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Question:
How does Cyntoia fit in with the "superpredator myth?"

Cyntoia fits the persona of "superpredator" when prosecutors said she committed cold-blooded murder. She was referred to as a criminal without any hesitation to commit the crime. She was treated as an adult at the age of 16 and eventually transferred to an adult prison. During her first trial, her mental health was not taken into consideration. Many fought for her retrial to be reopened and be heard once again with more investigation.
Her trauma of sexual abuse was unrecognized and it affected her future life decisions.
She was a victim of being sentenced to life without parole. The term superpredator closed the idea of the possibility of other factors that could have led to this crime such as mental health.  Her new case was able to present she had fetal alcohol syndrome. "Superpredator" disregards a person's childhood trauma and situations that they themselves could not control. Law in itself continues to evolve and include new data in medicine, science, and technology to figure out more about juvenile crime/development.

Question:
What are the common themes between Amiee and Cyntoia?

The common themes between Aimee and Cyntoia are family dysfunction and mental health and abuse. Both juveniles experienced abuse that caused them to for past experiences to trigger when confronted with a similar situation. Aimee lived in an abusive home and she experienced being raped by one of her older brother's friends. Cyntoia experienced multiple rapes and physical and mental abuse that nobody kept a record of.

Family dysfunction with Aimee is that whenever Aimee came home her brother's friends continued to be welcome in their home. Aimee didn't feel safe coming home after probation. Cyntoia was surrounded by violence her biological mother was an addict to alcohol and illegal drugs.

Amiee was diagnosed as bipolar. She was given the opportunity to be able to do school and get back on the right track. However, Aimee fell back into using drugs and leaving school. Cyntoia suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome. Her biological mother admitted in the film that she used to drink a lot during her pregnancy with Cyntoia.

Question:
How is Cyntoia's case an example of the way women are treated in self-defense cases?

Cyntoia's case as an example of the way women are treated in self-defense cases because the court viewed only the negatives. For example prostitution, a juvenile, and because she was a troubled kid. The court didn't take into consideration her mental health and why her actions were the way they were. Cyntoia was a victim of previous abuse and wasn't given the opportunity for restoration. She was sentenced to life and when given the opportunity she was able to accomplish so much. Cynotia for being a victim of sex trafficking, abuse, rape, and poor mental health came across a situation she needed to survive.

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"Lawyers seek Justice For Women Jailed For Killing Abusive Partner"

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"Lawyers seek Justice For Women Jailed For Killing Abusive Partner"

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Week 13

This article published by "The Guardian" gives us an insight into 20 incarcerated women cases. Their lawyers are now seeking justice for killing their abusive partners. These women explain their horror of living in fear with their significant other. For example "He had strangled me at the bottom of the stairs and that frightened me because you can get punched in the face or your hand broken, but I had never lost my breath before, she recalled" ( The Guardian, 1). Traumatic events as such trigger these victims and could affect their mental health.

As these women fought to survive with their partners they also continue fighting when they are on trial. These women unfairly convicted are seen as criminals meant to serve life in prison for choosing to survive. A surprising statistic stated, "new data shows that between April 2008 and March 2018, 108 men were killed by women they had a relationship with" ( The Guardian. 2). This statistic brought forward evidence that these women had experienced violence or some type of abuse from their partners before.

Among these cases, 43% of the women were convicted of murder and 46% of manslaughter. The most common method of killing was by stabbing their partner. Females tend to use weapons more than male partners. In-court weapons add more time in years in prison. These women kill as a last resort "It had a really big impact on me because I never wanted what happened to me as a child happening to my son and it did. Justice wasn't done" (The Guardian, 3).

This article states if a woman pleads guilty their chances to enter a plea are slim to none. It denies them access to being able to say it was for self-defense. This article concludes by acknowledging that the victims of domestic abuse has a horrible impact on them. Moreover, Prosecutors should carefully analyze all pieces of evidence such as mental health.

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t was a specific moment in which she thought she might die that drove Stella to the brink. "He had strangled me at the bottom of the stairs and that frightened me because you can get punched in the face or your hand broken, but I had never lost my breath before," she recalled.

