A 17-year-old murdered 3 people. Have 34 years in prison been enough?

Phillip Clements, 51, stood next to his lawyer in the courtroom to address the family of the three people he murdered with a barbell when he was 17.

“I know there’s no words I can say to the family,” Clements said as he apologized. “I was a confused kid — grown into a man of integrity, morals and principles.”

Clements was sentenced to five consecutive life terms for killing Kathryn Gatlin, 64, and two of her children — Nancy Barowski, 41, and John Brian Barowski, 45 — inside the Maryland home of the family that was helping to care for the teen in 1989. Two other family members Clements bludgeoned in the apartment survived the attack as he was looking for money to feed his drug addiction.

Thirty-four years later, a judge is weighing whether Clements should be released from prison after he requested that his sentence be reconsidered. Clements’s possible early release has pitted the family’s concerns over safety and whether he has served enough time for the heinousness of his actions against Clements’s desire to leave prison to get another chance at life.

“He’s paid in 34 years,” Michael Chandler Towns, an assistant public defender representing Clements, said during a hearing this month in Prince George’s County Circuit Court. “He changed and grew up.”

In 2019, Clements’s sentence was already reduced from the life sentences to 65 years after he challenged his punishment asserting he got an illegal sentence based on Supreme Court rulings, according to court filings. His projected release date is no later than 2037 when he’ll be 66 years old. But recently Clements asked for his sentence to be reconsidered so he can be released earlier to help build a life and get established before he’s too old.

Several of the victims’ family members spoke up in court to oppose his release and said they don’t understand how he could possibly get out of prison for his crimes.

They “were savagely beaten like animals in a slaughterhouse,” Stephen Barowski, Gatlin’s son and Nancy and John Barowski’s brother, said through tears.

Maryland law could be on Clements’s side. With the recent passage of the Juvenile Restoration Act and new policies nationwide that allow sentencing reconsiderations for people who committed crimes when they were juveniles, Clements’s circumstances are much different than they were three decades ago, according to experts.

Brianna Ford and Doyle Niemann, prosecutors with the Prince George’s County State’s Attorney’s Office’s Conviction and Sentence Integrity Unit, said in court that the unit’s responsibility is to take a close look at cases “where children were sentenced to die in prison.” The state is in support of the defense’s recommendation for time served and Clements’s release on five years of supervised probation, with conditions.

Both prosecutors and the defense argue that Clements has clinically been deemed a low risk to society and has been substance-abuse-free for 20 years with no violent infractions in his entire incarceration period. The next step for Clements would be a release to a wraparound service and reentry program based in North Carolina.

“Our job,” Ford said, “is to balance that terrible crime committed by the defendant with what we know now.”

In 1989, Nancy Barowski was working at a printing company and lived with her mother Kathryn as she raised her young son, said Robert Logan, her brother-in-law.

Her brother, John Barowski, who was mentally disabled, lived at the home, too, and got a job working at a 7-Eleven nearby cleaning up and organizing the store, Logan said.

The matriarch of the family, Kathryn Gatlin had six children. Her home — the hub of weekend and holiday gatherings — turned out to be the place where everyone was “always there,” Logan said in an interview.

Clements was also often there as the onetime boyfriend of Gatlin’s granddaughter. Gatlin was the kind of person who “wouldn’t hesitate to take somebody in” and let Clements stay at the apartment when he was having trouble with his own family, Logan and court documents said.

On the Saturday morning of Jan. 21, 1989, Clements went to Gatlin’s apartment after spending the past evening using crack and phencyclidine (PCP), among other drugs, according to court filings.

He went “intending to rob her for money to buy crack cocaine,” the court filings said. The 17-year-old knew that on Saturday mornings, the family would have cash on hand for their grocery shopping days, Logan said.

That day, Gatlin was at home, joined by Nancy and John Barowski, another one of her daughters and Nancy’s 14-year-old son. She gave Clements breakfast but refused to provide him with money, according to the court documents.

At one point, Gatlin went to the bathroom, and Clements followed, Logan said. Clements then struck her repeatedly in the head with a barbell pole.

Clements also beat each of the four other family members inside the house in the head with the barbell before stealing money from their purses and fleeing in one of their cars, the court filings said.

Nancy Barowski and John Barowski were pronounced dead at the home. Gatlin, who was rushed to a hospital, died about a week later, according to court filings. Nancy’s son and Gatlin’s other daughter, who were seriously injured in the attack, survived.

That same day, Clements told a friend’s parent what happened, who then called the police.

