Highlights
Little was a serial offender, that much we know. After multiple arrests, Little didn’t serve a lot of prison time, which left him free to be a serial killer. Does the Little case have implications for criminal justice reform?
“It’s hard to fathom. I mean, how does someone get away with that…?”
Most crimes are not reported, most reported crime does not end in arrest, a sizeable percentage of those arrested are not prosecuted, the overwhelming majority of those prosecuted are plea-bargained to a lesser crime, most arrests for felonies do not get prison time and most violent offenders serve less than three years.
Author
Leonard Adam Sipes, Jr.
Retired federal senior spokesperson. Thirty-five years of directing award-winning public relations for national and state criminal justice agencies. Interviewed multiple times by every national news outlet. Former Senior Specialist for Crime Prevention for the Department of Justice’s clearinghouse. Former Director of Information Services, National Crime Prevention Council. Former Adjunct Associate Professor of criminology and public affairs-University of Maryland, University College. Former advisor to presidential and gubernatorial campaigns. Former advisor to the “McGruff-Take a Bite Out of Crime” national media campaign. Certificate of Advanced Study-Johns Hopkins University. Former police officer. Aspiring drummer.
Article
Samuel Little was implicated in 93 murders. The theme used by media was an “indifferent criminal justice system that allowed a man to murder without fear of retribution by deliberately targeting those on the margins of society.”
But the flip side to the story is “By 1975, he had been arrested 26 times in 11 states for crimes including theft, assault, attempted rape, fraud, and attacks on government officials.” The articles below document more arrests, including murder and acquittals. Yes, he occasionally did some prison time.
But the bottom-line question is how Little was on the streets at all or unsupervised by the justice system? He’s described as having “a lifetime of crime that ultimately would include dozens of arrests in cities across the country.”
Does the Little case have implications for criminal justice reform?
Criminal Justice Reform
There are dozens of prosecutors throughout the country vowing not to prosecute offenders for minor crimes. There are literally dozens of major criminal justice reform organizations supporting this view. They also want to cut the prison population in half.
There’s no doubt that some reform is necessary. We are aware of people prosecuted and placed in prison for acts that could have been handled through alternative means. I’m aware of a person who committed a series of burglaries who was mentally ill. The thefts were stupid in the extreme; he stole appliances (who does that?) and sold them to the local second-hand store. They were easily solved by law enforcement. Maybe he deserved a couple of months in a local jail and court-ordered mental health treatment. He got ten years in prison.
Rural judges often give out unwarranted long jail or prison sentences, ABA Journal.
So examinations of reform are justified. Even in urban areas, some judges go overboard.
A Lenient Justice System?
It’s equally true that there are offenders who have dozens of arrests who still walk our streets unencumbered by the justice system. There is a difference in not prosecuting a shoplifter (per public decree by multiple reform prosecutors) and not prosecuting someone with multiple arrests.
Most crimes are not reported, most reported crime does not end in arrest, a sizeable percentage of those arrested are not prosecuted, the overwhelming majority of those prosecuted are plea-bargained to a lesser crime, most arrests for felonies do not get prison time and most violent offenders serve less than three years.
The justice system, contrary to the popular narrative, has a degree of leniency built into almost every facet of operations.
Almost three-quarters (72.8%) of federal offenders sentenced in fiscal year 2016 had been convicted of a prior offense. The average number of previous convictions was 6.1 among offenders with a criminal history. About 3 in 5 state defendants had at least one prior conviction, Multiple Convictions. Many had multiple arrests and convictions.
More than half (57 percent) of violent offenders served less than three years in prison per a new DOJ report. The average time an offender served in state prison was 2.6 years, Time Served-USDOJ.
As to a second chance for prisoners, about 7 in 8 had more than one prior arrest charge, and a majority had at least five. Fifty-eight percent of felony defendants had at least one prior conviction. Forty percent of felony convictions result in a sentence to prison, Second Chances.
Per federal data: 16 to 50 percent of federal crimes are declined from prosecution. Per state data: 34 percent of state felony cases are not convicted (approximately nine percent involve a deferred adjudication or diversion outcome) Percent Not Prosecuted.
I examined hundreds of criminal cases throughout my career. The number of arrests and convictions and parole and probation violations for many was astounding.
Back To Little
So when I read in media reports that Little got away with multiple homicides because he killed women on the margins of society, I asked myself how many times was he allowed to escape previous charges?
The answer? “By 1975, he had been arrested 26 times in 11 states for crimes including theft, assault, attempted rape, fraud, and attacks on government officials.” He was arrested multiple times beyond that. He was “arrested in eight states for crimes that included driving under the influence, fraud, shoplifting, solicitation, armed robbery, aggravated assault, and rape.” Eventually, he was arrested and acquitted of a homicide.
At what point was a taxed and overburdened justice system simply lax in the prosecution and incarceration of Little? As stated above, I had the opportunity to examine hundreds of criminal cases and I was dismayed as to seemingly minor criminal cases not getting the attention they deserved based on criminal history. As we are all aware, the overwhelming majority of criminal cases are plea-bargained, thus convictions for robberies become assaults or larcenies.
Little was a serial offender, that much we know. I’m guessing that Little didn’t serve a lot of prison time, which left him free to be a serial killer. If the system didn’t crack down on him throughout his criminal career, it probably suggested that no one cared, which may have given him incentive to kill.
