Ruling in Winona Fletcher appeal opens door for Alaska’s handful of juvenile lifers to contest their sentences

People who were sentenced to life in prison as juveniles in Alaska now have legal grounds to ask for their sentences to be reexamined under a new Court of Appeals ruling.

The decision last week stems from an appeal by Winona Fletcher, the youngest female to ever be convicted of murder in Alaska.

In 1985, Fletcher and her 19-year-old boyfriend broke into a Russian Jack-area home and killed a husband and wife, Tom Faccio, 69, and Ann Faccio, 70, as well as Faccio’s 75-year-old sister Emelia Elliott. Fletcher was only 14 at the time of the murders. The case horrified Anchorage, generating intense media attention and helping to boost a nascent victims’ rights movement in Alaska.

Fletcher was sentenced to 135 years in prison.

Last year, the Alaska Court of Appeals found that Fletcher — and other juvenile defendants — should be sentenced under criteria that take into account youth, vulnerability and prospects for rehabilitation into consideration, part of a larger national reappraisal of stiff sentences handed down to youthful offenders in the 1980s and 1990s.

On Friday, the appeals court found that the decision is retroactive, so it applies to Fletcher as well as all juveniles sentenced to lengthy life sentences in Alaska.

“Making Fletcher fully retroactive would advance an important constitutional principle — namely, ensuring that juveniles tried as adults in the Alaska courts are not subject to cruel and unusual punishment and that only juveniles who have been found to be ‘irreparably corrupt’ will remain sentenced to de facto life without parole sentences,” the ruling says.

That’s not many people: Just one man, Brian Hall, was sentenced as a juvenile to a prison term longer than Fletcher’s. Hall was sentenced to 156 years and has served 31, said his wife, Angela Hall, an activist and the president of a support group for families of incarcerated people.

Two other juveniles have been sentenced to terms longer than 99 years, the ruling said. Six others have made claims related to the new criteria. It probably applies to roughly a dozen people total, said Marcy McDannel, Fletcher’s attorney.

“This doesn’t open the floodgates to hundreds of cases,” she said. “It’s only in very extreme cases.”

Some of the sentences will probably be affirmed by lower courts, McDannel said.

For Brian Hall and others, the decision is significant, his wife said in an interview. The decision will allow Hall and others to pursue resentencing based on the same legal principle — that recent advances in the study of the developing adolescent brain, trauma and other factors should inform how the criminal justice system holds young people accountable, Angela Hall said.

“When we read that decision, we burst out into tears,” she said. “This is what we’ve been waiting for, hoping for something like this.”

While litigation continues, Fletcher’s attorney says her client may be resentenced under the new criteria as soon as December.