When Joe Ligon's public defender, Bradley Bridge, drove him home after he was released from State Correctional Institution – Phoenix in Montgomery County on Feb. 11, Ligon was unnerved when Bridge took a call on speakerphone on his cell. He was unfamiliar with the technology and thrown by the disembodied voice echoing through the car.

It was only one of the many changes he had to adjust to. The Philadelphia skyline had changed since he'd been inside. He had outlived almost everyone he knew.

Ligon was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole at the age of 15, in 1953. By the time he got out 68 years later, he was the longest-serving incarcerated person to ever be convicted as a minor.

As a society, "we wasted money and we stole his life," Bridge said.

In 1953, Ligon, an Alabama-born teenager who did not know how to read or write, was sentenced to life for his involvement with a group of young people who committed a string of robberies and stabbings and killed two people. Ligon was convicted of murder because the judge concluded he was responsible for the actions of the other members of the group, according to Bridge.

In prison, Ligon, a loner by nature, tended to mind his own business and did not get into trouble, Bridge said.

"They could have released him with no threat to the public after 58 years, 48 years, 38 years, even 28 years," Bridge said. "The thing about juvenile lifers is they change."

The fight to get Ligon released was decades in the making. For Bridge, the story began in 2005, when the U.S. Supreme Court held in Roper v. Simmons that death sentences for defendants under 18 were unconstitutional. Bridge began to keep an eye out for key cases that might result in a ban for life without parole for juveniles. He took on Ligon's case in 2006.

"I figured after Roper came down, that the next legal issue would be a challenge to mandatory life without parole for exactly the same legal reasoning that the court posited in Roper: that juveniles can grow and change and become rehabilitated, and that it was an Eighth Amendment violation to continue to punish them," Bridge told Law360.

In the Supreme Court's 2012 decision in Miller v. Alabama , the justices ruled life-without-parole sentences for minors were unconstitutional. Bridge was soon part of a legal team that urged the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 2013, in Commonwealth v. Cunningham, to apply the ruling retroactively, in hopes of making more than 500 juvenile lifers in Pennsylvania eligible for parole.

Pennsylvania had some of the highest numbers of juvenile lifers in the country at the time, and still did as of 2016, according to data compiled by the Sentencing Project, which noted that Black people make up 13% of the U.S. population but 63% of juveniles sentenced to life without parole. Ligon himself is Black.

"If you look at the numbers of how Philadelphia and the state of Pennsylvania had played out, regarding the number of people ... given mandatory life without parole as juveniles, it's pretty racist," Bridge told Law360.

Though Bridge did not succeed in getting the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to provide relief to juvenile lifers in 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled the Pennsylvania court in 2016 with Montgomery v. Louisiana , invalidating all life-without-parole sentences applied to juveniles.

That left Ligon eligible for resentencing, and he was re-sentenced to 35 years in 2017. But that did not leave him completely free.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court had ruled in Pennsylvania v. Batts that the Supreme Court's Miller ruling invalidated mandatory minimum life sentences only, not mandatory maximum life sentences. Under Pennsylvania's indeterminate sentencing statute, incarcerated people who are released are put on parole for the duration of their maximum sentence. If Ligon had agreed to be released on the terms offered him in 2017, he would have been on parole for life because of the mandatory maximum — something he was not prepared to accept.

"Joe said, 'I don't want to be on parole for the rest of my life,'" Bridge told Law360. "So we litigated."

When reached for comment, the office of Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner — who took office in 2018 — told Law360, "The district attorney's office was supportive of resentencing and immediate release for Mr. Ligon, and we are grateful to see him finally free. Lifetime sentences from the Jim Crow era especially should be reviewed in every jurisdiction, not just in Philly, which leads all other Pennsylvania counties in righting wrongs of the past." 

It took until Nov. 13, 2020, for Bridge to obtain a federal district judge's ruling that the mandatory lifetime parole was unconstitutional. The judge ordered Ligon resentenced or released within 90 days.

"The prosecutor, the judge and I all agreed there was no need to have an extensive hearing," Bridge said. "He had been in prison for nearly 68 years at that point. So we all agreed that in 90 days, he would just be released."

Ligon's liberation is likely to set a precedent that will get other juvenile lifers free and clear of the criminal legal system, according to Bridge.

"Theoretically, that sentence is illegal for everybody else," Bridge said, adding that litigation for other individual cases is ongoing.

With his February release secured, Ligon was facing a whole new challenge: potential homelessness. He had been inside for so long that all but one of his immediate family members had died. Halfway houses run by the Department of Corrections could not take him because he was not on probation or parole. Ultimately, the Philadelphia Office of Homeless Services stepped up to fund housing for him. A Gofundme set up in his name was flooded with donations.

While Ligon's sentence is over, the damage done to him and the hundreds of others who have spent decades in prison since childhood remains, Bridge highlighted.

"It's really debilitating to be in prison for that long," Bridge said. "It's incredibly too long."

Have a story idea for Access to Justice? Reach us at accesstojustice@law360.com.

--Editing by Emily Kokoll and Kelly Duncan.