The two defense teams coordinated their bid for a reverse waiver. Anissa’s was scheduled first. On May 26, 2015, she boarded the jail’s transpo van for the courthouse. To accommodate camera crews, Bohren had transferred proceedings from his usual courtroom—a small, unremarkable space—into a grander one with wood-paneled walls, an arched doorway bordered in marble, and timber ceiling inlays. Lining the wall were ornate portraits of long-dead judges, sporting muttonchops and beards in the style of Abraham Lincoln.
Anissa’s parents settled in the pews behind the defense table, while Bella’s family and friends crowded behind the prosecution. Anissa lowered herself between her attorneys, Joseph Smith and Maura McMahon, awkwardly clutching a pencil, determined to take notes despite her handcuffs. Bohren climbed the wooden stairs to his perch, vaulted between the court reporter’s station and the witness box. The court reporter lifted her fingertips over the small stenotype machine. Court was called into session.
“Anissa’s actions on May 31st of last year and the months leading up to that date must be analyzed through the lens of science and research related to adolescent brain development,” Smith began. He cited Roper v. Simmons, a 2005 Supreme Court case in which the court had ruled that sentencing juveniles below the age of eighteen to the death penalty was a violation of the Eighth Amendment, and Miller v. Alabama, a 2012 Supreme Court decision that mandatory life sentences without parole for juvenile homicide offenders were unconstitutional for the same reasons.
In making these decisions, Smith explained, the Supreme Court had cited the same scientific studies that Smith and McMahon planned to raise at that day’s hearing—studies that, as Smith recapped in his opening argument, “identified three significant differences between juveniles and adults when it comes to differences that impact culpability.”
1. A lack of maturity and undeveloped sense of responsibility that “are more understandable among the young,” qualities that often result in impetuosity.
2. Juveniles are more susceptible to peer pressure than adults.
3. A juvenile’s “character” is “not yet well-formed—personality traits are more transitory than those of adults.”
Smith then turned his attention to “the anatomical underdevelopment of the juvenile brain,” explaining that adults with fully developed brains made decisions using their frontal cortex—an area tied to executive functioning skills like deliberative thinking, weighing costs and benefits, thinking ahead, and regulating impulses—while decades of science had shown that adolescents relied on their amygdalas, “the area of the brain associated with primitive impulses, aggression, anger, fear.” The younger a child was, the more likely she was to be reactive in this way. Moreover, the MRI studies on adolescent brains defined “adolescent” as someone between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. For a child as young as Anissa, who had been twelve at the time of her crime, brain development was even more impaired. In fact, research showed that one’s ability to plan ahead and anticipate actually decreased between the ages of ten and thirteen.
“The Roper court concluded that the differences between juveniles and adults render suspect any conclusion that the juvenile falls among the worst offenders … Even a heinous crime committed by a juvenile [cannot be seen as] evidence of irretrievably depraved character.”
To the contrary, Smith argued, a juvenile’s undeveloped frontal cortex left open the possibility for total transformation. Compared to adults, juveniles were more capable of learning new things; they could in essence grow into completely different people. Their immaturity laid the foundation, as Smith put it, “for remorse, renewal and rehabilitation.”
Anissa’s short-term destination was all but assured: whether she was tried as a juvenile or an adult, she would be sentenced to Copper Lake School for Girls, a juvenile prison, until she turned seventeen. Her next destination depended on her status: if prosecuted as a juvenile, she would age out of Copper Lake and return to the community; if prosecuted as an adult, she would proceed to Taycheedah Correctional Institution, a women’s prison, to serve out the rest of her sentence. Also at issue was whether she would receive therapeutic resources while housed at Copper Lake. Though Copper Lake offered an array of age-appropriate resources to its inmates, if Anissa was sent there as an “adult,” juvenile programming would be considered wasted on her. She would not receive the same rehabilitative support as her peers.
Prosecutors at Anissa’s reverse waiver hearing argued that Anissa would eventually receive adequate treatment in prison. Taycheedah offered rehabilitative programming, too: there was the “dental lab,” for instance, where inmates could learn how to make dentures; a building services program, which taught the basics of carpentry, plumbing, and electrical; “office software”; and a cosmetology program.
But the defense countered that because of extreme overcrowding at Taycheedah, years often passed before an inmate could start making dentures or begin a high school education. Residence halls that had been built for ten people now housed fifty-five women. The waiting list for the prison’s anger management course ran two hundred signatures long. What’s more, Anissa needed therapy now, not in four years. Waiting until she turned seventeen to address her depression and other mental health issues put Anissa at risk for self-harm and suicide.
