Imagine you're 16 and have spent your life being beaten by your father and molested by both parents. You've run away from home repeatedly, going to friends whose parents defend you to the police, urging they intervene. Yet the cops return you every time to your sadistic parents, saying all they're trying to do is turn you into a "good Christian."
Now imagine that, at age 16, you snap and beat your mother to death with a metal fireplace tool.
You go to trial and your bumbling attorney, hired by your abusive father, fails to call a single witness or to produce any evidence in your defense. He refers to your abuse only when mocking the idea as absurd. You go on trial only months after the Columbine massacre, and a jury convicts you in just 90 minutes. You get life with no possibility of parole.
Nate Ybanez doesn't have to imagine. This is his life story.
Because he committed his crime in Colorado, a state where Focus on the Family and the New Life Church have spent more than a decade lobbying for draconian sentences for juvenile offenders, Ybanez received the harshest possible sentence.
He was older than age 13, and the state, bleeding money because of overcrowded prisons, chose not to heed the warning signs. The times he ran away to friends for protection and the horrendous beatings and sexual abuse he'd endured weren't relevant. Some bureaucrats believed 13-year-old boys were old enough to fend off their attackers, and thus unworthy of state aid.
As his parents were devout evangelicals who had strong local ties to church groups, police believed they wouldn't have hurt this troubled kid who was probably exaggerating anyway.
A competent lawyer could easily have called witnesses corroborating the abuse, dug up the calls to police urging that Ybanez be removed from the situation or even bothered to take notes and give his client a true defense. But Ybanez's attorney did none of this, and as this was Colorado, he was sentenced as an adult and the life sentence for murder was compulsory.
Ironically, had he committed his crime in Texas, a state known for its harsh sentences, a young offender like Ybanez would have been sent to a juvenile facility, where he'd have been trained for the day he'd rejoin society.
But in Colorado his future is a life in hell with no chance for forgiveness or that someone will understand his plight and give him a second chance.
Instead, he must spend the rest of his life behind bars for protecting himself when the state wouldn't. He could mount an appeal for a new trial if he had access to thousands of dollars to fly in experts.
But he's broke and is paid only $50 a month in prison to make office furniture, and most of that money goes to pay for necessities, such as toothpaste and toilet paper.
"The fact is, this should have been a manslaughter case, with a term of eight to 12," Terrence Johnson, Ybanez's appeals lawyer, told Rolling Stone. Ybanez has spent more than nine years behind bars already, including time served while awaiting trial, so winning an appeal could encourage prosecutors to commute his sentence to time served.
Ybanez was failed by his parents. He was failed by the state of Colorado's judicial system. Now he's at the mercy of that state's appellate system. Given a harsh sentence mandated by cruel laws enacted by a fearful contingent of evangelicals, one could even suggest he's been failed by God.
Ybanez deserves at least the dignity of a fair trial. And if we, as Americans, guardians of democracy, don't find the gross failures of the justice system in this case morally reprehensible enough to warrant one, we'll fail him too.
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