After 68 years in prison,
Joe Ligon hopes for a
"better future"
The United States has long led the world in the number of children sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Pennsylvania has put more juveniles behind bars for life than anywhere else in the country.
Of those people, Joe Ligon has the tragic distinction of being the oldest and longest-serving "juvenile lifer" in the country. The 83-year-old was released from prison in February after serving nearly seven decades for crimes he committed when he was 15.
"What was the first thing you did as a free man?" CBS News' Michelle Miller asked Ligon in his first U.S. television interview.
"I almost cried," he said. "Ok. But I broke down with a big smile on my face. A free man. Free at last."
Ligon, the son of Alabama sharecroppers, was incarcerated when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president and Nat King Cole's "Pretend" was on the music charts. He returns to a changed world, pointing out buses and buildings he had never seen before.
"I went to the window and I looked out and when I seen all these high buildings. But I expect to see that," Ligon said. "They locked me up. They did. But they didn't lock my mind up."
In 1953, Ligon and four other Black teenagers were involved in an alcohol-fueled spree of robberies and stabbings in Philadelphia in which two people died.
"I was guilty of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. It wasn't with the intention of hurting nobody. I didn't murder anybody," he said.
"There are people out there who are gonna watch and they're gonna say, 'He stabbed someone. He committed a crime.' You say to them what?" Miller asked.
"I'm sorry that I committed a crime. I'm sorry that someone was murdered, I'm sorry about that," Ligon responded.
He concedes he did stab someone that night but maintains he didn't kill anyone and said he's a changed man.
"Did you feel remorse for what you did?" Miller asked Ligon.
"Yes, I did. Yes, I did. I had to feel remorse," he said.
The teenagers were tried together. They pleaded guilty and were convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of ever getting out.
Bradley Bridge, an assistant defender at the Defender Association of Philadelphia, has represented Ligon for more than 15 years. He told Miller that he sensed injustice and was compelled to do something about it.
"Joe was convicted largely by guilt by association. There were four kids that were tried together. And a lot of the evidence against one child was considered against the other two or three other children," Bridge said. "If this case went forward to trial today, he'd probably be found guilty of a manslaughter charge...and maybe third-degree murder and might do five to ten...or ten to twenty."
His fate started to change after a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions found that mandatory life without parole sentences for juveniles were unconstitutional. In 2016, the Supreme Court ruled that all juvenile lifers should have a chance to be re-sentenced. But, after nearly seven decades behind bars, Ligon refused to be released on parole because he didn't want to be supervised for the rest of his life.
So they kept fighting until a federal judge recently vacated his sentence. He was released without parole. Bridge said Ligon's case is a representation of many issues in the criminal justice system.
"First of all, it symbolizes that we really should sentence people individually based on who they are and what it was that they did. So a mandatory sentence doesn't do that," he said. "And the second thing is that children are particularly unique in their ability to grow, change and reform themselves and therefore, giving an adult sentence to a child is inherently wrong."
Throughout everything, Ligon has had a supportive family, including his niece Valerie. Most of his immediate family has since died and the world may have changed, but Ligon said he's not dwelling on the past.
"Ain't nothing I can do about the past. But the only thing I can say, I just hope I have a better future," he said.
According to an estimate by the Vera Institute of Justice, it cost the state of Pennsylvania nearly three million dollars to incarcerate Ligon for 68 years, and that's without medical costs.
Ligon said he's planning his future and is considering using the custodial skills he learned in prison to get a job cleaning the offices of the lawyers who helped him get out.
By Albert B. Kelly | Guest Columnist
If you’ve never heard of Joe Ligon, it may be because he has spent most of his life behind bars.
I imagine that if there is one thing that might help give Ligon the sense that his life was not completely wasted, it’s that his story is part of a larger narrative that might change how we handle juvenile justice. When Joe Ligon walked out of prison recently, he was the oldest juvenile “lifer” in the country, having spent 68 years in prison.
Ligon began his prison life at age 15 in December 1953. He was no angel; he was convicted of first-degree murder after he and several other teens attacked multiple people in South Philadelphia — killing two and injuring six. They were accused of being in a gang, one that went on a crime spree that included robbery, assault, and ultimately murder.
Ligon has always maintained that while he was guilty of taking part in the robberies and assaults, he did not take a life — even as the prosecution stated that he alone was responsible for both murders. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole. In 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that automatic life sentences for juveniles were cruel and unusual punishment. Ligon’s sentence was changed from life without parole to 35 years to life.
Though eligible for parole after the ruling, Ligon did not apply because he did not want to be on parole with all of the conditions that were attached to it. His lawyer continued to argue that sentencing a juvenile to life was unconstitutional, and a federal judge agreed — ruling that the prosecution had three months to either re-sentence or release him. He was released last month without conditions. He now begins life outside of prison at the age of 82.
There are people who will argue that if you do the crime, you do the time. I don’t necessarily disagree, but not all time is equal. There’s Black time, and there’s white time, and the two are not the same. My point is that when it comes to crime and punishment, especially involving juveniles, the discussion is a lot more nuanced that many care to admit. One of the biggest obstacles to reform is the tendency to see the crime as the only thing that is true about the accused, especially when they’re Black.
In Joe Ligon’s case, he grew up in Alabama and dropped out of school in the third grade. Functionally illiterate when he arrived in Philadelphia with his family as a young teen, he couldn’t cut it in school and got caught up on the streets doing goodness knows what until December 1953. That kid never stood a chance.
I am astounded to think about the time that has passed and the changes that have taken place between his arrest in 1953 and his release this year. When Ligon went into prison, Dwight Eisenhower, our 34th president, was wrestling with how to get us out of the Korean War. The civil rights movement as we know it had not yet begun, and no one knew the names Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King Jr. Sen. Joe McCarthy was hunting communists.
But, it’s the smaller things, the changes in the daily stuff of life that astound even more. Riding in a modern car, using today’s technological devices and dealing with the computerization of just about everything, show just how far removed the life of 1953 is from the life of 2021.
If it’s astounding to think about the history and the changes in society over the past 68 years, what about the changes in someone’s life, someone like Joe Ligon? If we can ever get to where we consider that, especially for juvenile offenders, incarceration should be as much about rehabilitation as punishment, we have to allow for the possibility that juvenile offenders can be rehabilitated to society’s benefit.
The nation’s highest court considers life without parole for juvenile offenders to be cruel and unusual punishment for the individual, and they’re right. Yet, I also believe that if we still have lives like Joe Ligon’s rotting behind bars for decades, it becomes cruel and unusual for the rest of us — whether we realize it or not.
Albert B. Kelly is mayor of Bridgeton. NJ
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