For Nicole, she was "pushed over the edge" when violence by her partner triggered a post-traumatic response to historic abuse by other men. "I was getting flashbacks of abuse ... everything came to a head and I just lost it."

For others, like Cathy, it was the stark belief they were beyond the protection of the law and could see no other way out. Put bluntly, it was a matter of survival.

The cases of these female prisoners are among those examined in a report that analyses how the justice system treated women who killed their male abusers. It concludes that both the law and the way it is applied in England and Wales means women are being unfairly convicted.

Failures to explore properly the abuse suffered by women who kill mean they could be convicted of murder instead of manslaughter, or the appropriate defences may not be put forward, the study found.

Now, lawyers who believe dozens of women could be serving time in prison for unsafe murder convictions are assessing at least 20 cases where there may be grounds for appeal.

This comes after Farieissia Martin, convicted of killing Kyle Farrell in 2015, had her murder conviction quashed in December following support from Justice for Women, co-authors of the report. She is now facing a re-trial.

Harriet Wistrich, the founder of the Centre for Women's Justice, said: "Our research investigates why, despite an apparent increase in the understanding of domestic abuse, we still see so many miscarriages of justice with women who are themselves victims, serving life imprisonment for choosing to survive."

New data shows that between April 2008 and March 2018, 108 men were killed by women they had been in a relationship with - either at the time of the killing or some time previously. In comparison, nearly eight times as many women (840) were killed by partners or ex-partners during the same period.

Researchers looked at 92 cases where women had killed men over the same decade and found that in 77% of them the woman had experienced violence or abuse from the deceased. "This is likely to be an underestimate as some women will never disclose abuse," explained Wistrich, who has represented more than 10 women in their appeals against murder convictions.

She said: "While hundreds of women subjected to violence and coercive control were killed by their partners, most of the small number of women who killed men were driven to do so after suffering abuse. Many were imprisoned for long periods at great cost to them and their families."

Of the 92 cases, 43% of the women were convicted of murder and 46% of manslaughter - just six were acquitted. Of those convicted of murder, 33% were sentenced to 20 years or more in prison and 35% to 15 years or more.

In 71% of cases the defendants had stabbed the deceased. Women are more likely to use a weapon than men who kill their female partners - because they tend to be physically smaller - but use of a weapon results in longer prison sentences.

Researchers interviewed 20 women between the ages of 23 and 65 from a variety of backgrounds who were convicted for killing abusive men.

They also spoke to 14 lawyers who had represented or prosecuted women in these cases and examined 23 domestic homicide reviews and 17 case files involving women defendants who had applied to the Criminal Cases Review Commission.

Women who kill their partner or ex-partner often do so as a last resort, researchers found. They noted a failure to address men's violence throughout the justice system, from policing and legal representation to the courts and prison service.

The women in 19 of the 23 domestic homicide review cases had experienced historic abuse from a man other than the one they killed.

Nicole said her ex-husband had abused her children and revealed she had also been abused as a child. "He admitted it and got a caution...It had a really big impact on me because I never wanted what happened to me as a child happening to my sonsand it did. Justice wasn't done."

In Cathy's case, non-molestation orders had been issued against her ex-partner and she had moved house to evade him. Police had been called to 54 separate incidents involving the couple but on six occasions charges were dropped against her ex.

On the night she fatally stabbed him, he had broken into her home and told her to remove her clothes. She later disclosed she thought he was going to rape her. After initially being charged with murder, she was convicted of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility - one of the partial defences.

But legal experts say too often a lack of expertise or mistakes made early in a woman's case mean the proper defences are not advanced.

After Stella was arrested for killing her partner, police recorded that she was "shell shocked". She said: "They told me he was gone. I couldn't take it in and said, 'I have got to be with him.' I couldn't imagine living with that... I was very suicidal [but] they thought I was fit for interview straight away."

Dr Catherine Durkin, a forensic psychiatrist for the NHS, says women who have suffered long-term abuse will often be in a state of severe shock when they enter the criminal justice system.

