Marshan Allen emerged from prison in clothes unfit for the midwestern winter: a standard-issue gray hoodie and sweatpants, a pair of slippers. He boarded a van that drove him to the front parking lot of Stateville Correctional Center. It was December 2016, and 40 miles northeast rose the orange glow of Chicago. The van slowed to a stop. The door opened. From the huddled welcome party of family and friends and lawyers came a shout: “Hallelujah Jesus!”
Prison had been punishment by absence, and, besides family, it was simple pleasures that Allen had missed: fishing, driving, washing cars, sleeping in, mowing the lawn. He had missed baths, and had long envisioned a bubbly soak on his first night home. He filled the shallow tub, lowered himself in, and closed his eyes under the fluorescent light.
The court, again in a five-to-four opinion, recognized universally “mitigating qualities of youth” in the details of Miller’s upbringing: kids are immature, reckless, and dependent on family, for better or worse. “Incorrigibility is inconsistent with youth,” wrote Justice Elena Kagan in the majority opinion. State law could no longer mandate a life sentence for juveniles, as such “punishment disregards the possibility of rehabilitation even when the circumstances most suggest it.” A 2016 decision made this retroactive. Suddenly eligible for a second chance were 2,200 adults sent as kids to die in prison.
To Allen, the stolen van, the ride-along with Dixon and Langston, even the weapons, all marked a campaign grounded in that fundamental if rough-cut Old Testament variety of fairness: steal back what’s stolen. “I don’t remember anyone talking about killing,” Allen told me.
Allen’s first trial ended with a hung jury. One of the jurors found the mandated sentence of life without parole too severe. The prosecutors brought the case again in June 1994, imbuing Allen with the criminal motivation of vengeance. Because of Illinois’s law of accountability, it didn’t matter whether Allen had pulled a trigger or even possessed a gun. Accountability “is like a blanket that spreads out over the criminal activity,” the prosecutor explained in his closing statement. By stealing the van, Allen “placed himself under the blanket.” Nor, the prosecutor continued, should Allen’s youth overshadow or soften the viciousness of the murders. The judicial lines of reasoning that animated Miller v. Alabama were still years away. “Whether it is a 16-year-old, a criminal mind is a criminal mind nonetheless, and it acted like a criminal mind,” said the prosecutor. This time all the jurors agreed.
X House, which had been home to inmates on death row when Illinois still practiced capital punishment, was intimate relative to other wings, housing 80 men rather than hundreds. Though raised Baptist, Allen had never read the Bible, which he’d grown up knowing as the white man’s book. But haunted by those the state had killed and in search of guidance, he shrugged off this preconception and enrolled in a class on Catholicism. He began to question the prayers for release he had long whispered to God. What interest did God have in letting him go, Allen thought, if he wasn’t living life as he should? And if he were somehow granted release, whether by divine or earthly intervention, would he even recognize what this looks like—living life as he “should”?
