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By: Marlize Duncan
It was 57 years of being behind bars before Sheldry Topp had finally been released from prison.
After years of abuse from his father, Sheldry Topp was placed in a state hospital for a mental illness that was left undiagnosed. While there he endured electroshock therapy and years later he fled from the institution. After fleeing, he went to the home of an Oakland County, Michigan attorney and stabbed him. The attorney’s death drove Topp to escape the scene, which resulted in his capture by the FBI.
This is the event that had Sheldry Topp sentenced to life in prison without parole at only 17 years old.
Topp ended up spending 56 years in prison, (since 1962) expecting to stay there until his death, but that was until a 2012 and 2016 Supreme Court Decision.
The first decision in 2012, according to CNN, was that minors, “cannot be sentenced to life in prison without at least the possibility of parole” and that sentencing of this sort are considered ‘cruel and unusual’. This was affirmed in a 5-4 ruling, putting society a step further away from harsh criminal sentences reinforcing Justice Elena Kagan’s idea that states ignoring the possible rehabilitation of adult inmates (who were sentenced as minors) is wrong.
Similarly, the aforementioned 2016 Supreme Court ruling was so that the 2012 decision could be applied to prisoners who were sentenced in the past. These two Supreme Court decisions are what gave Sheldry Topp a second chance at life.
This case though shows how corrupt the United States prison system was in the past to give a 17-year-old black child a life sentence without the ability to experience life not behind bars whatsoever. But then it also begs the question: Is our prison system still corrupt, especially to minorities?
As of recently, there has been a rise in the disparity between black and white youth incarceration rates.
The Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C.-based research and advocacy center working to reduce the use of incarceration in the United States, released a fact sheet that analyzed and displayed data from the U.S. Justice Department starting from 2001. It showed that as of 2001, in comparison to white children, black children were “four times to be incarcerated”, but when looking at statistics from 2015, four times became five. Specifically, the data presents that 86 out of 100,000 white children were incarcerated, while for black children it was 433 of the 100,000.
Although we as a society are making huge strides in the juvenile incarceration arena, until we can shrink the racial gap between the imprisonment of black and white children, we have a lot more to do.
On the bright side though, Sheldry Topp left prison a free man as of early March 2019. His first act as a free man? To have a steak dinner with his brother.
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