Next, McMahon and Smith set out to prove that transferring Anissa’s case would not depreciate the seriousness of her crime or lessen deterrence to other juveniles, who might commit similar crimes. Again, they based their case in science; research conclusively showed that adolescents are biologically incapable of forecasting future consequences, period. They do not consider the law, much less individual statutes of the law, before breaking it. And as far as young offenders like Anissa went, studies showed that, if anything, adult prosecution actually increased the rate of recidivism. “Deterrence is the idea that by sending a child from the juvenile system into the adult system, you are sending a message to other juveniles that ‘this kind of behavior won’t be tolerated,’” testified Dr. Anthony Jurek, who had evaluated Anissa prior to the hearing. “And the findings of the research are that it really doesn’t have that effect … There is no evidence that children waived into the adult system have a lower rate of recidivism. It doesn’t seem to deter them at all …”
“I do not believe that there’s any reason to suspect that if she is returned to the juvenile system, that that would serve as a bad example for other juveniles—I think that she’s already clearly being punished … Clearly the message sent is that even a child this age, there are very negative consequences for this kind of behavior.”
Expert witness Dr. Michael Caldwell agreed. In addition to being a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he also worked half-time at Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center, treating “violent criminals,” including “the 14 most unmanageable criminally insane patients in the state.” In the past, when called to testify at reverse waiver hearings, Caldwell had arrived at the conclusion that the juvenile in question should remain in the adult system, “given the person’s criminal sophistication, and the level of maturity, and so on.” But he did not feel that way about Anissa.
Having evaluated Anissa in jail, Caldwell placed her overall IQ high-average, “somewhere between 110 and 120.” But when it came to “processing speed,” which Caldwell described as, “working out puzzles, and abstract thinking,” Anissa’s IQ fell much lower. This fit with Anissa’s teachers’ observations that Anissa “shut down” when given too many instructions at once; according to them, she needed “to make progress in developing her analytical skills.” Caldwell described Anissa’s “deficit in that area” as being “so striking compared to her other functioning,” that he’d been forced to rule out a potential brain injury.
While it isn’t unusual for individuals with high IQs to test lower than average in specific areas of the test, Anissa’s results lent Caldwell and other psychologists valuable insight into her mental state leading up to the crime. Unlike a child with normal processing speeds, Anissa would have found it almost impossible to analyze conflicting information, especially if the information felt emotionally charged. This, combined with what one doctor described as Anissa’s “retiring” personality, had made her more likely than most to get swept up in a plan that, according to Anissa’s lawyers, had been commandeered by a more “dominant” individual like Morgan, whom Anissa wanted to protect and impress. Rather than weigh opposing viewpoints according to the evidence at hand, in other words, Anissa would have tended to side with whatever point of view made her most likely to maintain a friendship with Morgan. A family friend would later summarize this trait in Anissa to documentary filmmakers, calling her “a follower” and “big believer.”
On day two of Anissa’s trial, Dr. Caldwell returned to the witness box to continue his testimony about the biological differences between adults and children. Anissa wore a pink-and-purple blouse and bedazzled glasses.
“Is there a particular type of adolescent that is most sensitive to the influence of peers?” McMahon asked.
“The peak appears to be young adolescent females,” Caldwell said.
Referring to Anissa’s pediatric records, which showed that prior to the crime, she was on the cusp of puberty—slightly less physically developed than her peers—Caldwell added that, mentally, “she would have been closer to about age nine if her brain development was consistent with all of her other physical development.”
If reverse-waived into the juvenile system and sentenced to Copper Lake, Caldwell acknowledged that Anissa would likely be released somewhere between eighteen months and three years, a period of incarceration he described as “more than enough.”
“In addition to all of the things of adolescent development we’ve talked about up until now, in my opinion, she was suffering from a delusional disorder at the time and in this belief in Slenderman and all of that. And her psychological immaturity would have prevented her from thinking about, kind of rationally evaluating, some of those delusions.”