"The stress of retelling the circumstances of their arrest in prolonged interviews and at trial can be so triggering of their underlying trauma that they experience dissociative or amnesic states.

"This can impair their ability to recall information about the offence, but also to disclose the often highly distressing circumstances of past abuse," explained Durkin, who carries out assessments on female prisoners.

Women may struggle to engage with police and solicitors in the immediate aftermath of the killing but the details they share at that point can have important consequences for their trial. Defence lawyers interviewed said even when abuse was disclosed early there were cases where they believed a murder prosecution had been pursued inappropriately.

One explained: "I have acted in several cases where there is significant evidence of history of abuse on the defendant which impacted her mental health and supported a partial defence to murder, where the CPS [Crown Prosecution Servce] could have charged with manslaughter and/or accepted a plea but have chosen to fight it."

Pleading guilty to manslaughter can avoid a murder conviction but entering a plea in this way can deny a woman access to the full defence of self-defence and the chance of being acquitted.

Stacey Hyde, a troubled teenager who had suffered neglect and abuse as a child, was wrongly convicted of murdering Vincent Francis in 2010. She stabbed him after he attacked her friend, who the prosecution acknowledged had been subjected to violence by Francis on 27 previous occasions.

Hyde appealed on the basis of fresh psychiatric evidence and offered a plea of manslaughter, which the evidence supported, according to her lawyers. "However the CPS was determined to pursue murder at retrial and opposed bail," explained Wistrich. The jury later acquitted Hyde on the grounds of self-defence and she walked free having served six years imprisonment from age 17.

Wistrich added: "In my experience the Crown will pursue murder convictions even following a successful appeal and regardless of compelling evidence of mitigation."

Just six women out of 92 were acquitted on the basis of self-defence while 14 had tried to run self-defence as part of their trial for murder and were convicted. The defence is "risky" according to some lawyers, and campaigners are calling for an amendment to this law to be added to the Domestic Abuse bill currently going through the House of Lords.

But legislative reforms are limited without specialist understanding of domestic abuse across the justice system.The report, Women Who Kill: how the state criminalises women we might otherwise be burying, recommends mandatory training for police, lawyers and judges, especially around coercive control.

Sally Challen was the first woman to have her murder conviction quashed in the wake of new coercive control laws which came into force in England and Wales in 2015. She killed her husband Richard in 2010 after four decades of being controlled and bullied by him. She was jailed for life with a minimum term of 22 years, later reduced to 18.

But in a groundbreaking appeal judges heard new psychiatric evidence framing her case in the context of her husband's controlling behaviour. Sally, who pleaded guilty to manslaughter, walked free after nine years due to time already served. She said: "Many women who are in prison today serving life sentences for murder have not had the domestic abuse they experienced properly explored during trial."

Louisa Rolfe, assistant commissioner of the National Police Chiefs' Council lead for domestic abuse, said officers receive training on coercive control, adding: "We have a responsibility to investigate every violent death, and consider all the evidence, including previous history, before we seek a decision from the CPS on whether a person should be charged and with what offence.

"Our understanding of the devastating impact of living within an abusive relationship is developing all the time and we always seek to learn from any previous incidents, and we always seek to learn from any previous incidents" she said.

A CPS spokesperson said: "We recognise the devastating impact of domestic abuse on victims, and prosecutors take all relevant factors into account when deciding the appropriate charge. Medical evidence, including on mental health, forms a key part of our considerations in these kinds of cases.

"Every prosecution is kept under continuous review and, where there is consensus that a partial defence is available, we are unlikely to proceed with murder charges. However, experts will often disagree on this point and these matters may then be set before a jury to decide."
*Some names have been changed to protect identities

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Lawyers seek justice for women jailed for killing abusive partners

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t was a specific moment in which she thought she might die that drove Stella to the brink. "He had strangled me at the bottom of the stairs and that frightened me because you can get punched in the face or your hand broken, but I had never lost my breath before," she recalled.

