The shooter was later charged with second-degree murder and given the possibility of parole. Hines, who was 15 at the time, was charged with felony murder for participating in a robbery that resulted in a homicide.

Although Hines never pulled a trigger or even held a weapon that day, he was sentenced, under Michigan law, to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He was offered a plea bargain deal, with the chance to serve 20 to 40 years if he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of second-degree murder. But the middle-schooler simply didn’t understand the deal, according to Deborah LaBelle, who authored a report released on Tuesday about the systematic disadvantages facing juveniles who are placed within the adult criminal justice system.

And today, 22 years later, Hines is still behind bars.

“Juveniles are getting sentenced more harshly than adults because of their inability to negotiate the adult criminal justice system,” LaBelle, the director of the Juvenile Life Without Parole Initiative, told The Huffington Post.

The United States is the only country in the world that sentences juveniles to life in prison without the possibility of parole, according to experts. And five states — California, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan and Pennsylvania — account for two-thirds of all youths younger than 18 currently serving natural life sentences. This means that they will likely die behind bars.

In Michigan, children as young as 14 who are charged with certain felonies can be tried as adults and, if convicted, sentenced accordingly. Michigan ranks second behind Pennsylvania with more than 370 young people thus far having been sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, according to LaBelle’s report, “Basic Decency: An Examination of Natural Life Sentences for Michigan Youth.”

The report, released in conjunction with Second Chance 4 Youth and the American Civil Liberties Union, details wide-ranging differences in the way the states sentence their youth. It also highlights the financial and human costs of juvenile life-without-parole sentences and vast racial disparities.

Juveniles charged with a killing in which the victim was white were 22 percent less likely to receive a plea offer than in cases where the victim was black, according to the report.

In Michigan, 73 percent of youths serving life sentences are racial minorities, even though minority youths comprise only 29 percent of the state’s youth population.

The disparity shows up in other trends. “Nationwide, black youths represent just 28% of juvenile arrests, yet they account for 35% of juvenile defendants who are waived to adult court,” the report stated.

The entire report summary can be found in the Huffington Post

U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin in Manhattan said in a written ruling that there was “overwhelming evidence” that a centralized stop-and-frisk program has led to thousands of unlawful stops. She noted that the vast majority of New Yorkers who are unlawfully stopped will never file a lawsuit in response, and she said class-action status was created for just these kinds of court cases.

The lawsuit alleged that the police department purposefully engaged in a widespread practice of concentrating its stop-and-frisk activity on black and Hispanic neighborhoods based on their racial composition rather than legitimate non-racial factors. The lawsuit said officers are pressured to meet quotas as part of the program and they are punished if they do not.

Darius Charney, who argued the case on behalf of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a non-profit legal organization, said: “We’re very pleased. We think she clearly got everything right on the law.”

He said the ruling “reinforces that this is a citywide problem the NYPD needs to address.”

In 2002, there were 97,296 stops. Last year, there were 685,724 stops, while there were 601,055 in 2010 and 575,304 in 2009.

The Police Department has said it made 203,500 street stops during the first three months of 2012, up from 183,326 in the first three months of 2011.

The RAND Corp. research organization, in a study commissioned by the NYPD and released in 2007, concluded the raw data “distorts the magnitude and, at times, the existence of racially biased policing.”

The study acknowledged that “black pedestrians were stopped at a rate that is 50 percent greater than their representation in the residential census.” But it said using the census as a benchmark was unreliable because it failed to factor in variables such as a higher arrest rate and more crime-suspect descriptions involving minorities.

Read more reactions concerning the class action status in the Huffington Post

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Apparently Pastor Winans was pumping gas at the Citgo Gas Station at Linwood and the Davison when he was robbed.

He was not hurt in the incident, but was roughed up. Below is a photo courtesy of WXYZ at the scene of the crime.

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50-year-old Zhang Bangsheng, a monkey caretaker at Wuhan Zoo in China, used warm water to wash a small Francois’ Leaf Monkey’s buttocks and then licked it for a full hour, until the little monkey defecated the peanut.

Since the peanut was too big to pass through the monkey’s butt, and the monkey was too small for medication, Zhang’s unconventional approach was the only way to save it. Mr Bangsheng “laughed with satisfaction” after the monkey finally defecated the peanut.

via Gawker