‘They Got Her This Time, Son’
This article is a collaboration between The Atlantic and The Marshall Project.
On September 12, 2018, the five adult children of Debbie Liles waited in the prosecutor’s office in Jacksonville, Florida, to meet the man who one year earlier had bludgeoned their mother to death with a golf club.
Michelle, 38, had brought what she called her “madwoman” binder of colorfully highlighted police reports about the murder. Have you seen the crime-scene photos of our mom’s brain leaking onto her kitchen floor? she wanted to ask the killer. Because we have. So you should too.
Sitting on a windowsill, Dana, 42, clutched a framed poster of a space shuttle that she planned to show the man. On the back, Debbie, a grandmother of eight, had written a note to one of Dana’s sons, who struggled with loneliness as a boy. “This picture makes me think of you so much,” she wrote, “a rocket shooting up to God.”
Their brother Gerald, 34, the philosopher of the family, sat thinking about a court document he’d read that detailed the perpetrator’s childhood. Repeatedly abandoned as a toddler with no food for days at a time. Found wandering on a highway at age 4. Sibling died in a house fire. Sexually abused, whipped with extension cords, placed in more than 20 different foster homes. Attempted suicide at age 13 because, he said, “nobody wanted him.” Gerald wanted to believe that this man was just broken, not beyond repair. Your life has value, he hoped to tell him.
After a while, their father, Mike, joined them and their other siblings, Rachel, 43, and Rockey, 26. Wearing his Sunday suit, Mike could hardly keep his head up as he walked through security—the violent killing of his wife of 41 years had hobbled him physically and mentally. He placed his tattered King James Bible on the conveyor belt, planning to read a passage to her murderer, perhaps from Matthew 5:39: “But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” More than anything, Mike wanted answers. Even after a police investigation and a year of pretrial hearings, he was plagued by questions. Did you have an accomplice? Did Debbie try to get away? Why us?
The defendant had agreed to tell Mike and his family everything about the murder and to plead guilty. In return, he would be spared the death penalty and instead spend his life in prison—but only if the Lileses felt satisfied that he had told the truth. This arrangement, brokered by Jacksonville’s newly elected state attorney, was essentially unprecedented in the history of homicide prosecutions in the United States.
[Graeme Wood: Life in prison, or the death penalty?]
Jacksonville, the murder capital of Florida, seems an unlikely place to find a more merciful response to homicide. Under the leadership of Angela Corey, the state attorney there from 2009 through 2016, hundreds of children—disproportionately Black children—were charged as adults, and more people were sent to death row than in nearly any other jurisdiction in the country. She once made national headlines for charging a 12-year-old boy with first-degree murder, prompting a cover story in The Nation headlined “Is Angela Corey the Cruelest Prosecutor in America?”
In the 2016 election, Corey was ousted by Melissa Nelson, a younger and significantly more charismatic Republican, who campaigned on a platform of being “tough but fair.” Hardly one of the so-called progressive prosecutors promising to reduce punishments for crimes in places like Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco, she supports the death penalty and has boasted about her record of putting away “drug traffickers, robbers, rapists, and murderers,” including a man who chopped a couple to death with an ax.
Yet Nelson, the daughter of a sheriff’s deputy, is a believer in alternative sentencing. During her campaign, she used