The teen then confessed to police and was charged as an adult with multiple counts of first-degree murder and attempted first-degree murder.

Decades later, family members told the court at Clements’ reconsideration hearing just how much their lives had changed since the murders — how they suffer from anxiety and panic attacks, being “no longer able to trust” others and how they live with guilt and holidays spent without three “innocent, caring family members.”

Gatlin’s granddaughter who had dated Clements asked the judge to keep the man who “destroyed” her family from being released.

“We’re not the same group of people and we never will be,” she said.

Logan said his family couldn’t understand why Clements’s back-to-back life sentences were reduced following a 2019 court decision. And they’re again distraught he could be let out even earlier.

“We feel he’s right where he should be,” Robert Logan said.

Maryland and states nationwide have grappled with how to address the life sentences of those who committed crimes when they were young.

Chandler Towns, Clements’s defense attorney, said in court documents that the Supreme Court has “recognized that juvenile offenders are less culpable and more capable of change than adults.”

“Broader Maryland law and this court’s 2019 ruling have spoken loudly that indeed, despite the brutal and tragic crimes he committed as a 17-year-old, he deserves to spend part of his life outside of prison gates,” Chandler Towns said.

When a court is weighing a sentencing reconsideration for juveniles, ideally, they would consider that the person committed the crime when they were underdeveloped and had “diminished capacity” because of their age, said Ashley Nellis, co-director of research of the Sentencing Project. Other factors, such as Clements’s drug use and motivation for money to support his drug use, would also be considered as doubled diminished capacity, Nellis said.

It is possible for reformed people to emerge from prison with those factors now removed, Nellis said. And research shows that it is less likely for people who commit homicides and later go to prison for longer periods of time to commit another crime after release.

What juvenile reconsideration hearings try to reveal is whether “that is a different person that is facing them and whether that person is still a danger,” Nellis said.

“When you’re taking this second look at a human being some years down the road, part of that is taking a second look at yourself as a society. Do you still believe that giving children five life terms is a good idea?” Nellis said. “I think the growing consensus and national consensus is saying no.”

At Clements’s reconsideration hearing, a clinical psychologistretained by the defense testified that Clements presents a relatively low risk to public safety based on a risk assessment.

Clements’s life circumstances at the time he committed his crimes should also be considered, Chandler Towns said in the memo.

At 17, Clements “was in the middle of this chaotic developmental period when the crime occurred,” Chandler Towns said, referring to cognitive deficits. At 13, he had gone to live with his father, who was “largely absent.” Clements then started drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana and by the end of his sophomore year of high school was addicted to using PCP and cocaine.

Clements dropped out of school, and “getting and using drugs were of singular importance to him,” according to the memo.

His 34 years in prison shows he could be a law-abiding citizen upon release, his defense argued. Clements held consistent employment and education opportunities, completed 23 certificates while incarcerated and has been sober for two decades. He had only four infractions in prison, none of which were violent and none that have occurred in the last 14 years.

Prince George’s County Circuit Court Judge Cathy Serrette, who is expected to make a decision May 8 on Clements’s resentencing request, asked both the defense and prosecutors to provide her with a complete transfer plan if Clements is granted a reduced sentence.

“It’s a grave case,” Serrette said. “Those are important pieces that are missing.”

The parties are weighing whether Clements could go to a two-year program in North Carolina for substance abuse counseling and supervision.

The residential drug rehabilitation program would offer Clements the support he needs to stay sober outside of prison and vocational training that would allow him to pursue a commercial driver’s license, Chandler Towns said in court documents.

In a letter addressed to Serrette, Clements said he has taken advantage of all the programs to improve himself that he can while incarcerated.

“My biggest fear is that I get out much older and everyone has passed away,” Clements said in the letter. His grandmother and father have died, and his mother is “all I have left in this world.”

“It’s a very daunting reality,” Clements said.

Knowing that Clements will be released at some point, Ford, the prosecutor, said the North Carolina program can send quarterly reports on Clements’s progress and “does what prison could not.” It would prepare him for release back into society.

“Mr. Clements is not the person he was when he was 17,” Ford said.

But the 17-year-old Clements is the person Logan can’t forget when he recalls the “buckets of blood” he had to clean up at the family home the day after the killings.

Or the closed-casket funerals for his sister and brother-in-law, who were “smashed like eggs.”

The scars from the barbell are still visible on the surviving family members’ bodies, the family said in court.

“They paid a terrible price for the kindness they showed to him,” Stephen Barowski said. “We have also paid the price.”