On March 24, 1998, five people were killed and ten were wounded in a matter of minutes just west of Jonesboro, Arkansas. The dead were four girls, Natalie, Paige, Stephanie and Brittheny, and one woman, Shannon Wright. Nine of the wounded were children and the tenth was an adult. By the end of the afternoon two boys were in custody. Mitchell Johnson was 13. The other boy was eleven.
Arkansas had no way to try either of them as an adult. Its law set fourteen as the youngest age at which a child could be charged in adult court, and neither boy had reached it. The case went instead to a juvenile judge, on a petition that charged each boy with five counts of capital murder and ten counts of first-degree battery. On August 11, 1998, his fourteenth birthday, Johnson pleaded guilty to every count. The younger boy contested the case, and the same judge found him delinquent on every count after a hearing of a little more than three hours. Both were committed to the state for an indeterminate term that could not run past their twenty-first birthdays.
That ceiling shaped everything that came after. The state could keep Johnson only until he turned eighteen. Federal charges carried his confinement on to twenty-one, and on August 11, 2005, he left a federal detention center in Tennessee with his time served. Seventeen months later he was arrested in northwest Arkansas. A federal jury convicted him early in 2008, and a state court gave him twelve years later that year. He spent most of the next seven years in custody on those adult cases, and in July 2015 he was released to federal supervision in Texas.
Jonesboro is the seat of Craighead County, in the northeast corner of Arkansas. The killings took place about two miles west of the city, in the county's jurisdiction, and the Craighead County Sheriff's Office took charge of the investigation.
The investigation was short. Both boys were taken into custody by officers the same afternoon. Why they had done it was never answered in court. No motive was offered at the August hearing, by either side.
On March 25, 1998, the day after the killings, the State filed a petition in juvenile court charging the two boys with five counts of capital murder and ten counts of first-degree battery. The charges were the same for both.
The petition could go nowhere else. Both boys were under fourteen, the minimum age at which Arkansas allowed a child to be charged as an adult, and no prosecutor could take them into adult court for any offense. The case stayed in the juvenile division, where the outcome would be an adjudication of delinquency and a commitment to the state, not a conviction and a sentence.
A probable cause hearing was held the same day. At it, counsel for the younger boy gave notice that he intended to raise two defenses: that his client had been insane at the time of the offenses, and that he was not competent to proceed. The court set a separate hearing on those questions. Johnson's lawyers raised no such issues.
The judge assigned to the case was a circuit-chancery judge from Osceola, in neighboring Mississippi County, sitting as the juvenile judge. The Craighead County prosecutor's office presented the State's case. The court placed the participants under a gag order, and the proceedings over the following months went forward under it.
At the separate hearing the juvenile judge heard the younger boy's arguments that the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses entitled him both to a determination of his competency before any adjudication and to the defense of insanity. The judge rejected both. A court in a delinquency case, he reasoned, could consider any mental disease or defect at disposition, when it decided where a child would be placed, and the Juvenile Code required nothing more.
That ruling left the younger boy's lawyer with a choice. He could seek an interlocutory appeal at once, or he could go forward to adjudication and raise the questions afterward. He chose to go forward, so that both issues would be preserved for the Arkansas Supreme Court.
The adjudication hearing took place in Jonesboro on Tuesday, August 11, 1998. The hearing was the juvenile equivalent of an adult trial, heard by the judge alone, without a jury.
Johnson's part was brief. On his fourteenth birthday he pleaded guilty to all five counts of capital murder and all ten counts of first-degree battery, and he admitted that he had taken part in the events of March 24. The plea ended the question of his responsibility. It left only the question of disposition.
The younger boy entered no plea of guilty. His lawyer stipulated to the facts but not to intent, and he told the court that his client did not understand the nature of the proceedings. The judge had already ruled on that point. The prosecution then called seven witnesses who tied the two boys to the deaths. The hearing lasted a little more than three hours, and at its close the judge found the younger boy guilty on every count.
In juvenile court that finding is called delinquency. The judge ruled both boys delinquent, a result that corresponds to a guilty verdict in adult court, and set disposition for the same afternoon.
At the disposition hearing Johnson read a written statement in which he apologized for what had happened on March 24. The younger boy declined to make any statement.
The judge committed both boys to the Arkansas Division of Youth Services for an indeterminate period. Its length was left to the youth services authorities rather than to the court, and it could run until each boy reached twenty-one. If either was released before then, the order provided, he would spend up to ninety days in a juvenile detention center. The judge added time for aggravating circumstances and for further violations, and the commitments were fixed to end on each boy's twenty-first birthday: August 11, 2005, for Johnson, and a date in 2007 for his co-respondent.
This was the most the law permitted. Arkansas in 1998 had no juvenile life sentence for any offense, and nothing in its Juvenile Code allowed a child of thirteen to be held into adulthood for capital murder. A delinquent could in principle be held until twenty-one, but the state had no facility designed to hold young people past eighteen, and its practical authority over the two boys was expected to end there.
Both boys were sent to a youth services facility in Arkansas.
The younger boy's case went on to the Arkansas Supreme Court, which decided it on July 13, 2000. The court split. On competency it reversed the juvenile court, holding that under the reasoning of In re Gault a juvenile has a due process right to have his competency determined before he is adjudicated. On insanity it affirmed. Following its own earlier decision in K.M. v. State, it held that because no statute gave juveniles an insanity defense, the absence of one did not deny due process, and that a rational basis supported giving the defense to adults in circuit court while withholding it from juveniles in a system built around rehabilitation and without juries. The court reversed and remanded in part and affirmed in part. One justice dissented on competency.