Washington Post
By New Year’s Day 1971, Mary Brosley, 33, had become the first known victim of a man since recognized as the most prolific serial killer in U.S. history. Over more than 700 hours of videotaped interviews with police that began in May 2018, Little, now 80, has confessed to killing 93 people, virtually all of them women, in a murderous rampage that spanned 19 states and more than 30 years.
A gifted artist with an unnervingly accurate memory, Little has produced lifelike drawings of dozens of his victims. And, with the fervor of an old man recalling the exploits of his youth, he has provided police with precise details about their murders, invariably effected by strangulation.
The FBI has pleaded with the public for assistance but has declined to release Little’s case file, saying each murder investigation is being led by local authorities. To fill in the gaps, The Washington Post obtained and analyzed thousands of pages of law enforcement and court records — including a complete criminal history assembled in the early 2000s — and conducted interviews with dozens of police officials, prosecutors, defense attorneys and relatives of Little’s victims. The Post also reviewed video and audio recordings of a number of Little’s confessions.
What emerges is a portrait of a fragmented and indifferent criminal justice system that allowed a man to murder without fear of retribution by deliberately targeting those on the margins of society — drug users, sex workers and runaways whose deaths either went unnoticed or stirred little outrage. In many cases, authorities failed to identify them as murder victims, or conducted only cursory investigations.
But Little’s decades of impunity underscore a troubling truth about the U.S. criminal justice system: It is possible to get away with murder if you kill people whose lives are already devalued by society.
At 13, Little was caught stealing — a bicycle, he has said — and sent to the Boys’ Industrial School, an Ohio reform school, according to a record released by the nonprofit Ohio History Connection. Two years later, he was arrested in Omaha for burglary, according to a copy of his criminal history. A year after that, he was charged with breaking into a furniture store in Lorain, Ohio, and shipped to a juvenile detention center for two years.
Thus began a lifetime of crime that ultimately would include dozens of arrests in cities across the country: Assault in Denver. Soliciting a prostitute in Bakersfield, Calif. Theft in Philadelphia, DUI in Los Angeles and shoplifting in Phoenix.
Darryl Brosley had long wondered about the mother who vanished when he was a child. “It’s hard to fathom. I mean, how does someone get away with that? Transient or otherwise?”
Little’s Criminal History
Samuel Little was born on June 7, 1940, in Reynolds, Georgia, to a mother he claimed was a prostitute. Soon after his birth, Little’s family moved to Lorain, Ohio, where he was brought up mainly by his grandmother. He attended Hawthorne Junior High School, where he had problems with discipline and achievement. In 1956, after being convicted of breaking and entering into property in Omaha, Nebraska, Little was held in an institution for juvenile offenders.
Little moved to Florida to live with his mother in his late 20s, working at various times as a cemetery worker and an ambulance attendant (by his own account). He has said he then “began traveling more widely and had more run-ins with the law”, being arrested in eight states for crimes that included driving under the influence, fraud, shoplifting, solicitation, armed robbery, aggravated assault, and rape.
In 1961, Little was sentenced to three years in prison for breaking into a furniture store in Lorain; he was released in 1964. By 1975, he had been arrested 26 times in 11 states for crimes including theft, assault, attempted rape, fraud, and attacks on government officials.
In 1982, Little was arrested in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and charged with the murder of 22-year-old Melinda Rose LáPree, who had gone missing in September of that year. A grand jury declined to indict him for her murder. However, while under investigation, Little was transferred to Florida to be brought to trial for the murder of 26-year-old Patricia Ann Mount, whose body was found in September 1982. Prosecution witnesses identified Little in court as a person who spent time with Mount on the night before her disappearance. Due to mistrust of witness testimonies, Little was acquitted in January 1984.
Little moved to California, where he stayed in the vicinity of San Diego. In October 1984, he was arrested for kidnapping, beating, and strangling 22-year-old Laurie Barros, who survived. One month later, he was found by police in the backseat of his car with an unconscious woman, also beaten and strangled, in the same location as the attempted murder of Barros. Little served two and a half years in prison for both crimes. Upon his release in February 1987, he immediately moved to Los Angeles and committed more than 10 additional murders.
Little was arrested on September 5, 2012, at a homeless shelter in Louisville, Kentucky, and extradited to California to face a narcotics charge, after which authorities used DNA testing to establish that he was involved in the murders of Carol Ilene Elford, killed on July 13, 1987; Guadalupe Duarte Apodaca, killed on September 3, 1987; and Audrey Nelson Everett, killed on August 14, 1989.
All three women were killed and later found on the streets of Los Angeles. He was extradited to Los Angeles, where he was charged on January 7, 2013. A few months later, the police said that Little was being investigated for involvement in three dozen murders committed in the 1980s, which until then had been undisclosed. In connection with the new circumstances in Mississippi, the LaPree murder case was reopened. In total, Little was tested for involvement in 93 murders of women committed in many US states.
Conclusions
Little seemed to escape multiple arrests without doing serious prison time or being placed on parole and probation. If he got the time deserved for felonies and violent offenses, he wouldn’t be free to murder multiple women.
Criminal justice reform is a necessary process but, concurrently, we have to be aware that there are people in the justice system who are worth prosecutions based on criminal history.
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