On a summer night in 1995, Edward “Eddie” O’Brien, then 15, acted on an obsession that had been growing inside him for months. Already standing 6-foot-4 and weighing 260 pounds, he was a member of a well-known family in Somerville — his grandfather was a former police chief.
O’Brien, a former altar boy, lived across the street from Janet Downing and her family. Her son was one of O’Brien’s best friends.
The teen had become fascinated with Downing, watching her from his bedroom window through a telescope. O’Brien frequently asked her children about her and admitted to her sons that he had watched her undress. On the night of her death, he spoke about wanting to hurt someone.
Edward “Eddie” O’Brien, 16, sits in Somerville District Court on Jan 9, 1996, during testimony to determine whether he would be charged as an adult. (AP Photo/Boston Globe/Tom Landerfers, Pool, File)
On July 23, 1995, Downing was found bleeding, lying on the floor of her home. Furniture was overturned, and there were blood stains throughout the house.
The 42-year-old had been stabbed and slashed nearly 100 times. She was pronounced dead at a local hospital.
Downing’s death and O’Brien’s subsequent arrest dominated the media around the same time state lawmakers were negotiating the contours of a bill that allowed children as young as 14 to be charged as adults with first- or second-degree murder.
Now, at least one state lawmaker wants to change the decades-old law because he says it unfairly targets communities of color. Other advocates say the law prejudices teens who plead guilty to lesser charges or have their cases dropped altogether.
The O’Brien case
When O’Brien was indicted for Downing’s murder, a judge convened a transfer hearing that lasted nine days and included testimony from a court-appointed psychiatrist and officials from the Department of Youth Services. At the close of the hearing, a judge declined to move O’Brien’s case to Superior Court, where he would have been arraigned and tried as an adult.
However, the Supreme Judicial Court reversed that decision for a number of reasons, including that the superior court judge “incorrectly excluded expert testimony about the nature of the crime that was relevant to the issue of the defendant’s dangerousness.”
By the time O’Brien went to trial in the superior court, he was 17. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder and he was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
The 1996 law
Less than a year later, in July 1996, Massachusetts lawmakers passed a law that would dramatically affect how future cases like O’Brien’s would proceed.
The law required anyone 14 and over charged with first- or second-degree murder to be charged as an adult, automatically pulling them out of Juvenile Court.
In the nearly three decades since the law was approved, 30 14- and 15-year-olds have been charged with those crimes, MassLive found through a series of public records requests.
Of those 30 defendants, eight were 14 at the time of the offense, and 22 were 15. Eighteen are people of color, though the number could be higher because the data was not provided for every case.
As is often true in the criminal justice system, many of the cases identified by MassLive that were affected by the 1996 law were resolved without ever going to trial. In several cases, teenagers pleaded guilty to lesser charges, such as manslaughter, that would not have led to their being charged as adults.
Massachusetts does not charge teenagers as adults for other serious crimes, such as rape, leaving those cases in juvenile court, where a judge determines how to proceed with the case.
Court documents regarding teens charged with those lesser crimes would be sealed because their cases proceeded in juvenile court. Thus, statistics and demographics regarding those cases were unavailable.
The 1996 law created what is known as a statutory exclusion, or a law that removes certain cases involving teen offenders from the juvenile court’s jurisdiction. Massachusetts is one of 28 states in the U.S. to have such an exclusion and one of only 11 to include teenagers as young as 14 to be tried as adults, according to data released by the Justice Department.
The difference between juvenile and adult court
The key difference between juvenile and adult court is access, said Duci Goncalves, the deputy chief counsel for the Committee for Public Counsel Services’ Youth Advocacy Division. The public is barred from attending hearings in Juvenile Court. Court records, such as dockets and recordings, are only available to someone with a legal connection to a case, such as a juvenile’s parent or lawyer, for example.
Duci Goncalves, deputy chief counsel for the Committee for Public Counsel Services’ Youth Advocacy Division (Courtesy of CPCS)
In an adult courtroom, there is no such privacy protection for any defendant. Court hearings and trials are open to the public, and unless a judge orders court documents sealed, they are available for anyone who wants to get a copy. In some cases, teens are arraigned out of view of the public, and their court records are sealed. But the charges they face and their name are public information.
