THE BOY’S LIFE
TONY CLAYTON WAS 30 years old, and just two years out from passing the Louisiana bar, when he walked into court in February of 1994, prepared to try his first murder case. He was, in his words, a “braggadocious kind of little young jit,” determined to prove himself with a case that would test even the most veteran of prosecutors.
The defendant, Taurus Buchanan, stood charged with second-degree murder—accused of throwing, at the age of 16, a single, deadly punch in a street fight among kids. If convicted, an automatic sentence would fate him to spend the rest of his life in prison, with no hope for parole. A section chief in the East Baton Rouge District Attorney’s Office had told Clayton that securing a murder conviction under these circumstances would be a tough task. But Clayton had told her, “Ah, man, I can convict. I can do it. Just give me the damn case.”
Clayton, who is African American, says he had been hired by the district attorney’s office in part because of his ability to connect with black jurors. He became so good in the courtroom he could inspire profane awe. “If Tony Clayton told jurors to eat shit out of his hand, they would do it,” one court clerk told us. To Clayton, a prosecutor was akin to a projectionist in an old movie theater. “That guy where the light’s coming from, he’s projecting an image on the screen. And that’s me. I’m projecting to those jurors how I want them to view my case.”
On the opening day of the trial, Clayton told the jury pool that young as Taurus was, a murder conviction would send him away, never again to be free. “Does that bother you at all to determine the fate of this young man?” Clayton asked a 19-year-old woman. “No, it doesn’t,” she said. “What about you?” Clayton asked another woman. “No, it wouldn’t,” she said.
Taurus Buchanan stood trial in the era of the “superpredator,” the label applied to violent juveniles in the mid-1990s, when states and the federal government passed one tough-on-crime law after another. Today, two decades later, a trio of rulings from the US Supreme Court has peeled back some of those laws, recognizing the folly of assigning equal culpability to adults and kids. In October, the court heard arguments in a fourth case, and how that ruling comes down could determine what happens to hundreds of lifers sent to prison when they were kids.
