Ohio Teen Jailed for Five Years Over Pair of Shoes, Prompting Outrage

A judge's decision to sentence an 18-year-old from Columbus, Ohio, to five years in prison over his participation in an armed robbery of Nike sneakers when he was 15 years old has sparked outrage.

Dayonn Davis has been sentenced to five years in prison and 10 years on probation over the robbery that took place about two and a half years ago.

Davis had contacted the owner of a pair of black-and-white Nike Oreos, worth more than $100, on Facebook after seeing the sneakers listed for sale, prosecutor Sadhana Dailey said, according to the Ledger-Enquirer.

The then-15-year-old arranged to meet the seller in a park on January 17, 2016, bringing a friend with him. After trying the shoes on, Davis told the seller, "these shoes is took," as his friend pulled out a firearm, prompting everyone to run.

Davis was caught soon afterward when Columbus police managed to track him down and found the Nike sneakers in his closet.

A criminal docket from the Columbus County Superior Court shows Davis had entered a guilty plea for charges of possession of a firearm or knife during commission of a crime, and armed robbery.

Defense Attorney Susan Henderson said Davis had no previous juvenile record and was "extremely remorseful" over the incident that happened when he was a minor, the Ledger-Enquirer reported.

She said Davis, who had been an A and B student before his arrest, did not know his friend planned on bringing a gun on the day of his arrest, and said Davis had gotten his "life on track now" since the incident.

When Davis's mother reportedly told Judge Bobby Peters, who sentenced her son, that he had "been with the wrong person," the judge said, "Maybe he's the wrong person. He's the one with the shoes in his closet."

The decision to try Davis as an adult and Peters's harsh sentencing prompted outrage online.

"Fifteen-year-old Dayonn Davis, an honors student, stole a pair of Jordans. They tried him as an adult and sentenced him to 5 years in adult prison + 10 years of probation. This is the New Jim Crow," activist Shaun King wrote on Twitter.

Attorney and advocate Rabia O'Chadury, who wrote The Whole Story, about the high-profile murder conviction case of Adnan Syed, called the decision "unbelievable" and "egregious."

Advocacy group Schools Not Prisons also lamented the fact that Davis would "spend five years in prison and 10 on probation… over a pair of shoes."

Some compared the sentencing to that of Brock Turner, a white Stanford University student athlete who served three months of a six-month jail sentence after sexually assaulting an unconscious woman behind a dumpster, questioning how Davis could receive a five-year sentence when Turner's own jail time was so short.

A recent study conducted at Harvard University found that black offenders are sentenced to 4.8 months more in prison compared to non-black offenders.

The study also found that political affiliation plays a role in sentencing, with Republican-appointed judges handing out longer sentences to black defendants and shorter sentences to women than those appointed by Democrats.

The study's authors, who examined the practices of around 1,400 federal trial judges over more than 15 years, said their results supported previous research finding that black men served longer sentences than white men for similar crimes.