Perhaps the most critical difference between the two venues is the express focus of juvenile court: rehabilitation. The court is governed by a Massachusetts General Law that sets out a process to “rehabilitate, guide and encourage young people who come before the court.”
The court often connects teens with programs and resources designed to prevent them from repeating criminal behavior. The anonymity allows them a chance at rehabilitation without public scrutiny.
While the juvenile court doesn’t always meet that standard, Goncalves said, it still creates a fundamentally different environment.
“It’s not supposed to be a criminal proceeding,” she said. “It’s really about ensuring positive outcomes in the courtroom for the young person, but also positive outcomes for them in a community and in their life.”
The process could soon change
A proposed new law could send 14 and 15-year-olds facing first- or second-degree murder charges back to the juvenile court system.
State Rep. Russell Holmes, a Democrat who represents parts of Dorchester, Hyde Park, Jamaica Plain, Mattapan and Roslindale, has filed legislation that would eliminate 14- and 15-year-olds from being tried as adults. (Tréa Laverly/MassLive)
State Rep. Russell Holmes, a Democrat who represents parts of Dorchester, Hyde Park, Jamaica Plain, Mattapan and Roslindale, has filed legislation that would change the 1996 law.
Suffolk County, where Holmes’ district is located, has had the highest number of teenagers affected by the law — nine of the 30 teenagers were charged there.
The current statute unfairly targets communities of color, he said, an assertion supported by data obtained by MassLive.
“There are lots of mistakes that we made when we were getting tough on crime, tough on drugs, and those things impacted the Black and Latino community in a much harsher way than I would have liked them to,” Holmes said in a telephone interview. “I would like those young people to have an opportunity to be in a system that is not continuing to teach them adult-like things, but teach them and treat them as … what they are, which is children.”
An era of getting tough on crime
Beginning in the 1970s, Massachusetts began instituting mandatory minimum sentences, first for firearms offenses, then for drug dealing and vehicular homicide.
In 1994, just two years before the Massachusetts law requiring teens to be charged as adults when facing murder charges, then-President Bill Clinton signed a sweeping crime bill into law considered the most extensive federal crime legislation in the nation’s history.
It was in that context that Paul Haley, a state representative from Weymouth, filed legislation to toughen the law.
Haley, who departed the Legislature in 2001, worked as a prosecutor in Norfolk County before beginning his political career. There, he said, he was “very troubled by the fact that a youth who committed a horrific murder … could only be committed to the Department of Youth Services until 18.”
“There were some horrific murders that occurred that I thought warranted more significant punishment and … the ability to keep this individual from the community,” Haley continued.
During the interview, Haley pointed to the case of Rod Matthews, who was convicted in 1988 of beating his classmate at Canton High School to death with a baseball bat. The Norfolk County District Attorney’s office prosecuted Matthews’ case.
He was convicted of second-degree murder in March 1988 and sentenced to life with the possibility of parole. In November, Matthews was granted parole.
However, not all of the cases affected by the law have been as violent as the one Mattews committed.
Among them: a drug deal gone wrong in Lawrence that led to the arrest and indictment of a 14-year-old and a 15-year-old, and a fatal fire in Turners Falls that prompted charges against a trio of teenagers, including a 15-year-old.
How the thinking has changed
The legislation, filed by Haley, was passed as part of a nationwide get-tough-on-crime movement. In 1999, the state Supreme Judicial Court wrote it was spurred by “societal concerns about violent crimes committed by juveniles.”
Haley acknowledged that the science and understanding of teenage brain development hass changed since 1996, and said he was “comfortable” with the Supreme Judicial Court’s decision in 2013 that deemed sentences of life without parole for people under 18 were unconstitutional.
“Simply put, because the brain of a juvenile is not fully developed, either structurally or functionally, by the age of 18, a judge cannot find with confidence that a particular offender, at that point in time, is irretrievably depraved,” justices wrote at the time.
The court’s decision was a “reasonable accommodation,” Haley said.
In the wake of that decision, some adults convicted as teenagers have gone before the state’s parole board to ask for their release – including O’Brien and Matthews — their arguments based, in part, on their age at the time of the crimes.
