Dakotah dreamed of becoming a country or rock singer, though he considered the goal cheesy. His first demo would be called “Generation Millennials.” He spent most of his time listening to his MP3 player, purchased from the prison commissary, and singing along in his eight-by-eleven-foot cell. Depending on how much money his dad put into his account, he could buy about a dozen new songs a month, and he tried to memorize the lyrics to each one. The other day, his crew yard boss had referred to him as “the kid who sings,” which he liked, since he’d become accustomed to responding to “white boy.”

Dakotah quizzed me on the songs I knew, and each time I failed to recognize a hit he laughed and sang it for me in a whispery, high-pitched voice. As soon as he finished one song, he tried to find another, searching for anything I might know. “The only thing I really need is my music,” he said, tapping his foot. “If I’ve got music, I’m straight—I can do my time. You won’t hear a peep out of me.”

Three months after the trial, Dakotah’s case was assigned to the state appellate defender’s office, which represents indigent clients who can’t afford private counsel. His lawyer, the office’s deputy director, has contested his sentence on the ground that Dakotah received ineffective counsel, in part because Lanny Fisher never brought in an expert to explain why Dakotah failed to show “stereotypical signs of adult-like remorse.” A new medical evaluation characterized Dakotah as a “traumatized youth without access to his emotions in the moment.” An evidentiary hearing will be held in February to determine whether Dakotah deserves a new trial.

Dakotah’s sentence may also be affected by two cases that will be argued before the Supreme Court next term. Both cases, which will be heard in tandem, challenge the constitutionality of life-without parole sentences for juveniles fourteen and younger. The two defendants maintain that early adolescence is a distinct developmental period during which susceptibility to influence reaches its peak. “Relative to the cognition of adults and even older adolescents, young teenage judgment is handicapped in nearly every conceivable way,” one petition reads.

But pegging legal protections to age markers also invites the escalating possibility of further dividing populations. It is well documented, for instance, that girls mature faster than boys, both physically and psychologically. (At a teen-ager’s recent murder trial, a University of Pennsylvania neuropsychologist testified that “biology would say” that boys should be held accountable for their crimes at a later age than girls.) Terry Maroney, a Vanderbilt law professor, said that legal arguments based on developmental research, which have become more prevalent since Roper v. Simmons, could be used to challenge children’s autonomy rights and create an “unduly complicated system with different rules for each potential subgroup.” Deborah LaBelle, a lawyer and the author of a report on Michigan inmates sentenced to life for crimes they committed before the age of eighteen, said that she doesn’t want to redraw a boundary that, for more than a century, has reflected the fact that “society has a different kind of responsibility to youth.”

In Roper, the dissenting Justices argued that judgments about a defendant’s maturity and culpability should be left to juries. But, in the new cases before the Supreme Court, both fourteen-year-olds were tried in states with mandatory sentencing for murder, so jurors couldn’t take their age into account. One of the petitioners was physically abused by his alcoholic father, had attempted suicide six times, and was drunk and high on the night of the crime. His lawyer has argued that his mandatory penalty is cruel and unusual and violates the Fourteenth Amendment, which protects defendants’ rights to due process. In death-penalty cases, trial procedure requires that juries consider mitigating factors, such as youth, mental health, and prior record, but there are no parallel safeguards in place for the penultimate punishment.

In Michigan, several judges have described their discomfort with sentencing an adolescent to die in prison, but the state’s automatic-sentencing laws leave them no choice. In July, a federal district court ruled that the American Civil Liberties Union can proceed with a lawsuit challenging the state’s mandatory-sentencing scheme for juveniles. Michigan has the second-highest number of juveniles sentenced to life without parole, and in 2008 the state’s House of Representatives voted to abolish the practice, but the bill never passed in the state Senate; the issue is politically unpopular.

Prosecutors, who are elected officials, are also subject to political pressures, yet they have unfettered discretion to set the terms of a juvenile’s charge. LaBelle told me, “I can’t think of anywhere else in the world where the state can change the legal status of an individual—‘Yes, I know you are a child, but now I will make you an adult’—so rapidly and in a factual vacuum.” She continued, “We are telling these kids there is no such thing as redemption. They can never make amends.”

For many juveniles, it is several years before they grasp the gravity of their crime and the permanence of the penalty. Joshua Miller, a twenty-nine-year-old inmate at the Wilkinson County Correctional Facility, in Mississippi, told me that it wasn’t until he reached his mid-twenties that the “ ‘without parole’ part of my sentence finally dawned on me.” After killing his girlfriend when he was fourteen—she rejected him, and he wanted to stage a “ ‘Romeo and Juliet’ kind of thing”—Miller was placed in an adult prison, where older inmates “treated me like the weak coward that I was,” he said.

