When Nicholas W. Browning is sentenced in December for the fatal shootings of his parents and two younger brothers, the 16-year-old Cockeysville honors student with no prior criminal record will likely join a state prison population that includes hundreds of inmates serving time for crimes they committed as teenagers.
He'll be fingerprinted, photographed and, in the language of the prison system, "classified."
He could serve out his sentence - up to two consecutive life terms, according to the terms of the plea agreement reached Monday - among other maximum-security inmates convicted of murder, rape and other serious crimes, state corrections officials say. Or, if he is deemed in need of protection, he might spend as many as 23 hours a day in his cell.
"In terms of whether he'll be in the general population or segregated, that depends on his characteristics, his age, how he carries himself," said Kendall Gifford, the director of case management with Maryland's Division of Correction. "Some people make the charge that we don't want to take a young guy and put him in with the lions. But a lot of the young guys are the lions."
Browning, however, appears to be far different from the typical juvenile inmate.
A sophomore at Dulaney High School and a Boy Scout, he played lacrosse and enjoyed regular ski trips in Western Maryland at his family's vacation home on Deep Creek Lake. He took high-level classes at Dulaney and has an IQ that a psychiatrist who evaluated him testified places him in the superior or very superior range of intelligence.
And having pleaded guilty this week to four counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of his parents and brothers, he faces a sentence that will likely leave him a distant chance of ever being released from prison. No inmate serving a life sentence has been paroled in Maryland since 1994, and all such cases require the approval of the governor.
"Most kids prosecuted as adults are not kids who have killed their families. Most are not kids who have killed at all," said Bart Lubow, the director of programs for high-risk youth at the Annie E. Casey Foundation. "The difference in Nick's case, of course, is that his case is this horribly egregious, one-of-a-kind thing."
Of the current prison population of 23,285 inmates, 62 are younger than 18, according to statistics from the state's Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services.
