No adult court for juvenile charged in shooting of 14-year-old boy

A 16-year-old Springfield boy charged with attempted murder and first-degree assault in the Eugene shooting of 14-year-old Major Clemens will have his case decided in juvenile court, Lane County District Attorney Christopher Parosa said.

If convicted, the boy could be committed to “juvenile prison” up to age 25, but no longer than that, Parosa said, acknowledging that such an outcome “often will feel very unsatisfying for victims.”

Family members have expressed disappointment with the investigation into the shooting of Major, an eighth-grader. He spent days in a medically induced coma after being shot in the head Feb. 17 in Eugene, according to a GoFundMe page set up to help his family with medical expenses as he continues to recover from a serious brain injury.

“We have trusted the police and the DA and the system to support and get justice for Major, and unfortunately this is not the experience that we’re having,” said Laurel Shaw, Major’s aunt, at a May 19 meeting of the city’s Human Rights Commission.

In a May 27 text message to Lookout, Sarah Erickson, Major’s mother, said: “I also agree with Laurel. We are very frustrated with the system.”

Part of the family’s frustration is the decision by Parosa’s office not to seek adult court for the youth accused of shooting Major, according to Shaw. 

“We can’t even get the DA to put this before the courts to try this young man as an adult,” she said at the meeting of the commission, a citizens’ advisory group for the city of Eugene.

In Oregon, prosecutors can seek a waiver hearing to determine whether a youth’s case will be decided in adult court, with a potentially longer sentence if the youth is convicted.

Parosa said prosecutors opposed the 2019 law that changed the process for charging youths as adults.

By a two-thirds majority, state lawmakers rejected a portion of Measure 11, the 1994 ballot measure that established minimum sentences for serious crimes. As part of Measure 11, youths 15 and older who committed a serious crime — within a category that came to be known as Measure 11 offenses — were automatically tried as adults.

Aliza Kaplan, a law professor and director of the Criminal Justice Reform Clinic at Lewis & Clark Law School, said she and the clinic supported the 2019 change.

“Neurological and psychological research … is what drove the change of the law,” Kaplan said. “All of the research shows that youth have a diminished capacity for impulse control, long-term reasoning.”

This “also means that there is a higher capacity for rehabilitation and behavioral change,” she added.

Kaplan also referred to U.S. Supreme Court opinions about juvenile justice in years before the 2019 change by lawmakers.

For example, in 2012, the nation’s highest court, in a 5-4 vote, curtailed life-without-parole sentences for youths under 18 when committing a crime, stating in an opinion that “children are constitutionally different from adults for purposes of sentencing.”

Eugene shooting case

Parosa, explaining his office’s decision, cited the police investigation into the alleged shooter and also the need for a mental evaluation of a youth before a waiver hearing.

“It used to be that we had the ability to simply waive them over into adult court,” Parosa said. But the Legislature changed that, he said.

“Now, what has to happen is every youth has to be initially charged within juvenile court, and it becomes incumbent upon the state to be able to demonstrate that a youth that you were prosecuting has a higher-than-ordinary sophistication level in order to get them over into adult court,” Parosa said.

Parosa described the shooting as “horrible,” but said “we have to rely upon our law enforcement investigations to make some educated guess on which cases are worth pursuing and which are not” when it comes to seeking a transfer from juvenile to adult court.

“My understanding, from talking to the prosecutors involved, a major crimes team attorney for us and our juvenile prosecutor, both of whom are working that particular case, (is) that there is nothing in the law enforcement investigation that suggests that we are going to have any success on the merits, trying to demonstrate that this is a youth with higher sophistication than normal,” Parosa said.

Speaking generally, “we have to have some toehold to believe that this person has a higher level of maturity to ultimately go get the psychological evaluation,” Parosa said. While the DA’s office has the option to pursue an expert evaluation of a youth, he cited a limited budget for such evaluations.

“The last juvenile psychological evaluation we did cost us about, I want to say, it was $20,000 to have it done,” Parosa said, adding that his office’s yearly budget for evaluations — including for adults — is between $70,000 and $80,000.

Data from the state show the dramatic effects of the 2019 state law that changed Oregon’s juvenile justice system.

“There’s only been four or five cases since [the law] was passed where a youth was actually found to have a high enough sophistication level to be waived into adult court. That’s statewide,” Parosa said.

Kaplan said funding constraints affect both defense attorneys and prosecutors, adding, “I understand completely well why that’s frustrating.”

But she said, “The focus here should be on the law.”

Statewide, “there’s still an opportunity for the district attorney to move someone into adult court,” Kaplan said.

Youth have their own detention facilities in Oregon, and, should there be a conviction, the commitment would likely be to a secure facility run by the Oregon Youth Authority based on the nature of the charges against the Springfield boy, which also include first-degree assault.

‘Long, long road’

Shaw, Major’s aunt, told the Human Rights Commission the boy is no longer in a hospital but has had multiple surgeries and continues to show effects from the shooting. 

She described her nephew as going “from being a 14-year-old boy to literally cutting his age in half, and being a 7-year-old boy.” Shaw said doctors performed three major brain surgeries on her nephew, who at one point developed spinal meningitis, which is an infection of membranes around the brain and spinal cord.

Major “has a long, long road ahead of him,” Shaw said.

The youth charged with the shooting has been held in juvenile detention and appeared Friday at a Lane County Juvenile Justice Center hearing. His father and his father’s partner were also present and, as is typical, were allowed to sit near him during the court appearance and speak with him briefly afterward.

During Friday’s hearing, an attorney for the youth charged in the shooting and a prosecutor spoke about plans to meet for a second time to potentially settle the case before a scheduled fact-finding hearing, which is similar to an adult trial.

Fights before the shooting

Videos provided to Lookout of a physical fight involving Major Clemens show multiple youths involved. The videos are said to be from two days before the shooting, and show Major being punched by two youths at the same time and also a fistfight between Major and a different youth.

Shaw did not refer to any videos, but said she’s been disappointed in the police.

“The detective who interviewed Major, it took him two months to interview Major, and then he had the nerve to ask my sister, Major’s mom, ‘Is he always this dismissive,’ and she said, ‘No, sir, not before his traumatic brain injury,’” Shaw said.

Angela Church, a cousin of Major, in February told Lookout the shooting followed an argument between teenagers at Valley River Center shopping mall. 

Police responded at about 9:45 p.m. Feb. 17 to reports of shots fired in the Harlow neighborhood, near the intersection of Kinsrow Avenue and Marche Chase Drive, and also reports of people running and vehicles fleeing the area.

Officers found Major badly injured in the parking lot of 330 S. Garden Way, the Chase Gardens Medical Center.

Church said that the family wanted to speak out in part because of other youth violence in the area.

“We want to try to get his story out the right way and raise awareness of the groups of troubled teens and gun violence that’s been happening in Lane County lately,” Church said in a February text message.

However, violence among teens “isn’t representative” of her cousin, who “wasn’t armed at all,” Church said at the time.

Shaw told the commission that while her nephew is African American, the shooter is white.

“I do not believe that the crime was a bias crime, but I believe that the reaction and the result has been anything but results that we want to see,” Shaw said.