"I ran back into the room, and he was..." Spence paused, unable to speak for a moment. His muscular jaw flexed beneath a blonde beard that didn't quite cover the thick scar curving from his eye to his cheek. "He was dead. I don't have words for that moment. I was devastated. I called for an ambulance. We were arrested."
The robbery in which Spence participated resulted in the victim's death.
Under California's felony-murder rule, Spence would be found guilty of murder if the district attorney proved that he had intended to commit a robbery.
Spence was a juvenile and, at that time, the law placed the burden on the juvenile's defense to prove in a special hearing to consider whether he was eligible to be considered as a juvenile by the court. (California's Proposition 57 changed this practice, also known as 'direct filing').
In court, a Sacramento Country Sheriff escorted Spence to what is called a 707 (b) hearing to determine whether the 16-year-old was eligible to be treated like a 16-year-old child.
The court, according to Spence, can consider a juvenile an adult if it finds any of the following: a crime is too severe, the juvenile can't be rehabilitated by the time he or she is 25-years-old, the juvenile's crime shows an adult amount of sophistication, or the juvenile has a prior record.
Spence had never been arrested, but the district attorney argued that, because Spence used drugs, he was a criminal living a criminal lifestyle. The district attorney also argued that Spence had
shown adult sophistication when he used a butter knife to jimmy the door to his mother’s bedroom -- from where he would take the gun with which Thomas eventually killed the victim. This was enough, according to Spence, for the law to try him as an adult.
The court tried Spence as an adult and sentenced him to 25 years to life.
“The moment after I committed my crime, I was committed to change my life,” Spence said, rejecting the court’s opinion he couldn’t be rehabilitated. “After the court sentenced me, I eventually arrived at High Desert State Prison in 1998. It was a violent, maximum security prison and thoughts of changing my life went out the window. Life became about surviving.”
High Desert didn’t offer the therapy and peer counselling Spence needed to address his traumas and turn his life onto a positive course. Just as he’d done in high school, he found acceptance and solace in the prison drug culture.
Although he was making irresponsible decisions, Spence still managed to make gradual changes in his life.
“I was a programmer,” he said.
For incarcerated people, programmer is a term that designates a person who practices self-improvement and doesn’t cause problems for correctional officers. “But I still had one out of the right kind of lifestyle. I was still seeking acceptance in ways that devalued my worth. It took me 15 years to realize that I was behaving in the same way that had caused me to commit my crime when I was 16.”
Today Spence works with youth offenders – people, like him, who committed their
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