This article is published in partnership with Look 2 Justice, a nonprofit led by incarcerated people that advocates for justice, fairness and accountability in Washington’s criminal justice system. Kevin Light-Roth is a freelance writer currently incarcerated in a Washington state prison.
Washington state wanted Aaron Howerton to die in prison. Over nearly three decades of incarceration, every time he attempted to shorten his life sentence — filing appeals, petitioning the governor for clemency — prosecutors came out in fervent opposition, using the full weight of government to smother his efforts. Every time, the state won.
As the unrest and upheaval of the 2020 COVID pandemic gave way to the early tumult of 2021, Howerton had been in prison for 28 years. He was almost 50 years old and out of options. The national push to end mass incarceration, which gained momentum prior to the pandemic, had derailed as focus shifted to a different set of crises.
Confined to his living unit for months on end because of COVID lockdowns, he watched live news broadcasts of protestors clashing with police in riot gear, of an enraged mob storming the US Capitol. The outside world seemed to be falling apart.
Freedom began to look like an impossible dream.
“I never gave up, even when times were really, really hard,” said Howerton. “But I am a realist, too.”
Two months later, Washington state’s highest court shook the world of resentencing with a prison reform decision that would give Howerton a glimpse of hope for freedom.
Up until the Washington Supreme Court issued what would become universally known as the Monschke decision in 2021, judges had no discretion when sentencing children convicted of aggravated murder, regardless of any mitigating factors. Once the jury found an adolescent defendant guilty, only one outcome was possible: a mandatory term of life without parole.
This was true even for young people like Howerton, who was arrested at 18, had no criminal history and was convicted as an accessory to murder, not for murder. Judges often went on record to express disgust and frustration, enumerating the reasons they would have handed down a lesser sentence if doing so were legally permissible. They sometimes offered words of consolation before sentencing a teenager to die in prison. But their hands were tied.
The Monschke decision cut them free of those constraints in March 2021 — but it also created a bizarre legal predicament. To qualify for a resentencing hearing under Monschke, a prisoner must satisfy two prerequisites: he or she must have been under 21 when arrested, and he or she must have been convicted of aggravated murder, the highest severity of murder charge in Washington’s statutes. Incarcerated people who were as young as Kurtis Monschke at the time of their arrest, but were charged with a less serious crime, are barred from resentencing.
The prison reform bill HB 1317, which is currently scheduled for an executive session hearing on February 27 in the Appropriations Committee of the Washington state House of Representatives, seeks to change that. It provides an avenue for people who committed crime less than aggravated murder to have their sentences reduced.
Prison reform activists have been fighting for such legislation since the Monschke decision came down. This is the first year they have a chance, after years of urgent calls to make resentencing more equitable.
Different brains, different sentences
By 2021, appellate courts across the country had for years recognized that, in the words of US Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, “children are different” — children’s brains are not yet fully developed and this makes them more impulsive, less mature and uniquely susceptible to peer pressure. Courts had also routinely acknowledged that adolescents convicted of a crime are more likely than adult defendants to rehabilitate as they age. Because of these mitigating qualities, teenagers who entered the adult justice system before they turned 18 were given special due process protections, including one against the sentence of life without parole. The Monschke decision expanded that protection to cover adolescents who were over 18 but younger than 21.
“Developments in neuroscience have rendered a bright line at age 18 arbitrary,” Washington Justice Sheryl McCloud wrote in the opinion. Because “there is no meaningful cognitive difference between 17-year-olds” and 18-to 20-year-olds, “there is no constitutional difference either. … That is why mandatory sentences for youthful defendants are unconstitutional.”
And just like that, some incarcerated people were closer to walking free.
But nearly all incarcerated people who were teens and 20-year-olds when they were convicted of aggravated murder under the unconstitutional statute were still in custody — only the dead had completed their terms. They would all need to be transferred to county jails and resentenced.
Among the first back in court was Art Longworth. Incarcerated since 1985, Longworth was 20 years old when he received his life sentence after a murder conviction. Like Aaron Howerton, he had filed a number of appeals and each time faced unyielding opposition from prosecutors. “The state’s position was if I ever got out I would kill prosecutors,” said Longworth.
This was based, unknown to him, on statements made by two jailhouse informants, which were included in a file prosecutors had compiled on Longworth. At his resentencing hearing, the state was forced to disclose these documents, and Longworth at last understood why, during his many appeals, judges and prosecutors both seemed to be so swayed by animus and so unwilling to consider any argument he offered.
