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A deal declined and a baby dead
Monday, March 19, 2001 By Barbara White Stack, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
The judge called it the deal of the century.
But the teen-ager, Daniel M., thought three years in reform school was too long a sentence for a gun fight that wounded three people.
So he declined the deal, lost the chance for trial in juvenile court, and now, faces life in prison -- not for the shooting, but for a crime he's accused of committing while he was out on bond.
The charge: killing his girlfriend's 1-year-old son.
Daniel was one of 34 Allegheny County youths whose cases remained in adult criminal court in the first year of Pennsylvania's "adult time for adult crime" law.
Because they were being treated as adults, they qualified to get out of jail on bond before trial. Daniel's murder indictment was the most serious of the charges filed against these teens while they were out on bond, waiting months or even years for their trials, but it was far from the only one.
Bond is one of the flaws of "adult time" laws, critics say. In juvenile court, they note, there is no bond. Juvenile judges may detain children, to prevent them from committing new crimes, until they go to trial.
Children charged for the first time with minor crimes are permitted to live at home until trial, sometimes wearing devices that allow probation officers to monitor their movements. Those charged with serious crimes, however, are held in places like Shuman Juvenile Detention Center until trial, which normally is held within 90 days in Pennsylvania.
When the legislature was debating "adult time" in 1995, naysayers like State Sen. Allen G. Kukovich, D-Manor, argued against making it easier to send children to the adult criminal court system, where they would qualify for bail. He pointed to a study by John Buggy, research and planning director for the Philadelphia courts, showing that four boys who'd been transferred by the city's juvenile court to criminal court for trial in 1991 had committed murder while out on bond.
"I gave an impassioned speech on the absurdity of this," Kukovich recounted.
Now another study shows problems with bail. David Myers, criminology professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, researched the cases of 557 Pennsylvania youths and found that when he compared children who committed similar crimes, those who went to criminal court were much more likely to be freed before trial and to commit new crimes during that time.
He talked to justice officials across the state about "adult time," and they consistently cited bail as a problem.
The shooting case
Daniel M. is an example of that problem.
He was 16 when he and two 19-year-olds -- his cousin, Michael McMiller, and a Beltzhoover man, James Pryor -- were charged after an exchange of gunfire on March 5, 1997, at a Mount Oliver intersection crowded with students and shoppers
An elderly woman, a 17-year-old boy and Pryor were wounded.
Daniel was charged as an adult, but after an extraordinary 10-month delay, he was allowed to ask a juvenile court judge to transfer the case there, in a procedure called decertification.
The case went before Common Pleas Judge Cheryl Allen Craig on Jan. 20, 1998. Daniel was represented by public defender Nikki Tufano, who'd served in juvenile court for more than a decade and knew how to work a deal with the prosecutors there.
She persuaded Assistant District Attorney Ron Tyszkiewicz to agree to decertification in exchange for Daniel pleading guilty and remaining in reform school for three years.
Craig called it the "deal of the century," because prosecutors ordinarily resist allowing youths who fire guns to be tried in juvenile court, and because Daniel faced the potential of five years in adult prison.
But Daniel rejected the offer and stayed in the adult system, where he was entitled to get out of jail on bond until his trial.
He had been released from jail the day after his arrest on a $20,000 bond. A year and a half later, he spent a few hours in jail on crack possession charges, then was released on $500 bond.
Nearly three years after the shootings, Daniel still hadn't gone to trial, and he and his girlfriend and her 1-year-old son went to Muscogee County, Ga. to visit relatives.
There, on Dec. 5, 1999, the baby died of blunt force trauma to the torso.
Daniel has been charged with killing him. If convicted, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.
Had he taken Tufano's deal, he'd have been in reform school on the day the baby died.
His murder trial is scheduled for April 2. This time, he's being held in jail without bond.
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