Kip Kinkel was publicly reviled when, suffering from undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenia, he shot and killed his mother and father before killing two of his classmates and wounding 25 others in a mass shooting at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon, in 1998. Kinkel pled guilty to murder and attempted murder and was sentenced to 111 years in jail without the possibility of parole. Since then, Kinkel’s case has been repeatedly weaponized to justify extreme punishment and sentencing for juveniles. After twenty years of silence, Kinkel finally spoke to journalist Jessica Schulberg in an exclusive interview published in HuffPost in June. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Schulberg speaks to TRNN’s Eddie Conway about how Kinkel’s story fits into the fight against over-incarceration and juvenile life sentences.
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