James Comer’s case helped end de facto life sentences for young offenders in New Jersey. He had been convicted of felony murder as a teenager, after his companion in a robbery shot a victim.

By Maia Coleman

Oct. 17, 2025

With a steady stride, James Comer stepped past the front gate of the Northern State Prison complex in Newark, N.J., through a crush of honking delivery trucks and a throng of awaiting friends, into freedom.

For years, this moment — the crisp October morning, on a frontage road beside Newark Liberty International Airport, the soft sunshine, the air — had seemed unimaginable.

Mr. Comer was only 17 when he took part in an armed robbery that left a man dead, sending him to prison with a sentence of 75 years. His first chance at parole would have come decades into that sentence, when he would be 86.

It amounted to a life sentence.

But over the years, Mr. Comer’s case propelled a legal movement that would end de facto life terms for juvenile offenders in New Jersey, and create opportunities for young people to petition for their early release. Over two decades, Mr. Comer’s case rose to the state’s highest court, opening the door for dozens of inmates to seek sentence reductions.

On Friday morning, 25 and a half years after he was first arrested, Mr. Comer completed his reduced term, taking deep breaths and wiping tears from his cheeks as he crossed to the other side of the Newark prison gate.

“When I started this, I was trying to get out of jail. I wasn’t doing this to try to set precedents, I wasn’t trying to help nobody, I was trying to help me and my family,” Mr. Comer said on Friday, just minutes after his release. “I didn’t know it was going to open the doors.”

Mr. Comer grew up in Newark in the 1980s, often moving, and surrounded by constant violence and crime, according to Alexander Shalom, one of his lawyers, who represented him while working at the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey. Mr. Comer had no major criminal record — nothing more than a marijuana arrest, Mr. Shalom said — but at 17, he fell in with a 21-year-old cousin and things took a turn for the worse.

On the evening of April 17, 2000, Mr. Comer, the cousin and a 17-year-old friend set out on a string of four armed robberies. During one of the robberies, on Park Avenue in East Orange, one of Mr. Comer’s accomplices shot and killed a 35-year-old man, George Paul, while searching his pockets, according to trial testimony reported by NJ.com. He was a father of two.

Mr. Comer was not the shooter, but after the group was arrested, he was taken to court and tried, as an adult, on accusations of robbery and felony murder, among others. The charge can be leveled against those accused of certain felonies that have resulted in death, even if that person didn’t do the killing.

Mr. Comer’s cousin testified against him and the other 17-year-old. Mr. Comer was given a sentence totaling 75 years, with no chance of parole for about 68 of those years, the longest sentence of the three.

“He was going to die in prison,” Mr. Shalom said.

He spent his early incarcerated years earning a high school diploma. He loaded up on self-improvement classes and joined a music production program, where he honed a passion for gospel hip-hop.

Around 2012, his luck began to change.

The U.S. Supreme Court had recently limited the punishments that could be imposed on juvenile defendants, first eliminating the death penalty, then banning mandatory sentences of life without parole for nonhomicide charges, and finally, in 2012, extending that ban to homicide charges.

There was a chance to push the rulings further in New Jersey. Mr. Comer’s was the perfect test case.

Over the next few years, with the help of Mr. Shalom and Lawrence S. Lustberg, a lawyer with Gibbons P.C., Mr. Comer fought his case up to the state supreme court, arguing that his sentence amounted to life without parole and was therefore illegal. The court agreed and Mr. Comer returned for a resentencing hearing, where he received a new term of 30 years with no parole, the mandatory minimum.

For Mr. Shalom and Mr. Lustberg, it hadn’t gone far enough.

Mr. Comer and his team appealed for a second time, returning to the state supreme court, and this time arguing that the minimum sentence was unconstitutional when applied to youths who commit crimes “when their brains are still forming,” Mr. Lustberg said.

In a landmark ruling in 2022, the court mandated that any minor who receives a lengthy sentence can ask for a resentencing after 20 years, opening a pathway for scores of inmates to seek reductions.

In New Jersey, those appearances are now called Comer Hearings.

After his second appeal, Mr. Comer was resentenced again, this time receiving a new term of 25 and half years without parole, which ended Friday.

“The point of this is really about justice,” Mr. Lustberg said. “That’s ultimately what this jurisprudence is all about: It’s about the benefit of forgiveness, and it’s about the understanding that people really do change.”

The changes prompted by Mr. Comer’s case arrived amid a wave of statewide and national legislation in the late 2010s and early 2020s, as officials rethought the criminal justice system, including bail practices and rules for prosecuting minors.

But Mr. Comer’s case has taken on new significance, and urgency, as national attitudes regarding criminal justice have flipped and many states have revived tough-on-crime legislation.

Mr. Lustberg said that the Comer decision will be an important bulwark in New Jersey, especially as the conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court has indicated it could be willing to roll back certain precedents protecting juvenile defendants.

Since the Comer decision, at least 41 incarcerated people have been released, or will be in the next 13 years, as a result of Comer Hearings, many having received sentence reductions, according to the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender. About 57 more prisoners are eligible for the hearings.

The group has formed something of a community on the outside, showing up at current inmates’ resentencing hearings to speak on their behalf.

“It’s really incredible what people have done with their lives because of the second chance, because of Comer,” said Luis Torres, 50, who received a sentence of 30 years to life at age 16. He was released from prison almost three years ago after a Comer Hearing. Mr. Torres, who now works in the ombudsman’s office for the Department of Corrections, became friends with Mr. Comer in prison and arrived at the Newark prison on Friday morning to greet him.

His case “gave a lot of us who thought that we were going to potentially die in prison a hope,” Mr. Torres said. “His release means that a lot of folks understand that we’re not the same people we were as children.”

On Friday morning, as Mr. Comer made his way through the group of friends and family who had assembled to meet him, the day seemed to come alive. Cars whizzed by on the highway beside the prison. An airplane took off, rumbling overhead.

After his release, Mr. Comer said that he plans to start his next chapter immediately, with dreams of making gospel trap music, and working on behalf of other incarcerated people.

“We’ve got some work,” he said, tossing his head back to meet the sunshine.

“I’m here. They’ve got a voice now.”

Maia Coleman is a reporter for The Times covering the New York Police Department and criminal justice in the New York area.

A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 18, 2025, Section A, Page 15 of the New York edition with the headline: Calmly Taking First Steps to Freedom After Facing a Lifetime Inside a Prison.

See more on: American Civil Liberties Union

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5787475&forum_id=2\u0026show=my#49357746)

But yes these are obviously scalps for ACLU types. The amount of funding and man power for these cases is immense. There's a relative army of lawyers who do nothing but try and overturn these cases all day.

At the same time places like Newark are universally known to be unlivable hellscapes and this is really bad for everyone. This is why desirable real estate is so expensive and life is unlivable. We used to have double or triple the amount of housing per capita because these urban areas were livable and now they're not. And guys like this reoffend all the time like the dude who went on Joe Rogan to do a victory lap about being exonerated and then brutally murdered someone shortly thereafter.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5787475&forum_id=2\u0026show=my#49357882)

====

the NJ Supremes read that into the text of their constitution. lol.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5787475&forum_id=2\u0026show=my#49357926)