The judge for Longworth’s resentencing found the informants’ claims preposterous. After she reviewed Longworth’s accomplishments and heard testimony from his supporters in the community, she reduced his life sentence to 30 years. He had already served 37.
Free, he continued the work he began during his incarceration, advocating for foster youth at the nonprofit Treehouse. Longworth grew up in foster care and state facilities — for him, improving the lives of foster kids and keeping them out of prison is more crusade than occupation.
The people resentenced as a result of the Monschke prison reform “were part of a generation of kids called animals and superpredators,” said Anthony Blankenship, an expert on the criminal justice system at Washington nonprofit Civil Survival. Now that they’re out, he said, the argument that they were too dangerous to release has been proven untrue.
“The prison guard union and prosecutors and police all told the community these were the most dangerous people in the prison system. They were beyond redemption. But what did they do when they got out? They raised their kids. They became gang intervention specialists and community organizers. They’re small business owners, employing people. They made the community better and safer.”
Assault against a vending machine vs murder
According to Blankenship, however, the Monschke decision doesn’t allow incarcerated people who were under 21 when arrested and were convicted of any crime less severe than murder the same chance at resentencing.
Kale Vorak is one of them. During a tussle with loss prevention personnel at a grocery store in 2003, the gun tucked behind Vorak’s belt slipped free and went clattering across the floor. Both Vorak and the security guard scrambled for the pistol, and in the course of their struggle it went off, the bullet smashing into a nearby vending machine. No one was shot.
But Vorak entered a justice system that was still heavily influenced by superpredator theory and the notion that the children entering its courtrooms were intractably violent and essentially soulless. This is how Vorak’s sentencing judge viewed him.
“My judge called me a menace to the community and told me I should never be released,” said Vorak. That judge sentenced him to 45 years.
Eighteen years later, Vorak was still in a cell when he heard about the Monschke decision. At 36, he had already spent half his life in prison for the assault of a vending machine. He had completed an associate’s degree and numerous personal betterment programs. He facilitated a peer-led violence reduction class. Ten years had passed since his last rule violation. He was confident that if he could get back into court, he’d go home: on the spectrum of violent criminal acts, his was comparatively mild.
Then he learned the mildness of the crime was the problem.
“If you were a teenager convicted of burglary, you’re ineligible for a Monschke hearing,” said Blankenship. “You have to stay in prison. But if you were a teenager and you killed someone with a hatchet, Monschke probably applies to you. So under the Monschke standard, aggravating factors become mitigating factors and mitigating factors — like maybe you committed a nonviolent crime, or your crime was obviously impulsive and unplanned — become insurmountable obstacles to freedom.”
As that standard went into effect, the outcomes could be difficult to believe.
Eric Krueger petitioned for a new sentencing hearing a year after the Monschke decision came out. Back before his original sentencing, Krueger successfully argued for his life term to be reduced to 40 years — five years less than the sentence Kale Vorak was serving. Krueger was 20 when he was arrested, Vorak 18. Vorak accidentally shot a vending machine stocked with bottled water. Krueger was convicted of three counts of murder.
“You don’t need to be a legal scholar to appreciate how ludicrous this situation is,” Blankenship said. “I don’t care who you are, no rational person would say it makes sense to give someone who shot a vending machine more time than someone accused of killing people.”
Legislative inaction while people languish behind bars
Heather Kelly, a defense attorney based out of Seattle, has studied the Monschke decision and its precedents to their finest details. Although she believes all youthful defendants deserve the same opportunity as the people resentenced under Monschke, she also sees the logic behind the limited scope of the decision.
“Life without parole is really in a category of its own,” Kelly said. When courts review statutes concerning the imposition of life sentences, she said, they tend to conduct their analyses with singular gravity, and are more willing to overturn life sentences than lesser terms.
This is particularly true when it comes to the youngest defendants — the relevant factor, Kelly said, is usually “length of sentence rather than the severity of the crime.”
Because court opinions and public sentiment have both been “shifting in favor of more humane sentences for youth, first with the abolition of the death penalty [for juveniles] and then the elimination of mandatory life without parole” for juveniles, Kelly saw the Monschke decision as predictable.
