Fifty-one years in prison is the kind of justice you get if you are the 16-year-old survivor of sex trafficking that kills a much older man who solicits you for sex. Though Cyntoia Brown is clearly the victim in this scenario—a young woman who has experienced unspeakable trauma and sexual assault at the hands of men, the state of Tennessee says that she must remain in prison for five decades before she can be released.
In 2004, Brown was 16 when she shot and killed Johnny Allen, a man who was 43 years old at the time. She was a runaway who was living with her 24-year-old boyfriend, a pimp who raped her and forced her into prostitution. Allen was a real-estate agent who solicited Brown one night for sex. He took her back to his home and got into bed with her. According to Brown, she feared for her life and thought he was reaching for a gun. So she shot him first with a handgun she had in her purse.
The Huffington Post notes that Brown was later tried as an adult and convicted of the following: first-degree murder, felony murder, and aggravated robbery. She was originally sentenced to life in prison. The U.S. Supreme Court says that life sentences without parole for juveniles is a violation of their constitutional rights. And so Brown’s lawyers filed a lawsuit claiming that her sentence is unconstitutional. But the state of Tennessee doesn’t care about Brown or her rights. So last week, the state’s Supreme Court ruled that she has to remain in prison for 51 years before she is eligible for parole. Specifically, “under the state’s law, defendants like Brown who were convicted of first-degree murder after July 1, 1995, can only be released from prison after serving at least 51 years of their sentences.”
This is not justice. Especially when Brown was convicted of a crime for defending herself against a man who was in the act of committing a crime—unless, of course, Tennessee considers sex with a minor who’s been forced into prostitution legal. It’s nothing but a workaround for the court, which delighted in noting that technically Brown isn’t in prison for the rest of her life. In fact, they made it clear that she’d received a “life sentence, not a sentence of life without the possibility of parole.”
One can only hope these judges are pleased with themselves. After all, it takes a truly awful person to sentence a teenage rape victim to life in prison.
It’s worth noting that Brown hadn’t even reached the age of consent and wasn’t a legal adult at the time. And yet somehow, she’s the villain who ends up in jail until she’s a senior citizen. It’s really hard to imagine that this would be happening if Brown were white. And especially male. Actually, it wouldn’t be happening. Because white men who rape are so often given a pass, receiving light sentences or no sentence at all. We need only look at some recent cases in the news to know this.
Jeffrey Epstein, a former hedge fund manager, got 13 months in prison for trafficking and raping multiple teenage girls. And just this week in Texas, a university student accused of drugging and raping a classmate, received zero jail time for his actions.
Even white women receive lighter sentences for killing people. Keeva Delaney, of Johnson City, Tennessee, shot her husband during an argument in 2016. She pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter. She was 21 at the time. In July of this year, the sentencing judge, citing her lack of remorse, sentenced her to serve 30 days in jail every June for the next ten years. The sentence was supposed to be a “reminder of her actions that took her husband’s life.”
There is no doubt that all of these cases are different and have their particular nuances. But this is a pattern. Fully grown white men and women who commit crimes somehow escape the full weight of the law in ways that black women do not when they are defending themselves—even when they are minors. Remember Marissa Alexander? She’s the black woman in Florida who spent three years in jail and more than two on house arrest for firing a warning shot at her abusive husband. Though she claimed self-defense and he was not injured (the bullet went into the wall), she was originally sentenced to 20 years in prison. It was only after extensive activism and an appeal that her conviction was overturned.
Twenty years . . . 51 years . . . those are the sentences for black women and girls like Marissa and Cyntoia with histories of abuse who defend themselves. And zero or minimal jail time for white rapists and murderers. Something is very, very wrong here. The adult men in Cyntoia Brown’s life abused and failed her. But the courts have decided that she’s the one who will end up paying—with her life.