‘Very disturbing’: Florida teens get longer prison sentences than adults

Florida is one of 13 states that give prosecutors unfettered power to try children as adults without getting sign-off from a judge. And when judges determine the penalties for those kids, they give them higher sentences on average for felony crimes than older, adult offenders, according to a Miami Herald investigation.

Danny Knight is one of those kids.

He was 17 when he was charged in Pinellas County with robbing a CVS pharmacy at gunpoint with his friends and selling opioid pills. Three years later, he was sentenced to 40 years in prison for his crimes – a harsh sentence by any standard and longer than current laws would call for based on his offenses.

Florida judges have the option to give teenage offenders “juvenile sanctions,” which send them to a juvenile facility rather than prison, or classify them as “youthful offenders,” resulting in either probation or being confined at a camp with other convicted young adults for up to six years.

Knight was not given either of those less punitive sentences. He’s not alone.

Only one in 10 of the more than 20,000 children tried as adults in Florida were given juvenile sanctions and less than 5% received a “youthful offender” designation, the Herald found in an analysis of the last 15 years of state court system sentencing data from 2008 to 2022.

Children tried as adults were sentenced to a little more than three years in prison on average for third-degree felonies — around 50% longer than the average sentence given to adults for the same class of offense. The vast majority of all felony charges are third-degree offenses, which are the lowest class of felony crimes and include burglary, some types of assault, drug possession and certain DUI offenses.

Children and adults had similar average sentences for more serious offenses that fall under first and second-degree felonies.

Overall, a child tried as an adult was sentenced to a little more than five years for a felony charge while an adult received around three-and-a-half years. These trends held even after the Herald adjusted for the most extreme sentences that could skew the figures.

The Herald’s findings are “very, very disturbing,” said Lynn Tepper, a former family court judge in Florida’s Sixth Judicial Circuit which encompasses Pinellas and Pasco counties.

Tepper said it is incumbent upon judges to find out the context behind a child’s offenses and to keep in mind that punishing children with prison time only increases their likelihood of becoming repeat offenders.

“If your purpose is accountability then there are other ways to do it,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be like this.”

Knight was member of a gang that committed a string of pharmacy robberies. The spree ended in a shootout with undercover police officers where one officer was injured.

But Knight was not part of that botched robbery attempt and prosecutors did not accuse him of being involved in any of the other robberies.

His conviction and harsh sentence came despite questions swirling around the investigation: Knight testified in court that St. Petersburg police officers had assaulted him when he was arrested. Prosecutors were also unable to disprove Knight’s claim that during the robbery he had been carrying an air-powered pellet gun and not a firearm, which would mean a lower charge and less harsh punishment.

Knight asked for a “youthful offender” designation but was denied. His family has spent the past decade and thousands of dollars trying to get his sentence reduced.

The state attorney’s office of the Sixth Judicial Circuit, which prosecuted Knight, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The St. Petersburg Police Department declined to comment.

Family strife to gang life

Knight was the fourth of five children and grew up in St. Petersburg. He was outgoing, got good grades and played youth football, he said. He has fond memories of the regular cookouts his family had when he was a kid.

But things started to change around the time Knight turned 15 and his parents went through a divorce.

His father was an alcoholic and had temper issues that led him to fire 200 bullet rounds into their home one night, as Knight and his brothers hid in the house. Knight recalled bullets whizzing past his head. Miraculously no one got hurt.

“It broke the stability that I had,” Knight told the Herald.

Knight “stopped caring about things”, felt embarrassed to be around other kids, skipped classes and met other members of his gang — “Haines Road Cru” — in the neighborhood next to his school.

Police investigated him once for disorderly behavior at school and officers found marijuana in his car during a traffic stop, court records show.

In the wake of his parent’s divorce, the family’s financial situation was volatile. Knight’s mother, Michelle Rothwell, worked as many as three jobs at a time to try to make ends meet.

Knight began to sell opioid pills on the street as his way to be “able to help out,” he said.

A month after the CVS robbery, Knight sold roughly 100 Vicodin pills to undercover officers. They didn’t arrest Knight then, hoping that he would lead them to the rest of the gang, which was by then responsible for a string of robberies.

The gang’s attempt to rob a Blockbuster video store in St. Petersburg on April 30, 2008 went awry and one of the gang members shot and injured an undercover police officer who had been surveilling them.

Police arrested several members of the gang and raided Knight’s residence in the early hours of the following day.

Prosecutors tried Knight as an adult and charged him with the robbery at the CVS in March of that year, alleging that he and other members of the gang robbed the pharmacy at gunpoint, dressed all in black and wearing masks. Knight and his friends, prosecutors said, stole around $500 from the cash registers and roughly $24,000 worth of pain pills, though those were not the pills Knight sold to undercover officers.

While the officers denied it, Knight and his brother told the court that police had beaten Knight during the raid, leaving him bleeding from the side of his mouth.

“They were rough with me the whole time,” he told the Herald. At that point they still didn’t know whether the officer who had been shot at the video store would survive so they kept saying things like “they should kill me,” Knight said.

Knight alleged officers coerced him into giving a confession while he was feeling the effects of a medication that made him drowsy. He said that he repeatedly told officers that he wanted to speak with his mother but was told by the officers that they had already done so and that she said she wanted “nothing to do with him.”

“Anyone who knows me would know I would never, ever have said that,” Rothwell, his mother, told the Herald. No one had contacted Rothwell, in violation of agency policy at the time, court records show.