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Me Facing Life: The Cyntoia Brown Story 

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Me Facing Life: The Cyntoia Brown Story 

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week 13

Cyntoia Brown has an inspiring yet tragic story thru her experiences in the juvenile justice system. This documentary filmed in 2004 explains the story of her arrest for committing murder. She was found guilty of killing a forty-three-year-old man named Johnny Allen. This film reveals her past and presents thru a span of six years of filming Cynotia.

At the age of 16, Cyntoia was a sex trafficking victim she lived in a hotel with a guy referred to as "kut throat". When she met Johnny Allen he told her he would pay to have sex with her. Mr. Allen took her to his home and that is where Cyntoia fired the weapon as an act of self-defense. She believed her life was in danger when she thought he was grabbing a weapon under the bed.

Cyntoia was tried as an adult and convicted of first-degree murder. Thru her trial countless times was she viewed and spoken of as a cold-blooded killer. Her trial ended with the decision of a life sentence in the year of 2006. As Cynthia's story became popular with the support of celebrities and others she was granted clemency.

Her mothers played a role in her childhood development. Ellenette Brown is Cyntoias adoptive mother describes Cyntoia's childhood of being sexually assaulted for many years by a neighbor. Ellenette expressed that her and Cyntoia didnt have the strongest bond when she reached her teenage years.
On the other hand, her biolgoical mother stated she drank alcohol and used drugs thru her prenancy with Cyntoia. This could have been the risk factor that caused her behavior. She gave Cyntoia up for adopiton when she knew she realized she couldnt take care of her.

During Cyntoia's imprisonment, she was able to accomplish her high school diploma, associate's degree, and a bachelor's degree. Her mission once released was to be able to help other women and girls by sharing her story on suffering abuse, and exploitation.

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Superpredator: The Media Myth That Demonized a Generation of Black Youth (The Marshall Project)

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Superpredator: The Media Myth That Demonized a Generation of Black Youth (The Marshall Project)

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week 12

In this article, John DiIulio defines a superpredator as "a young juvenile criminal who is so impulsive, so remorseless that he can kill and rape without giving it a second thought"
This word has been used by politicians and has caused great fear in many communities as the word became popular. "It has a profound effect on the way in which judges and prosecutors viewed my clients" ( Bogert, 1). This word gave meaning to a juvenile's trial.

A Professor stated that it is social class and adults that are responsible to teach right from wrong. John warned the public by stating that by the year 2000 there would be a significant increase in juvenile crime ( murders, rapists, and muggers ). However, that statement was false in the year 2000 juvenile murder arrests decreased by two-thirds. Juveniles were being prosecuted for crimes to many years of incarceration. For example, a 19 yr old in 1997 was found by the police trapped on a bridge, weapons on him, and thrown into prison for 21 years. Later on to find out that he was wrongly convicted of a crime by faulty eyewitnesses.  Juveniles were no longer looked at as children but seen and treated as adults.

The word superpredator was a way to keep describing the upcoming wave of juvenile killers. The word was being used without questions and it appeared in magazines, articles, and newspapers. As politicians prepare for their campaigns they would promise more law enforcement and tough penalties for juvenile offenders. This shut the doors to looking into the potential reasons WHY juveniles committed crimes. For example "the greater availability of guns " (Gobert, 2). Moreover, as juvenile crime continued the legislature made executive decisions to take away children's protections in juvenile court.
This word brought negative actions, thoughts, and concerns and this word was the incorrect verbiage to describe a Juvenile.

Statements :
- " Should we cage the new breed of vicious kids?"
- "Todays newborns will become tomorrow's super-predators"

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The epithet is a quarter-century old, but it still has sting: "He called them superpredators," Donald Trump insisted in his final debate with Joe Biden. "He said that, he said it. Superpredators."

"I never, ever said what he accused me of saying," Biden protested. While there is no record of Biden using the phrase, much of the harsh anti-crime legislation embraced by both parties in the 1990s continues to be a hot-button issue to this day. From the moment the term was born, 25 years ago this month, "superpredator" had a game-changing potency, derived in part from the avalanche of media coverage that began almost immediately.

"It was a word that was constantly in my orbit," said Steve Drizin, a Chicago lawyer who defended teenagers in the 1990s. "It had a profound effect on the way in which judges and prosecutors viewed my clients."

