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In When Kids Get Life, FRONTLINE producer Ofra Bikel (The O.J. Verdict, Innocence Lost) travels to Colorado to profile five individuals sentenced to life without parole as juveniles.

Colorado was an early pioneer in juvenile justice, focusing on rehabilitation rather than punishment. But in the late 1980s and 1990s, when a sharp increase in violent crimes by young offenders attracted enormous press coverage, legislators nationwide clamped down. In Colorado, the General Assembly eliminated the possibility of parole for life sentences and expanded the power of district attorneys to treat juveniles as adults.

In 1992, the United States ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which requires that juvenile imprisonment focus on rehabilitation, but the U.S. reserved the right to sentence juveniles to life without parole in extreme cases involving the most hardened of criminals -- the worst of the worst.

Jacob Ind

The crime scene was gruesome. In December of 1992, 15-year-old Jacob Ind murdered his mother and stepfather. The troubled family life that led to such a heinous crime slowly unfolded over the course of his trial. Jacob's defense claimed he and his brother had endured years of sexual abuse at the hands of his stepfather. Prosecutors argued the defense was exaggerating the abuse to give Jacob an excuse to kill.

Jacob is now 29. "All I wanted was something to end," he says. "I didn't really grasp the permanency of their deaths. I definitely didn't understand the gravity of what it means to kill somebody." But the mandatory sentencing law for first-degree murder made no exceptions, regardless of age. Judge Jane Looney declared at sentencing that her "hands were tied." She was required by law to sentence Jacob to life without parole.

Trevor Jones

Trevor Jones was trying to scam $100 from a classmate, but the plan went awry; the gun he had feigned offering for sale discharged and killed Matt Foley, who was attempting to purchase the weapon.

At the trial, the jury determined that Trevor had no intention of shooting anyone and what had happened was reckless manslaughter -- basically a very bad accident. But because the accident occurred in the commission of armed robbery, Trevor was found guilty of felony murder, which carried a mandatory life sentence. He is now spending his 10th year in prison.

Felony murder is a controversial law that charges criminals with murder, regardless of intent, if a death occurs in the commission of another felony. And felony murder assigns the same culpability to everyone involved in the felony, even if the actual murder is committed by only one person in a group, unbeknownst to the others.

Alison Parker, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch, has estimated that 26 percent of juvenile offenders sentenced to life without parole nationwide were convicted of felony murder.

Nathan Ybanez and Erik Jensen

In 1998, Nathan Ybanez and Erik Jensen were high school students in a wealthy suburb of Denver and members of a band called Troublebound. Erik came from a secure, affluent household; Nathan came from an abusive one. Within a year and a half of their meeting, Nathan killed his mother, and Erik was implicated in the crime by another friend involved in the cover-up.

Both Nathan and Erik were sentenced to life without parole. How did two boys with no criminal records end up involved in murder and penalized with a sentence the U.S. claims to reserve for "hardened criminals" who constitute "an extreme danger to society?" "In 10 years I'll either be on the streets or dead," says Erik, now serving his ninth year in jail. "I'm not going to keep doing this."

Read Nathan's latest appeal on his page here.

Or visit Erik Jensen's Web Site here.

Andrew Medina

Andrew Medina was also charged and sentenced for felony murder. He was only 15 when he and two acquaintances attempted a carjacking. No one knew for sure which of the three suspects fired the shot that killed the driver, 17-year-old Kristopher Lohrmeyer. But two of the suspects made deals with the prosecutor, pleading guilty to second-degree murder and naming Andy as the triggerman.

Andy, however, was not convicted of pulling the trigger but simply for being party to the carjacking at the time of Lohrmeyer's murder. That was enough for felony murder, and he was sentenced to life without parole.

Andy is currently in the Colorado State Penitentiary, the state's supermax facility, where he has served more than four years locked down in solitary confinement 23 hours a day.

The Pendulum Foundation needs your help to keep educating the public about kids serving life, to take programs into the prisons, coordinate juvenile clemency board efforts, do preliminary work on a ballot initiative that would transform the entire justice system, and to work with legislators on restorative justice and juvenile justice issues.