
“Death by incarceration is the devastating consequence of a cruel and racially discriminatory criminal legal system that is designed not to address harm, violence, and its root causes, but to satisfy the political pressure to be tough on crime,” the complaint noted.
Dozens of testimonies from incarcerated people sentenced to life detail the horrific toll so-called “death by incarceration” has not just on their physical, mental and emotional wellbeing but also the lasting impact separation has on their family members. Carlos Ruiz Paz, who is serving a life sentence in California, wrote in a testimonial that a life sentence without parole signaled a person was “irreparably damaged without hope of redemption”, adding: “Extreme sentences affect the kids who grow up without us and the parents that will die without us at their side.”
The complaint noted that the United States’ use of virtual life sentences increased exponentially since the 1970s, particularly after the supreme court abolished the death penalty in 1972, prompting states to strengthen life sentencing laws for offenders. Even after the supreme court reversed course in 1976, extreme sentencing practices continued. By the 1980s and 90s, as the federal government incentivized states to impose harsher sentencing practices in an effort to curtail perceived rises in crime, more and more people were imprisoned for longer.
The toll of that suffering has disproportionately upended the lives of Black and brown people who have been subjected to over-policing throughout time, exposing them to the US carceral system and led to escalating mass incarceration. Organizers argue that that violates international human rights law prohibiting racial discrimination. “This systemic deprivation of resources, including education, healthcare and other social support and services, is coupled with the entry of more police and prisons in these communities and exposure to the criminal legal system,” the complaint noted.
The US is the only country that sentences children under 18 to life without parole, a practice that the United Nations has already singled out. And the US accounted for more than 80% of people worldwide serving life sentences without parole.
“We are the world leader in life imprisonment,” said Kara Gotsch, deputy director of the Sentencing Project, one of the organizations involved in the UN complaint. “We’re just continuing to warehouse people, expose them to dangerous conditions in prisons that are not built for old people, quite frankly. And it’s not serving the public interest or our moral interest is to incarcerate elderly people, until they die, because they’re not a threat to public safety.”
Black people accounted for 12% of the US population in 2020 yet made up 46% of all incarcerated people serving life or virtual life sentences, according to the Sentencing Project. What’s more, people of color account for more than two-thirds of those incarcerated serving life sentences in the US. For Latino Americans, the disparity is smaller but still stark, particularly at the state level: in California, where a third of its prison population serves a life sentence, nearly 40% of those serving life sentences are Latino and a third are Black. Though women account for just 3% of the US prison population serving life sentences, the number of women serving such sentences grew 32% faster than men in the past decade.
When Rose Marie Dinkins reflects on the past five decades in SCI Muncy in Pennsylvania, she sees how the US criminal justice system doesn’t allow mercy for change. Dinkins, a Black mother of four, was 24 when, in 1972, she was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences after she killed two police officers during an armed robbery. Her children, then toddlers, were now adults with children and grandchildren. Dinkins recounted how she had great-grandchildren she had never seen.
Dinkins saw how “the American justice system values some lives more than others”, pointing to how Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd, will be eligible for parole.
“These discriminatory sentencing practices have gone on for far too long,” she added. “No one deserves to die in prison who has made the effort to change for the better.”
Bret Grote, legal director of the Abolitionist Law Center, one of the organizations submitting the complaint, told the Guardian that pressure from the United Nations and the international community could bolster the ongoing movement.
He and others pointed to the impact past condemnations by the UN of solitary confinement practices and imprisonment of youth on life sentences have had on influencing legislative change. The complaint to the UN arises ahead of a case in Pennsylvania challenging the state’s life sentences without parole statute for people convicted of a felony that led to someone’s death, even if the person who received the sentence had no direct connection to the death.
By the time Carter first entered prison at 23, he had struggled with drugs and saw himself growing up in a society “that taught me that my Blackness was a curse”. “It destroyed my self-esteem,” he told the Guardian. Over time, after years of self-reflection work, he believed he could get a second chance, even as he was relegated to what he saw as a death sentence. He turned to writing, publishing three novels and co-authoring a Northwestern Law Review article with Rachel Lopez entitled Redeeming Justice that makes the case for rehabilitation and redemption from imprisonment.
He eventually helped form the Right to Redemption Committee, which was established in 2011 and advocates for abolishing life without parole in Pennsylvania and beyond, and they wanted to file a petition to the United Nations calling for “death by incarceration” to be classified as a human rights violation. Now that he’s out of prison, he hopes to facilitate writing workshops and create “redemption hubs” for formerly incarcerated people to contribute back to society after release.
His release by commutation is a rarity in the US, especially for Black people seeking pardon: a 2011 study of pardons under former presidents George W Bush and Barack Obama found that white applicants had a 12% chance of acceptance while Black applicants had between 2 and 4% chance. And in Pennsylvania alone, Governor Tom Wolf commuted 53 life sentences over seven years, a far cry from the just six between 1995 and 2015.
“The idea of redemption should be something that the state facilitates as opposed to hindering. They hinder the idea of atonement by imprisoning people but also confining people in the worst expression of themselves for the rest of their lives, even though that’s not who they are,” Carter told the Guardian. “That’s a gross violation of human rights.”