The appeal touched Johnson only as the second respondent named in the original petition. Having pleaded guilty, he had raised neither question, and his own adjudication stood.
The commitment order and the state's lack of facilities for anyone over eighteen pointed toward one date: August 11, 2002, Johnson's eighteenth birthday, when the state's hold on him was expected to run out. Federal prosecutors closed that gap. They brought federal charges arising from March 24, and those charges kept both boys confined until they reached twenty-one. Johnson finished his juvenile term in federal custody, at a detention center in Tennessee.
He was released there on Thursday, August 11, 2005, his twenty-first birthday, after more than seven years in confinement. Because the case had been handled in juvenile court, he came out with sealed records and no adult criminal history. The younger boy was released in 2007, when he turned twenty-one.
After his release Johnson lived in several states before returning to Arkansas, where he took a job at a Wal-Mart. On January 1, 2007, Washington County sheriff's deputies stopped a van in which he was riding in northwest Arkansas. They found a small quantity of a controlled substance and other items that led to charges. Johnson told the deputies that night that he planned to move to California and start over.
The state charged him with misdemeanor offenses. Those charges did not last. State prosecutors handed the case to their federal counterparts, and the state misdemeanors were dropped at federal request in favor of a single federal felony count: possession by a person who was an unlawful user of, or addicted to, a controlled substance, a federal felony carrying up to ten years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. Johnson pleaded not guilty.
The case was tried before a jury in the United States District Court in Fayetteville in January 2008. Johnson was twenty-three. The jury convicted him on the single count late that month.
Johnson was in custody again within days. On Saturday, February 2, 2008, Bentonville police were looking into a report that a customer's lost card had been used by someone else, and because Johnson worked at the business where the card had been left, he became part of that inquiry. Officers found a small quantity of a controlled substance on him and arrested him on a misdemeanor possession charge, and he was booked into the Benton County jail. He was soon accused of taking the card and using it.
Federal sentencing took place in Fayetteville in early September 2008. The guidelines called for a lighter term, but the prosecution argued that they did not reflect the gravity of the 1998 killings, and the court sentenced Johnson above them: four years in federal prison, followed by three years of supervised release. At the hearing he spoke to the court. "Not a day goes by that I don't think about what happened," he said.
The Benton County case came next. Johnson was sentenced in that court to twelve years in state prison for the theft of the card and its use.
He served the state sentence first. In December 2011 he was paroled from state prison on the theft and drug charges and moved directly into federal custody to begin the four-year federal term.
Johnson challenged the federal conviction from prison. He sought to have it overturned on procedural grounds. The United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit ruled against him in case number 13-2204, entering judgment on October 22, 2013.
He took the case to the Supreme Court of the United States. His petition for a writ of certiorari, filed in forma pauperis on January 21, 2014, was docketed as Mitchell Scott Johnson v. United States, No. 13-8403. The government waived its right to respond. The petition was distributed for the Court's conference of February 28, 2014, and on March 3, 2014, it was denied, without any statement of reasons. One justice took no part. Johnson filed a petition for rehearing on March 25, 2014, and the Court denied it on April 21, 2014, with the same justice again not participating. The federal conviction stood.
Johnson completed his federal sentence and was released in July 2015. He was placed under the supervision of the United States Probation Office for the Southern District of Texas and entered a treatment program there, beginning the three years of supervised release the Fayetteville court had imposed. By early 2016 his whereabouts were unclear, and he could not be reached; he was thought to be living in Texas.
Johnson's own account of his intentions on March 24 was given to the court in his written statement and was never tested by evidence, because his plea made a trial unnecessary. No motive for the killings was established in any court.
The Arkansas Supreme Court held in 2000 that the co-respondent had been entitled to a competency determination before his adjudication, and it sent his case back to the juvenile court on that point.
August 11, 1984: Mitchell Scott Johnson is born.
March 24, 1998: Five people are killed and ten wounded near Jonesboro, Arkansas; Johnson and a younger boy are taken into custody the same afternoon.
March 25, 1998: The State files a juvenile petition charging both boys with five counts of capital murder and ten counts of first-degree battery; probable cause hearing held.
August 11, 1998: Johnson pleads guilty and is adjudicated delinquent; his co-respondent is found delinquent after a contested hearing; both are committed to the Division of Youth Services for an indeterminate term.
July 13, 2000: The Arkansas Supreme Court decides the co-respondent's appeal, reversing on competency and affirming on insanity.
August 11, 2005: Johnson is released from a federal detention center in Tennessee on his twenty-first birthday.
January 1, 2007: Washington County deputies arrest him after a traffic stop in northwest Arkansas.
January 2008: A federal jury in Fayetteville convicts him on a single federal count.
February 2, 2008: Bentonville police arrest him on a misdemeanor possession charge; he is later charged in the theft and use of a customer's debit card.
September 2008: He is sentenced in federal court to four years in prison and three years of supervised release.
2008: Benton County court sentences him to twelve years for the card offenses.
December 2011: He is paroled from state prison and begins his federal sentence.
October 22, 2013: The Eighth Circuit enters judgment against him in case 13-2204.
March 3, 2014: The Supreme Court of the United States denies certiorari in No. 13-8403.
April 21, 2014: The Supreme Court denies rehearing.
July 2015: He is released to federal supervision in the Southern District of Texas.