As Americans move incrementally away from the retributive mass incarceration model, she said, and “rethink our goals for the system, it makes sense that we’d start by reconsidering the longest sentences”.
Regardless of who the Monschke decision affects, Aaron Howerton said, taking a second look at the sentences of prisoners who were incarcerated as kids should be an urgent enterprise. Most of them come from extraordinarily disadvantaged, and often abusive, backgrounds. The system, he said, should recognize the damage done to them, and seek to heal them instead of “throw[ing] children away into a system where they are victimized even further.”
Howerton explained that the youngest prisoners are the most vulnerable to abuse and the most impulsive, unthinkingly putting themselves in situations that culminate in violence while in prison. Those experiences tend to stay with them. Howerton went home immediately after his resentencing hearing, got married and started a towing business. But more than two years after his release, he still talked about his own incarceration and its horrors in the present tense: “I can’t even begin to explain what I’ve gone through in the nearly 30 years I’ve done.”
“You’re totally unformed at that age,” Art Longworth said. “Who you are has no bearing on who you will become. It’s wrong not to give everyone the opportunity, whatever they were convicted of. Especially since we know sentencing judges specifically didn’t used to consider youth.”
The problem, said Longworth, is that few outside of legal circles and the state legislature are aware of the strange sentencing disparities arising from the Monschke decision. Attorneys have tried to expand the decision to include everyone sentenced of any crime as a teen, but those attempts have failed, and lawmakers have shied from the task. “We need the legislature to correct this,” Longworth said. “But our legislators are allergic to change.”
“We’ve had three legislative sessions since Monschke,” Blankenship said. “Unfortunately our lawmakers can’t get anything done.”
Lawmakers’ failure to act has frustrated appellate courts to the point that they have begun openly calling out lawmakers in the opinions they issue. In State v Bartholomew, released on November 28, 2023, judges from Division Two of the Washington State Court of Appeals wrote that “it is critical that the legislature enact a statutory provision” to replace the sentencing statute ruled unconstitutional in Monschke. The judges stressed that without a new statute in place, courts have no legally valid way to sentence 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds convicted of aggravated murder.
“As we near the third anniversary of our Supreme Court’s decision in … Monschke,” the court wrote, “it is long overdue for the legislature to address this situation.” 36 legislators were unmoved. Division Two published its Bartholomew opinion a month prior to the 2024 legislative session. During that session, legislators had several bills to choose from that would have resolved the issues raised by Monschke, ranging from a minor statutory correction that addressed only sentencing for aggravated murder to an act making parole hearings available to every prisoner arrested prior to turning 25. Washington’s Democrat-controlled legislature passed none of them.
Right-wing politicians and lobbyists often talk about the crime people might commit if released from prison, Blankenship said, but “no one talks about the harm caused by keeping people like [Art Longworth] in prison. No one asks how many kids’ lives would be lost if he hadn’t got the chance to do the work he’s doing.”
Blankenship pointed out that labeling one segment of prisoners the most dangerous — as the state has consistently done when discussing those convicted of aggravated murder — is the same as saying other segments are less dangerous.
“The question,” said Blankenship, “now that we’ve seen the beneficial public safety outcome of releasing the so-called worst of the worst, is why would we hesitate to extend the same opportunity to people who police and prosecutors have themselves identified as less dangerous?”
Heather Kelly agreed, but even though she was encouraged by the progress made on justice reform by way of Monschke and other recent court rulings centered on adolescent brain development, she cautioned against excessive optimism. In her evaluation of the political and legal landscape, “resentencing those without life sentences still feels pretty far off.”
Governor Jay Inslee granted clemency to Kale Vorak late in 2023. He went home in April of last year. It had been 21 years. “The first day was super overwhelming,” said Vorak, but he adjusted quickly. He enrolled in school and wants to work in reentry services.
He continues to be haunted, however, by all the people he left behind.
“I think it’s completely ridiculous that someone could be stuck in prison because their crime wasn’t quite violent enough. There are a thousand guys trapped in the system who were kids when they got locked up, just like Monschke was, but they can’t go home because they didn’t commit enough crime? That shouldn’t be the thing holding anybody back.”
Read more of RANGE’s legislative coverage here.
Kevin Light-Roth is a member of Empowerment Avenue, a collective of incarcerated writers and artists, and his work has appeared in The Guardian, The Hill, The Seattle Times, and elsewhere. Connect with him on X at @KevinLightRoth.