During his first few years of imprisonment, Miller tried to stay abreast of new albums, movies, and fashions, but eventually he realized there was no point in “keeping tabs on a structure I could never be part of.” He stopped reading fiction, because it was too painful to “journey into the free world.” He said that he has never had sex. He considers his girlfriend, who was thirteen when he murdered her, the love of his life. Although he looks back longingly on his childhood, he doesn’t like to hear stories about what became of his peers. “I can’t ruin a memory, or I’ll lose another attachment to that life,” he said. “I refuse to believe that my friends aren’t still children.”

When I visited the Eliason family in June, Steve, Lisa, and their nine-year-old daughter had moved into Jean Miles’s house, in order to save money. They had got a new couch and rearranged the living room, but the rest of the downstairs looked the same as it had in the police photographs. On top of the television was a framed photograph of Dakotah and his family standing in front of a pastoral autumn scene painted on a cinder-block wall in the prison’s visiting room. Steve and Jean both told me with pride that Dakotah was learning to be a model inmate. He had called home, upset, the night before because the toilet in his cell had overflowed, and, when the guards wouldn’t respond to his calls for help, he stayed composed and mopped up the sewage with his own clothes. “I tell him that if we go through the appeals process and nothing changes, then he can get as wild and crazy as he wants,” Steve said. He has noticed Dakotah’s language becoming foul, which “eats me up—he was a soft boy.”

Steve and I had spoken on the phone several times before, and, in each conversation, he offered new theories about his stepfather’s death and the ways it could have been prevented. At the house, he reënacted the crime as his mother sat in a rocking chair beside us. With his thumb and index finger extended like an imaginary handgun, he stood where he assumed Dakotah had been when he pulled the trigger. “If he had just missed by an inch, the bullet would have hit the glass cabinet over there and woken my father, who would have whupped Dakotah’s ass,” he said. “Then we would have gotten him some help.”

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Jean cried quietly throughout the demonstration, and added that Dakotah was a “loving grandson up until that moment.” “I would bring him home tonight,” she said. “I know the person he is.” She often thought about what would have happened if she had forced her husband to hide his gun—it was kept by the door in case of intruders—or had sat down with Dakotah for dinner that night. All he ate was three cupcakes. “But I had all kinds of stuff for him in the freezer,” she said under her breath.

The family talked about Dakotah’s diagnosis of bipolar disorder, though it won’t be relevant for the appeal—the legal bar for insanity is higher than simply having a psychiatric diagnosis. Since Dakotah’s arrest, Steve had discovered a history of bipolar disorder in his family, and he, too, received a diagnosis of the illness. He often repackages lessons from his own therapy sessions for his son, who calls home every day. The family talks to him on a speakerphone until the prison phone service cuts them off, after fifteen minutes. When Dakotah complains of feeling homesick, Steve jokes with him, “Grow your beard a little thicker, and I’ll shave my hair like you. You’ll sneak out, and I’ll take your place.”

By September, Dakotah had spent nearly three months in solitary confinement. In April, 2011, after six months in prison, he got his first ticket for a rule violation, Threatening Behavior, which resulted in the standard punishment: thirty days in segregation. Dakotah had told a boy in his unit that he’d kill him if he kept prying into his case. The boy had been joking around, saying, “Who’d you kill? Who’d you kill?” Two months later, Dakotah received another ticket, for Sexual Misconduct, after a female guard accused him of exposing his penis through the vertical window on his steel door. According to Dakotah, he was sleeping at the time. He told the guard that it must have been his cellmate, but she said the skin she saw looked light, and his cellmate was black. Dakotah confronted his cellmate, a fifteen-year-old convicted of sexual assault, “but he just laughs about it,” he said. “He giggles about all sorts of childish shit.”

Two weeks after his punishment ended, he and his cellmate got into a fistfight, and, at the end of August, both boys were transferred to the segregation unit. His cinder-block cell had one barred window, a bed, a stainless-steel desk and stool that were attached to the floor, a toilet, a sink, and a mirror. All his meals were delivered to him through a metal flap on his door, starting with breakfast, at 4 A.M. The only time he could leave his cell was to shower, three times a week; he was handcuffed on the way there and locked into the shower stall.

