www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view/20091004for_kid_killers_only_adult-sized_lessons_will_fit/
Damien Bynoe is the reason why 14-year-olds who kill with adult viciousness in Massachusetts can be sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in prison.
Lately, there’s been a push to revisit that law. Some believe it is too harsh and argue that a mandatory life sentence does not allow for the possibility that an impulsive teen killer may mature into an adult capable of understanding right and wrong. They want the requisite life sentence modified down to a second-degree murder penalty of 15 years.
Here’s a reminder of why they’re wrong.
On April 20, 1991, Bynoe, who was then 15, walked up Highland Avenue in Roxbury with two fellow members of the Orchard Park Trailblazers. He calmly pulled a gun from the waistband of his pants and fired five shots into a group of children.
When he stopped shooting, Charles Copney, who had just turned 11, and Korey Grant, 15, lay dead in the street. Copney, who had survived a brush with cancer and was called “Little Charles” by friends and family, became Boston’s youngest homicide victim at the time.
A few days later, a judge in Roxbury District Court, who was friendly with certain members of the sprawling Bynoe clan, made the decision that this 15-year-old henchman – who took two lives and followed it up with pizza in Dudley Square – could be “rehabilitated.”
The decision to place Damien Bynoe in juvenile lockup for barely five years sparked such outrage that pols on Beacon Hill wasted little time passing the Copney-Grant amendment, which moved teen killers into the world of grown-up punishment.
Asked about the new push to revisit that amendment, Patricia Copney, who became a reluctant activist after losing her only child on that distant April evening, was rather philosophical.
“Maybe I could have lived with (Bynoe) going to prison for 15 years a whole lot better than the slap in the face (Judge) Paul McGill gave us, and the slap on the wrist he gave Damien Bynoe,” she said recently. “But back then, we had no choice. It was all in the judge’s hands. There was nothing we could do. Nobody listened to us then.”
The sad truth is they’re still not listening. A couple of weeks ago, Damien Bynoe, now a hulking 34-year-old, sat in federal court as an assistant U.S. attorney spelled out the reasons the federal government believed he should spend the next 15 years in prison.
Prosecutor Christopher Pohl told U.S. District Court Judge Rya Zobel what Pat Copney knew only too well: Redemption has been wasted on Damien Bynoe. All he has done in the years since he walked out of a juvenile facility for killing Charles Copney and Korey Grant is sell drugs and point guns at people. In fact, nearly all of his crimes over the past dozen years have been committed while he was on probation.
“(Damien Bynoe) is a true career offender,” Pohl wrote in his sentencing memorandum, “not only within the meaning of the law, but within the natural ordinary meaning of the phrase.”
So Rya Zobel sent Bynoe away for five years. And Pat Copney was grateful for small favors. “At least I won’t have to look at him for the next five years,” she said, “and see him look at me with that stupid grin of his . . . like . . . killing Charles and Korey was just a big joke.”