An academic named John J. DiIulio Jr. coined the term for a November 1995 cover story in The Weekly Standard, a brand-new magazine of conservative political opinion that hit pay dirt with the provocative coverline, " The Coming of the Super-Predators."

Then a young professor at Princeton University, DiIulio was extrapolating from a study of Philadelphia boys that calculated that 6 percent of them accounted for more than half the serious crimes committed by the whole cohort. He blamed these chronic offenders on "moral poverty ... the poverty of being without loving, capable, responsible adults who teach you right from wrong."

DiIulio warned that by the year 2000 an additional 30,000 young "murderers, rapists, and muggers" would be roaming America's streets, sowing mayhem. "They place zero value on the lives of their victims, whom they reflexively dehumanize as just so much worthless 'white trash,'" he wrote.

But who was doing the dehumanizing? Just a few years before, the news media had introduced the terms "wilding" and "wolf pack" to the national vocabulary, to describe five teenagers-four Black and one Hispanic-who were convicted and later exonerated of the rape of a woman in New York's Central Park.

"This kind of animal imagery was already in the conversation," said Kim Taylor-Thompson, a law professor at New York University. "The superpredator language began a process of allowing us to suspend our feelings of empathy towards young people of color."

The "superpredator" theory, besides being a racist trope, was not borne out in crime statistics. Juvenile arrests for murder -and juvenile crime generally-had already started falling when DiIulio's article was published. By 2000, when tens of thousands more children were supposed to be out there mugging and killing, juvenile murder arrests had fallen by two-thirds.

It failed as a theory, but as fodder for editorials, columns and magazine features, the term "superpredator" was a tragic success-with an enormous, and lasting, human toll.

Terrance Lewis was 19 and returning from work in 1997 when Philadelphia police trapped him on a bridge, guns drawn, and arrested him for a murder that he spent 21 years in prison trying to prove he did not commit. Only last year did the judge finally throw out his homicide conviction, citing faulty eyewitness testimony.

"I'm a recipient of the backlash of that superpredator rhetoric," said Lewis, now 42. "The media believed in the rhetoric. All the coverage from back in that era was to amplify that rhetoric."

DiIulio's big idea wasn't original. His mentor as a graduate student at Harvard, the influential political scientist James Q. Wilson, had been warning for years about a new breed of conscience-less teen killers. ("I didn't go to Harvard," DiIulio told one interviewer. "I went to Wilson.")

But DiIulio was a clever popularizer who quickly became a darling of the think-tank circuit-and of the media. The Marshall Project's review of 40 major news outlets in the five years after his Weekly Standard article shows the neologism popping up nearly 300 times, and that is an undercount.

There was the Philadelphia Inquirer's fawning magazine profile of DiIulio, who grew up there. (Until recently, Pennsylvania had the country's largest population of people still serving life sentences without parole-for crimes they committed as children.) There was also a lengthy, mostly gentle New Yorker profile; a spot on The New York Times' op-ed page; and an appearance on the CBS Evening News.

The media exposure led to conference invitations, which led to more media exposure. The word "superpredator" became so much a part of the national vocabulary that journalists and talk show hosts used it without reference to DiIulio-including even Oprah Winfrey, in a segment on "Good Morning America."

The Weekly Standard's founding editor, Bill Kristol, now downplays the blockbuster cover story of his defunct magazine. But he admits: "It struck a nerve. And it caught on."

The notion of an impending wave of teenage savagery caught on among criminologists, too.

"How did these ideas get supported and weaponized throughout the decades? Academics also played a role," says Jeremy Travis, then at the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Justice Department, and now at Arnold Ventures, a charitable foundation from which The Marshall Project receives funding.

James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University, says he never used the term "superpredator," but he warned in numerous media appearances about the coming teen crime wave, and makes no apologies. "One of the things about forecasts is that they're sometimes wrong," he said.

Meanwhile, having sparked the media's feeding frenzy, DiIulio soon started sounding doubtful. "The term 'superpredator' has become, I guess, part of the lexicon," he told NPR in the summer of 1996. The word had "sort of gotten out and gotten away from me."

