The caller wanted a 12-inch pepperoni pizza with extra cheese, plus two Mountain Dews, delivered to 1016 Lamont St. on the North Side.

Two employees of Chubby's Pizza & Hoagies tried to make the delivery around 11 p.m. Sept. 9, 1993. They arrived to find an empty lot and, approaching out of the darkness, two masked assailants with guns. Minutes later, passenger Jay Michael Weiss, 34, a father of three, was dead and the car's driver wounded. The two assailants fled with $100 and the pizza.

	MORE ON THE STORY Graphic: Put away for life

Nine months later, Dorian Lamore, 16, was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole. The second assailant, Phillip Foxx, 16, was found guilty of second-degree murder for participating in the robbery and shooting the driver. He, too, received a sentence of life without parole.

Today, Mr. Lamore and Mr. Foxx are two of more than 440 inmates spending the rest of their lives in Pennsylvania prisons without the possibility of parole for crimes committed as juveniles. The state has more of these inmates serving life without parole, or LWOP, sentences, than any other state in the country, and all the other countries in the world combined.

More than 2,225 inmates in the United States are serving life sentences for crimes they committed as juveniles, according to a joint 2005 report by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. The report found that 97 percent of them are male, and black youths are 10 times more likely to receive the sentence than whites. Nearly 60 percent were first-time offenders. Most juveniles were sentenced for crimes -- primarily murder -- committed between age 16 and 17.

About one-quarter are in prison for "felony murder," which holds that anyone involved in the commission of a serious crime during which someone is killed is also guilty of murder, like Mr. Foxx.

The total number of "juvenile lifers" is likely much higher; a recent Pennsylvania prison survey by a private group revealed 443 such inmates compared with 332 in the report.

There are two main reasons for Pennsylvania's large population of juvenile offenders. The first is a modification of the state's juvenile law in 1995, called the "adult time" law, which required juveniles charged with serious crimes to appear initially in adult court. Judges have the discretion to decide whether to transfer the case back to juvenile court.

The second is that the state parole board cannot grant parole to anyone with an LWOP sentence. Only the governor can grant clemency.

'Super-predator' fears
Pennsylvania's "adult time" law and those in 39 other states were promulgated in the mid-1990s based on fears of "super-predators," hardened juveniles who, it was believed, needed to be tried in adult courts for their adult crimes. But the Human Rights Watch/Amnesty International study showed that the number of juveniles convicted of murder actually declined between 1990 and 2000, from 2,234 to 1,006 -- nearly 55 percent. Still, the percentage of juveniles receiving life without parole sentences increased by 216 percent, to 9 percent of the total.

According to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the United States is one of a handful of countries using life without parole for juveniles, and is one of only two countries -- the other is Somalia -- that did not ratify the 1990 Convention on the Right of the Child, which forbids the practice.

"Juveniles are the youngest and most immature of all the criminals, but they are serving the most time," said Bradley S. Bridge, a lawyer with the Defender Association of Philadelphia.

"Juveniles have the most ability to change over time. They are the least formed and the most malleable. Life without parole does not allow for a middle sentence. There is no opportunity [for juveniles] to change. That strikes me as anomalous and wrong."

In the past two years, several states have begun reassessing their juvenile sentencing laws. Last year, the Colorado legislature passed a law permitting juvenile lifers to be paroled after serving 40 years. Similar efforts in Florida and Louisiana died before reaching a vote.

The new Colorado law "gives [juvenile lifers] a reason for living," said Lynn Christian Hefley, the recently retired state legislator who unsuccessfully introduced similar bills twice before one finally was enacted in July. "We want to be human."

A poll conducted this month for the National Council on Crime and Delinquency found that 89 percent of respondents believed rehabilitative services and treatment can help prevent youth from committing future crime.

More important is a growing body of medical studies showing that the human brain isn't fully developed in juveniles. Research now shows that the brain does not cease maturing until the early 20s "in those relevant parts that govern impulsivity, judgment, planning for the future, foresight of consequences and other characteristics that make people morally culpable," wrote Dr. Ruben C. Gur, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Brain Behavior Laboratory at the university's School of Medicine.

"Therefore, from the perspective of neural development, someone under 20 should be considered to have an undeveloped brain."

Such research material was submitted by Dr. Gur as part of the 2005 case of Roper v. Simmons, in which the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the death penalty for juvenile offenders. In the aftermath of that decision, 15 to 20 Pennsylvania inmates previously sentenced as juveniles to life without parole have petitioned various courts to review their cases.

"The idea is that it's illegal to have life without parole," said Mr. Bridge. "Children are not the same as adults. They don't understand things that are so clear to us. They're also more likely to be followers; that's what you'd expect from juveniles.

"But can you put them away for the rest of their lives based on something they did when they were 13, 14, 15 years old?"

'I only cared about my pain'
Phillip Foxx was older -- 16 -- but still a juvenile. His birth father was a heroin addict, disappearing when his son was 3. His mother was an alcoholic. He said he was a good student until age 13, "when I started making bad choices like running around with the wrong crowd. That's when everything started going wrong."

There were arrests for a stolen car and for assault; the latter got him five days in Shuman Juvenile Detention Center. In January 1993 his mother died. Mr. Foxx was in ninth grade.

By the fall of 1993, Mr. Foxx was drinking and smoking marijuana daily. And he was living in an abandoned North Side building.

"I was trying to numb the pain of losing the only parent that I had known," he wrote in response to mailed questions from the Post-Gazette to him at SCI Somerset, where he is serving his sentence. "I did whatever I thought was necessary to put money in my pocket. To support my self-destructive lifestyle I became extremely selfish. I only cared about my pain and problems."

Of the night of his and Mr. Lamore's crime, Mr. Foxx, now 30, said, "I never thought for one second that someone would get hurt. I know how it is to lose a loved one to a violent death. I wouldn't wish that pain on anyone. I did not truly understand the consequences of my actions.

"When you're a juvenile you truly don't understand life and death because you feel almost invincible. I guess that's just the recklessness of youth."

He doesn't believe he should have been sentenced to life without parole for his crime. It implies, he wrote, that a juvenile cannot change.

"I think about never being free every day," Mr. Foxx wrote. "It is a painful feeling to be sentenced to die in prison. To even think that I could spend the next 50 years in prison hurts."

But it's likely that's exactly where he will spend his life.

There is no legislative effort in Pennsylvania for change. State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo, D-Philadelphia, said last year he favored eliminating life without parole for juvenile offenders. He added, however, that being perceived as "soft on crime" would be used by opponents for political advantage. He did not return calls seeking comment.

Various organizations are trying to effect changes.

"If we stick to the fundamental principles of our government and what we are as a society, this will work out," said Joseph Heckel, of Pittsburgh, a member of Fight For Lifers West, an advocacy group for Pennsylvania inmates serving life sentences. Mr. Heckel helped compile the list of 443 juveniles serving life without parole sentences in state prisons.

"Somewhere, sometime, something's going to happen when someone stands up and breaks that whole mentality."

The biggest problem, he said, is that "most legislators don't have the foggiest notion about these issues."

William M. DiMascio, executive director of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, said the Roper v. Simmons court decision "opens the door for viable appeals to be made.

"It kind of gives you hope in an area where there was none," he said.

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