Berks County Bar Association The Berks Barrister Spring 2018 - 34

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Beating the Drum of Justice
Continued from page 33

Miller v. Alabama and LWOP

Bryan Stevenson Beats the Drum of Justice

Although it is not described in Just Mercy, part of Stevenson's
growing legacy stems from his advocacy in the Miller case.
Berks County alone had eight cases affected by Miller and its
Pennsylvania progeny. Cases involving juveniles sentenced
to life without parole dated back to the 1980s and many saw
the convicted defendants reaching middle age behind bars for
crimes committed as teenagers.
I had the opportunity in recent years to represent Michael
Boettlin, who was serving a mandatory LWOP sentence at the
State Correctional Institution at Smithfield after having been
convicted of first degree murder in 1988. Boettlin has been
incarcerated since July 29, 1987 when he was 16 years old. The
case garnered a considerable amount of local attention due to
the heinous nature of the murder that was committed. Boettlin's
co-defendant was an adult and the main actor. Regardless, the
adult co-defendant took a plea deal and agreed to testify against
Boettlin at trial. Boettlin was sentenced to the mandatory
LWOP on August 15, 1988.
Due to Stevenson's success in the Miller case, followed by
the Pennsylvania cases permitting the ruling to be applied
retroactively, Boettlin and the hundreds of other juvenile lifers
in Pennsylvania had another opportunity at sentencing. With
the assistance of the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia,
I crafted a sentencing memorandum focusing on Boettlin's
experiences while incarcerated over the past 30 years. Boettlin
was given a new sentence in October, 2017, which will allow
for a meaningful opportunity for parole in about five years. As
fortune would have it, I was reading Just Mercy while preparing
for resentencing last summer and found it be incredibly
motivational.

As a young lawyer starting out in Atlanta, Stevenson
describes being the target of racial profiling by police. As he
sat in his car outside the apartment listening to the end of a
favorite song on the radio, he notices an Atlanta Police SWAT
vehicle park nearby. Stevenson gets out of his car to address
the officers only to have a gun drawn on him by one officer
as another slams him into his car. Through a combination
of his legal training and his upbringing in a low income area
of Delaware, he has the presence of mind to calmly say, "It's
OK, I live here." Police then conduct an illegal search of
his vehicle and run his name and license, under the guise of
investigating reports of a local break-in. After police find
nothing illegal, Stevenson asks for an explanation. He's told,
"We're letting you go, you should be happy."
Stevenson, still outraged by this example of racial
profiling and police abuses, began speaking out to the
African-American community at churches, organizations and
youth centers to educate others about how to handle police
interactions. After one talk, an older man in a wheelchair
approaches Stevenson and asks him rhetorically, "Do you
know what you are doing?" Stevenson stood silently, baffled
by the question before the man tells him, "You're beating the
drum of justice." Thirty years later, Stevenson is still beating
the drum, and our profession and our country are better for it.

END OF SPECIAL SECTION
34 | Berks Barrister

Daniel C. Nevins, Esquire,
is a principal of Ebner,
Nevins & McAllister, LLC
where he practices criminal
defense law. He is a member
of the Berks County Bar
Association's Board of
Directors.
http://berksbar.org/
Berks County Bar Association The Berks Barrister Spring 2018

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Berks County Bar Association The Berks Barrister Spring 2018