Of the 281 media mentions of "superpredators" we found from 1995 to 2000, more than three in five used the term without questioning its validity. The remainder included writers who contested DiIulio's thesis in op-ed articles of their own, readers writing outraged letters, or journalists quoting a number of dissenters in their articles.

Although it made the news pages, the term "superpredator" appeared most often in commentaries and editorials, and in newsmagazines. An emerging "journalism of ideas" would gather force through the 1990s as cable television and the internet took hold. News outlets that once focused on telling their readers the basic facts now felt they had to explain, in the words of one of Newsweek's advertising slogans, "Why it happened. What it means."

In January 1996, the magazine asked in a headline, "'Superpredators' Arrive: Should we cage the new breed of vicious kids?" (Full disclosure: We both worked at Newsweek in the 1990s, and regret not protesting its crime coverage at the time.)

It's commonplace to blame local news media for exaggerated crime fears, especially local TV with its famous dictum, "if it bleeds, it leads." But crime coverage went national in the 1990s. According to one study, at the beginning of the decade, the three national news networks ran fewer than 100 crime stories a year on their nightly news broadcasts. By the end of the '90s, they were running more than 500. On NBC News, a February 1993 segment on "Nightly News" focused on teen killers in the suburbs and rural areas, while one in December 1994 warned of a crime wave as America's teen population swelled.

The record doesn't show then-President Bill Clinton using the word "superpredator," but Hillary Clinton did as first lady. And he certainly helped amplify crime as a national story. Political reporters were dazzled by his legerdemain in stealing a traditionally Republican issue, promising more law enforcement on the streets and tougher penalties for juvenile offenders.

The 1994 Crime Bill, a package of mostly draconian federal laws, was national news. And Sen. Robert Dole, the Kansas Republican running against Clinton in 1996, with the economy humming and the Cold War over, needed an issue to hammer. When he talked about "superpredators," that made national news, too.

As some criminologists explained at the time, what drove juvenile homicides in the 1990s wasn't a new breed of violent teens. It was probably the greater availability of guns, making fights and gang rivalries among kids more lethal than before, said Franklin Zimring, a Berkeley law school professor. But to paraphrase Mark Twain, the truth was still putting on its shoes while the "superpredators" ran out the door.

State legislatures were already busy dismantling a century's worth of protections for juveniles when the fear of "superpredators" gave them a new push. New York had started the trend in 1978 after 15-year-old Willie Bosket killed two people on the subway. The media led that charge, too: Gov. Hugh Carey read a sensationalized story about Bosket in the New York Daily News ("He's 15 and He Likes to Kill-Because It's Fun"), and immediately called a special session of the legislature that stripped children of many protections of juvenile court.

Illinois followed suit, starting in 1982. At the end of Denver's media-driven " summer of violence " panic in 1993, Gov. Roy Romer pushed through an "iron-fist" overhaul of Colorado's juvenile justice system. By the end of the 1990s, virtually every state had toughened its laws on juveniles: sending them more readily into adult prisons; gutting and sidelining family courts; and imposing mandatory sentences, including life sentences without parole.

Readers who had already been subjected to a steady stream of horrific stories about child killers were primed for the "superpredator" theory. In Chicago, gruesome murders by children rocked the city in the early 1990s, including the case of Robert Sandifer, an 11-year-old whose love for cookies earned him the nickname "Yummy." He was being sought for the murder of a 14-year-old girl in late summer 1994, when he was himself murdered by brothers Cragg and Derrick Hardaway, ages 16 and 14.

The local crime became a national story. Time magazine put Yummy's picture on the cover: "So Young To Kill. So Young To Die." By the time Derrick Hardaway was sentenced in adult court in 1996, at the height of the "superpredator" frenzy, he got 45 years in prison for Yummy's murder. Not for pulling the trigger, but for driving his brother's getaway car.

"I hate the media," said Hardaway, who was released in 2016, in an interview last month. "I feel like I was convicted through the media."

"The reaction was, the way to stop this crime problem is to hit 'em hard," said Don Wycliff, then the editor of the Chicago Tribune editorial pages. "I don't recall a lot of persuasive dissenting voices at that time."