A key factor board members weighed on each of their decisions is whether the person has been rehabilitated — an issue a judge would have heard testimony on during a transfer hearing.
In determining a person’s rehabilitation, the board considers their behavior in custody, whether they have sought out programming to reform their behavior and whether they would have support from family if released.
Early last year, the state’s highest court went even further on the parole issue. It found that “emerging adults” — those 18, 19 and 20 years old — should also not be eligible for the strictest sentence handed down in the commonwealth. State legislators came up short in a push to include that group in the juvenile category, despite a bill clearing the Senate.
Some families of relatives who were murdered believe the law, as it stands, is the appropriate punishment.
The family of Colleen Ritzer, a math teacher who was killed in 2013 by a 14-year-old student, Philip Chism, urged state officials to consider victims and their families in their decisions.
They described Chism as a cold, calculated killer intent on taking a life.
“He was not a child who made a mistake and didn’t know what he was doing. He was old enough to know right from wrong,” the family said through a spokesperson.
“There will be no parole for Colleen and our family, and we will have to relive that horrible day at every parole hearing, and in the event he gets released, fear for our lives,” the spokesperson said. “Taking away the right of the court to charge certain juveniles as adults for heinous crimes is too extreme. It goes too far.”
Similarly, Downing’s family lobbied against parole for O’Brien.
Even as the state has moved away from its previous efforts to crack down on crime, the statute remains.
The bill sponsored by Holmes, the Boston Democrat, was included in a study order during the last session, often considered a dead end for legislation.
However, Holmes refiled the bill during the current session, and it was referred to the Joint Committee on the Judiciary.
“I have found that unfortunately, the legislature doesn’t move until we’re forced to do that,” he said. “I never know when something’s going to move. There’s not many things that move in this building.”
The case against O’Brien
The night Downing was killed, her son showed O’Brien how to unlatch the deadbolt on a door connecting the home’s kitchen to the deck. When the group O’Brien had been with at the home that night left for another location, he opted to head home.
Later, a friend saw him acting strangely near the Downing home.
Then, around the same time Downing’s son found her dying on the floor of their home, O’Brien entered a convenience store where he worked, sweating profusely and bleeding. He told the store clerk he had been mugged.
But when O’Brien brought police to where he said he had been mugged, they found no sign of a scuffle. What they did find was blood on O’Brien’s shin that matched Downing’s.
Charges against O’Brien were filed on July 26, 1995, just three days after Downing was killed. On Oct. 1, 1997, he was convicted.
Edward “Eddie” O’Brien testifies before the Massachusetts Parole Board on June 25, 2024. He was later denied parole. (Screenshot)
Last October, nearly three decades later, the parole board denied O’Brien’s first bid for release.
He has maintained his innocence. During a hearing before the board, O’Brien said he intended to file motions to further his claim that he was wrongly convicted. As a result, the board wrote that it had difficulty assessing his credibility and candidness in response to its questions.
While members found O’Brien had a low risk of reoffending, they opted to keep him imprisoned, pointing in part to his disciplinary history in prison. O’Brien was found to have possessed a cellphone for two years and served five years in maximum security custody as a result.
Downing’s family opposed his release, as did Middlesex County prosecutors.
O’Brien, now 45, will next be eligible for parole in June 2027.
Other outcomes
Because he was convicted, O’Brien’s case represents an unusual ending for many teens.
In the 30 cases identified by MassLive, there were nine times that a teenager pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of manslaughter, which could have enabled their court case to be conducted in juvenile court, out of view of the public. Prosecutors decided to drop charges against two of the teenagers, and another was acquitted after a trial.
Six more cases are working their way through the state’s court system, with three set to go to trial on Oct. 6. Another was convicted of manslaughter by battery — not murder.
But there is no way to undo the reputational damage done by an adult court process, particularly in the internet era, said Goncalves, the CPCS attorney in charge.
“Even in murder cases, if they’re acquitted of those charges, all of that information doesn’t automatically get wiped away. It’s out there forever,” she said. “For a young person who’s trying to reestablish themselves in the community … there’s really no way to scrub it.
“It creates real barriers for young people,” she added. “If the case has been dismissed, or someone pled out to a lesser charge, there’s still that stigma associated with it.”
Graphics by MassLive reporter Tréa Lavery.