Another point of contention was the gun Knight allegedly used in the robbery. Knight maintains that the guns they had pointed at the store clerks were air-powered pellet guns — similar to a BB gun — painted to look like real guns with bullets. An air-powered pellet gun, according to Florida law, is not considered a firearm.

The store clerks testified they thought the gun was a Glock automatic pistol but admitted that they were not certain. One of the detectives who interrogated Knight the day of his arrest also testified that he got no indication that either Knight or any of his accomplices had carried real guns.

Because the robbers were wearing masks, the store clerks also couldn’t conclusively identify Knight or any other accomplices.

On Dec. 7, 2009, Knight pleaded no contest — neither admitting guilt nor disputing the charge — to trafficking in opioids. His robbery charge went to trial and a jury convicted him on Feb. 16, 2011.

The judge sentenced him to 40 years in prison: 15 for the robbery and 25 for the drug trafficking charge, to run consecutively.

Only 14 other inmates are currently serving sentences longer than Knight’s for his trafficking charge, a Herald analysis of Florida Corrections Department records show. Unlike Knight, all of them were adults when they committed their offenses and 10 of them have records of prior criminal offenses.

Rothwell, Knight’s mother, has tried multiple attorneys to try to get her son freed. But Knight is still in prison.

Resentencing efforts

Changes in state laws over the last decade have given Knight and his family glimmers of hope for a reduced sentence. But time and again those hopes have been dashed.

Florida lawmakers twice reduced the penalty for the drug trafficking charge for which he was sentenced to 25 years. If he were sentenced today, the maximum penalty would be seven years. But the changes were not retroactive, meaning inmates who were already in prison would not be released or have their sentences reduced under the new law.

Knight’s family has tried working with lawmakers like Democrat Rep. Dianne Hart and former Republican state Sen. Jeff Brandes to change the laws to make the penalties retroactive but those efforts have not borne fruit.

Knight’s lawyers sought to reduce his sentence in 2017, citing a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that held that mandatory life sentences without parole for juveniles convicted of non-homicide offenses was unconstitutional. In another case, the state’s Second District Court of Appeals had found that a 40-year sentence was a de facto life sentence and illegal in light of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

In May 2018, the judge in Knight’s criminal case ruled that he should be resentenced.

But prosecutors asked to put the resentencing on pause roughly six months later, pointing out that other Florida appeals courts had ruled that decades-long sentences were not necessarily equivalent to life and that the Florida Supreme Court was reviewing the cases to resolve the conflict.

The court agreed to the pause. Knight was stuck in limbo for five years.

In that time, the state Supreme Court concluded that long sentences such as Knight’s didn’t automatically violate the U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

When the court — under a new judge — reopened his case in late 2023, Knight’s sentence was not reduced.

Knight’s current life revolves around the daily routine of Liberty Correctional Institution, a state prison roughly 40 miles west of Tallahassee. He wakes up at dawn and works in the prison canteen until around 5.30 p.m., with a lunch break in-between. After that, he reads, calls his family and then goes to bed.

Knight has a high school diploma but Florida only provides a college education for inmates with fewer than 10 years left to serve. His long sentence means that he will likely never get a college degree. He will never know what it’s like to go out on dates in his 20s, his mother said, and brief visits from his nephews and nieces are the only chances he gets to watch them grow up.

“All the things young men and women experience in their lives, my son never got to,” said Rothwell. “It breaks my heart.”

One of Knight’s brothers passed away last year from a myocardial infarction, a type of heart attack known as the “widowmaker.” Knight’s sentence and security-level meant that he was not eligible to receive a furlough to attend the funeral. Rothwell said she needs Knight to be with her now more than ever.

“I would do anything to save my child,” she said. “I just want my son home.”

How we worked on the data

The Miami Herald obtained, via a public records request, a copy of the Offender Based Transaction System (OBTS) maintained by Florida courts. The database contains records of every individual who has come into contact with the state’s legal system — from the point of arrest to their final sentence.

Additional factors which can determine a sentence such as whether a weapon was used or the quantity of drugs trafficked or money stolen were not released to the Herald per Florida laws. Names and exact birth dates were also not released. Only the month and year of birth for each individual was made available to the Herald.

To estimate the number of minors tried as adults, the Herald assumed that each person recorded in the database was born on the 15th of the month. The total number of minors obtained through this method was similar to the number of children tried in adult court that the Herald calculated from a separate dataset maintained by the Florida Juvenile Justice Department. Roughly 98% of those children were transferred to the adult system via the state’s “direct file” statutes.

To observe the frequency distributions of the sentences, the Herald checked central tendency measures like medians, modes and standard deviations. Capital felonies, life felonies and first-degree felonies punishable by life imprisonment make up a tiny fraction of all offenses and typically have extreme sentences, the Herald found. These offenses were excluded from the analysis of average sentences.

To verify for consistency, the Herald, in consultation with University of Miami-based criminologist, Alexis Piquero, adjusted for extreme sentences in the more common felonies so they don’t skew the figures while calculating the mean sentences of adults and minors tried as adults. The Herald first computed the 85th percentile — the figure below which 85% of the sentences fell — and then re-coded all the sentences above that value as that figure. For instance, if the 85th percentile was five years, then all of the sentences above five were re-coded to be five. The trend of children getting higher average sentences than adults held even after the adjustments.

The Herald also analyzed the Offender Based Information System (OBIS) database maintained by the Florida Department of Corrections to determine how Danny Knight’s sentence compared to other inmates convicted of the same charges. The database contains records of every inmate who have at any point in their lives entered a facility maintained by the state prison system.