When the "superpredator" concept was born a year after Yummy's death, the Trib was all in. Just 10 days after DiIulio's piece, the editorial board cited him in its argument for bringing back orphanages. A prominent and widely syndicated columnist for the Tribune, Bob Greene, advised readers to "stop thinking of the superpredators as merely some projected future phenomenon [but] something based on current fact." The Tribune even devoted its entire op-ed page to reprinting DiIulio's Weekly Standard piece.

"What can I say?" Wycliff said. "It seemed to explain a lot of things."

The Chicago Tribune would later publish exceptional work uncovering years of police abuse and misconduct by local prosecutors. But reporter Maurice Possley said his sources sometimes asked, "Where was the Tribune when all this bad stuff was going on in these courtrooms?"

Journalists of color say that a lack of diversity in American newsrooms influenced criminal justice coverage. Black reporters at the Tribune were so dismayed by their White editors' narrow outlook that in the early 1990s, one of them, Dahleen Glanton, organized a minivan ride to the city's Black neighborhoods.

"There were top editors who had never been to the South Side of Chicago," she remembers. (The editors most directly responsible for the Chicago Tribune's op-ed page when it reprinted DiIulio's piece, Wycliff and Marcia Lythcott, are both Black. Neither one remembers making the decision to run it. "I hated that term," Lythcott says now.)

By the late 1990s, the "superpredator" mania was dying down. "Young killers remain well-publicized rarity," a Tribune headline said in February 1998. "'Superpredators' fail to grow into forecast proportions."

In 2001, DiIulio admitted his theory had been mistaken, saying ''I'm sorry for any unintended consequences." In 2012, he even signed on to a brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court supporting a successful effort to limit life sentences without parole for juveniles. (DiIulio's wife said he was not available for comment for this article due to ill health.)

As the Biden-Trump debates showed, politicians now feel the need to backpedal from the term. When she was running for president in 2016, Hillary Clinton was pressed to apologize for using "superpredators" 20 years before.

Few media outlets have apologized for "superpredators." The Los Angeles Times conceded in September that "an insidious problem ... has marred the work of the Los Angeles Times for much of its history ... a blind spot, at worst an outright hostility, for the city's nonwhite population." Indeed, our analysis shows that the L.A. Times used "superpredator" more than any other major newspaper. But it was hardly alone in branding a generation of young men of color as animals and paving the way for harsher juvenile justice.

"If we don't acknowledge the impact of what past stories did," said law professor Taylor-Thompson, "I'm not sure the media's behavior will change."

Carroll Bogert is president of The Marshall Project. LynNell Hancock is professor emerita at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Additional research was provided by Kio Herrera and Noya Kohavi, and was sponsored by a grant from the Brown Institute for Media Innovation.
Source: Non-scientific review of all mentions of "superpredator" and its variations in 40 major U.S. news outlets from 1995 to 2000.

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Superpredator: The Media Myth That Demonized a Generation of Black Youth

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The epithet is a quarter-century old, but it still has sting: "He called them superpredators," Donald Trump insisted in his final debate with Joe Biden. "He said that, he said it. Superpredators." "I never, ever said what he accused me of saying," Biden protested.

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week 11:

A 2008 film featuring a juvenile's experience in the system.  This story takes place in a span of over 4 years and it uncovers Aimee's struggles, thoughts, and actions. She falls into using illegal drugs at multiple points of her journey in recovery. Her misbehavior resulted in many incarcerations and releases.

Aimee received therapy sessions and parole counselings. She was able to build a relationship with her teacher Ms.Lewis and her parole officer Mitch Blackart.
She learned that they were both very important to her because they believed in her. When Aimee experienced setbacks she continued to have the support of the people she trusted.

In this short film, she is diagnosed as bipolar. Aimee was juggling her mental health and family issues. During her recovery, she learned that she needed to work on her good judgment. Her parole officer insisted she stay on the right path and stay away from falling into the same bad habits.

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Kanopy - Stream Classic Cinema, Indie Film and Top Documentaries