Eldon Samuel III was 14 when he shot to death his drug-addicted father and then shot, stabbed and hacked to death his autistic younger brother in their northern Idaho home.
Last week, 1st District Judge Benjamin Simpson sentenced him to spend the next two decades in prison, starting immediately. But federal laws prohibit minors from being held within sight or sound of adult inmates.
The only way for Idaho prisons to meet those standards is to place the teen in solitary confinement.
That’s got Idaho Department of Correction (IDOC) officials scrambling to find a solution.
“We need to keep him separate from our adult offenders, and unfortunately there are no other juveniles in our system,” said Ashley Dowell, the department’s deputy chief of prisons.
The solution will likely be an out-of-state prison, Dowell said. Minors aren’t unheard of in Idaho prisons but haven’t been a significant portion of the state’s prison population for decades.
Today, there is just one other minor under IDOC jurisdiction — a 17-year-old girl on probation. Another juvenile is serving a blended sentence and is expected to be transferred to an adult facility at 18.
Samuel has already done time in solitary. He spent more than three months in a 9-foot by 12-foot holding cell in a Kootenai County Jail when he was first charged.
Experts believe extended solitary confinement amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Idaho intervened on Samuel’s behalf, asking the court to move him to juvenile detention.
Eventually, a judge agreed and sent Samuel to a local detention facility until his trial was complete.
ACLU-Idaho spokesman Leo Morales said his organization is watching Samuel’s case closely.
“What this raises again is a serious issue with regards to our prisons in this state, an issue with how our judges sentence juveniles. We know that solitary confinement is really cruel and unusual, particularly for juveniles,” Morales said.