During her testimony, Dr. Antoinette Kavanaugh, who’d also evaluated Anissa, spoke of her good reputation in jail. Unlike other inmates, Anissa had not had “any major incident reports,” and Kavanaugh described her transgressions in jail as “immature” at worst. In July 2014, she had received a verbal warning for drawing a flower on her wrist with colored pencils. Along with the hair-braiding and birthday-card citations, she was charted in August 2014 for rubbing lotion on one of the tables and was “advised not to misuse lotion.” “I think it’s important for the court to note that, despite the length of time she has been in there, she has not been violent or aggressive.”
“What’s more concerning to me,” Kavanaugh said, “is I think the help she needs in managing her emotional response—she doesn’t act out, she instead gets emotional, cries, sort of makes suicidal statements … My concern is that as she comes to terms with her role in it [the crime] and why she did what she did, she’s going to need help managing the emotional aftermath of that, and I think that’s the kind of help that any good therapist would be able to provide her, but that is something she will need”—something that wouldn’t be available to her in the adult system.
Kavanaugh agreed with Caldwell’s assessment that Anissa had shared delusional disorder at the time of her crime, which Kavanaugh described as being “not as flagrant as someone who is actively hearing voices or something, or talking to themselves. So it’s not as obvious, and I don’t think it’s a fault of her parents.” Kavanaugh attributed Bill and Kristi Weier’s inability to see that Anissa was depressed, suffering, and vulnerable in the time leading up to her crime to “a lack of education.”
But as Kavanaugh made her case, her description of adolescent brains was bogged down by confusing scientific terms like “gray matter,” “white matter,” “myelination,” “synaptic pruning,” “frontal lobe,” and “cognitive control system.” Anyone in Bohren’s place would have felt their eyes glazing over at the technical jargon. That Anissa had been involved in a stabbing was far easier to understand and to remember.
After the final witnesses finished their remarks, Bohren announced that he would not be issuing a decision that day. Instead, he would give his verdicts on Anissa’s and Morgan’s reverse waivers simultaneously, after Morgan’s team presented its case. But he invited Anissa’s attorneys to give their closing remarks.
McMahon stared up at him. “You are asked to determine whether a child should be a child, or an adult … Our Supreme Court had to decide, and tell us, that because children are children we don’t get to kill them, no matter what they have done.”
The next step, McMahon suggested, was for judges to begin putting children back in the juvenile system where they belonged. This, she clarified, was not about jurisprudence but about America’s “growth as a nation.”
The highest courts had already decided that executing child “felons” and sentencing them to life in prison constituted inhumane treatment. Now, McMahon argued that adult prosecution of minors was on the same spectrum of cruel and unusual punishment. She referred to Anissa as “this child … a young lady, very young, twelve years old at the time of the offense, thirteen now … She fell under the influence of a more disturbed individual, and it caused her issues to flower.”
“Three times, if I remember the testimony from the preliminary hearing correctly, she was given the knife by Morgan Geyser. Three times, she gave it back. She couldn’t do it,” McMahon said, never wavering from her solemn tone, as if wishing to communicate at all times that she knew the seriousness of her client’s charge and was remorseful on Anissa’s behalf. “Was her behavior good that day? No. Should she have run away and summoned an adult? Certainly. But given what she was dealing with and given the complexities of the juvenile brain and the inability at that point in time for the frontal lobe to be fully developed and assert itself, when blended in with the mental health issues, she did what she could.”
To substantiate her argument that Anissa should be treated with clemency rather than retribution, McMahon proceeded to quote from recent statements made by Bella and her family. When asked, during the recent ABC 20/20 special, whether she thought Morgan and Anissa’s case should proceed in adult court, Stacie Leutner had answered that it wasn’t for her to say. “And what did little [Bella] say to the detective when she was in the hospital?” McMahon asked now. “That Anissa needed to be treated differently than Morgan, because all she did was stand there and watch.” McMahon wagered that deep down, even Bella and her family would want Anissa’s case reverse-waived.
“She has been maintaining herself about two days short of a year in this facility,” McMahon said, referring to Anissa’s time at the Washington County Jail, “with children calling her a murderer, a monster—and yet when she spoke with the officers at secure detention about what was happening, she wasn’t saying, ‘This isn’t fair.’ What she said was, ‘I deserve this, I must be what they say I am.’ This is a child who needs help with dealing with what she did, and she’s not going to get that in the way she needs it, in the way that is helpful, in a way that is future-focused and that allows her hope for a future life, if we place her in the adult system.”
In McMahon’s opinion, Anissa had already received enough punishment.
“She has been for a year in a place where they’re required to provide her with natural light, but it comes in through a skylight, through which you can’t see the sky.”