When I visited Dakotah in September, it was the first time in nearly three weeks that he’d had an extended conversation with another person. We sat in a narrow cinder-block room, divided in half by shatterproof glass, and spoke to each other using rotary telephones whose dial pads had been removed. Dakotah had been animated in our previous conversations, but now he spoke in a dull, listless tone and sat slouched in his chair, his head resting against the wall of the cubicle. His eyes were dilated, and his lips were so chapped they looked bruised.

He told me that he was disgusted with himself for ruining his chance to see his family, who, for more than a month, had planned to visit on the second Sunday in September. It was the second time they’d had to cancel their plans at the last minute because he’d been placed in seclusion. (After a week without calls or letters from Dakotah, Steve had called the prison, and a phone operator told him that Dakotah was in the segregation unit, where visiting hours are restricted to Friday mornings.) Dakotah spent his first few nights in the segregation cell lying underneath his steel-framed bed, on the concrete floor, wearing nothing but shorts. “Oh, man, I was going off the deep end, like, living below the water,” he said, jiggling the phone cord. “The little flame lighting my candle of sanity just blew out.”

The effects of the sedative he’d been prescribed seemed to have worn off, and he struggled to sleep through the night. He woke up in cold sweats, with such vivid, violent dreams that he examined his body to see if he’d somehow been injured. “I don’t understand sleep anymore,” he told me. He had developed a theory, adapted from “The Matrix,” which he had watched countless times, that maybe life is an illusion, a kind of thought experiment, and dreams are the true reality.

Dakotah began talking to himself in his cell, little comments and reminders at first, and then, as the days passed, full conversations. “I go into this other mode,” he said, blowing air out of his mouth. “I can have all these conversations crisscrossing the room; there’s a version of me on the bed, at the desk, at the sink.”

At the end of my previous visits, Dakotah had chattered rapidly, nearly free-associating, occasionally singing, as if he would lose his visitor as soon as he paused. I had found myself coming to visiting hours later, to avoid prolonging the drama of separating. He would pick lint or stray hairs off my shirt or touch a scab on my hand, assuring me that it would fall off soon—any excuse for physical contact. But this time, our first visit with glass between us, he was the one to end the conversation. “I’m worn out,” he told me. “My mind is kind of dead.”

His sixteenth birthday was the next week, and I wished him happy birthday. “Yeah, I’m alive,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Whoopdefuckingwhoo.”

The day before Dakotah’s birthday, September 23rd, Steve drove four hours to the prison to surprise him. Dakotah had recently been transferred to the Behavioral Modification Unit, where he had contact with other prisoners, but most of his privileges, including use of the phone, were still suspended. In the partitioned cubicle, Steve and Dakotah pressed their knuckles against the glass, as if they were touching. It had been three months since they’d seen each other. “You look pasty, son,” Steve said tenderly. Dakotah, smiling broadly, smoothed the collar of his prison jumpsuit and confessed, “I don’t feel like I look so good.”

Steve updated Dakotah on developments in the lives of neighbors, relatives, and their pets, and then spoke at length about the mood-stabilizing medication he’d been taking. He said that he no longer acted like a tyrant at home, high-strung and aggressive. “That’s one of our traits—not knowing how to express our emotions,” he told Dakotah. The more Steve talked about their matching diagnoses, the more he seemed to convince himself that he was complicit in Dakotah’s crime. He couldn’t forgive himself for yelling at his children, which he now saw as a form of abuse. Dakotah, quiet and deferential, deflected his father’s comments with reassuring jokes. (At an earlier visit, he described his dad as his role model, except for his domineering manner: “He was Sgt. Pepper, and I was the Lonely Heart Band.”)

Steve wore an oversized tank top, which revealed a tattoo on his right shoulder in memory of his stepfather: “J.E.M., 1940-2010.” Dakotah had wept when he first saw the tattoo, more than a year earlier, and now he intended to get one, too. He also wanted the name of his dead dog tattooed on his biceps, his dead cat on his forearm, and his great-grandmother’s initials on his chest. At his father’s request, he planned to wait until he got to the adult side of the prison, since the Old Heads were more likely to clean their needles.

Both father and son vaguely hoped that other problems, too, would be resolved on the adult side of prison: the units might be less chaotic and noisy, the inmates calmer and more responsible. Steve had reconciled himself to the possibility that Dakotah would eventually get affiliated—with the Aryan Brotherhood, he guessed—because he would need that protection. At the end of the visit, Steve reassured Dakotah that he would find mentors when he moved to the adult population. “Not someone who will take advantage of you but a man who was locked away from his own kids,” Steve said. “I want a father in there watching over you.” ♦