Dad holds hope for imprisoned son

IN mythology, Brandon Hein would be the lost soul wandering through eternity, looking for an opening back into the world he was forced to leave.

He would be holding a lantern whose light was growing dimmer with every passing year and with every failed attempt to help him toward a door in the darkness.

The parallel isn’t too far amiss. Hein, who will be 30 next February, has spent the last 11 years in prison for being in the presence of a murder.

But during his incarceration, massive efforts have been made for his release. These include newspaper and magazine articles, a documentary film, a play, petitions, his own website and the passions of dozens of bloggers.

I write of him today, as I wrote of him shortly after he was sent to prison, because yet another court decision will soon be forthcoming in his case. Efforts have failed on a state level to have his conviction overturned. His only chance to escape eternity rests in the hands of a federal district court.

Hein was one of five young men involved in a fight that led to the death of a policeman’s son, 16-year-old Jimmy Farris, in a backyard Agoura Hills “fort” in 1995. A sixth youth waited in their car, a seventh didn’t fight. They ranged in age from 15 to 18.

They had gone there to buy or steal marijuana that the fort’s owner, Mike McLoren, was allegedly known to sell. During the fight, Farris and McLoren were stabbed. McLoren recovered. Farris died.

Jason Holland admitted to the stabbing. The others claimed they hadn’t even known a knife was present during the scuffle.

In court, one of them, stunned by the consequence of their punishment, remarked in a tone of incredulity, “It was only a fistfight.” That didn’t matter. Under California’s felony murder rule, Hein and three others were charged with first-degree murder because Farris was killed during what was judged to be a robbery. One had his sentence reduced. Only Jason Holland, the killer, and Hein went to prison for life without the possibility of parole.

Hein has become the poster boy for justice in a case grown cold with time’s passage. Efforts to free him from prison have refused to die, even as appeals failed.

Public opinion continues to resonate on his behalf, led by legal experts and by his father, Gene Hein. Many point out that the younger Hein, who killed no one, is serving the same sentence as Charles Manson, who was responsible for the murders of eight.

In a documentary based on Hein’s situation, “Reckless Indifference,” Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz calls the sentence “disproportional, outrageous, unconstitutional and immoral.” A bill by former state Sen. Tom Hayden to revise the felony murder rule died in the Senate. A virtual army of Hein’s supporters say that if Farris hadn’t been a cop’s son, the felony murder rule never would have been applied.

I met with Brandon’s father, Gene, a disarmingly soft-spoken man of 55, who has never believed that his son would spend the rest of his life behind bars. He tends Brandon’s website with loving care and visits him every other week at the California Correctional Institute in Tehachapi.

“He tries to keep a level head in prison,” the father says. “He’ll tell you that 90% of doing time is mental. That’s not to say he doesn’t get angry and frustrated. He has difficult times. He always says it’s not hard to get into trouble, but it’s hard staying out of it.”

Sitting across from him in a restaurant, I wondered at the passion enclosed in this quiet, self-possessed man. His attitude hasn’t changed from the first day we met in their well-kept suburban home on Oak Park’s Sunnycrest Drive. He laughs easily and often appears to shrug off the darkness that has enveloped his family. But his actions tell a different story.

He has managed to awaken the world to Brandon’s case with the determination of a distance runner, even arranging to post his son’s artwork on to their website: remarkably evocative pen and ink sketches of rage and sorrow that Brandon has produced in prison. He has learned to paint and cut hair behind bars, and when he isn’t doing one, he’s doing the other. Time passes easier that way.

The tragedy that embraced seven boys is as much cultural as it is personal, addressing the unevenness of justice in America. The families all lost sons in the brutal enclosure of a suburban backyard. They stumbled into fate’s playground, one with a knife, another doomed to feel its sharp edge, and emerged as players in an American tragedy.

In his way, Brandon Hein represents them all, the lonely figure of mythology wandering through eternal darkness, seeking the door that will allow him into the light. Justice for him would also illuminate a law that vanquishes the innocent along with the guilty. The death of Jimmy Farris was a personal tragedy. Existence of the felony murder rule is societal. We are demeaned by its existence.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.