In the eyes of the court, James Price was considered a man. To the eyes in the courtroom, he was visibly a boy. At 5-foot-5 and 120 pounds, his standard-issue orange jumpsuit pooled at his feet and dragged. Shackles jangled around his skeletal wrists and ankles as a bailiff led him into a sunless chamber in downtown Milwaukee. Facing decades in prison, his fate hinged on one woman’s decision. “All rise,” said the bailiff.
And in walked Judge Janine Geske.
Appointed to the bench in 1981, Geske had seen it all in this dusty old courtroom. Sometimes she joked that when she dies, she’d like her ashes scattered in the hallway; then she could be sure they’d stay there forever. Geske’s caseload over 12 years on the circuit had included many of Milwaukee’s rapes and homicides. She’d seen her city’s worst — killers who’d made her, however briefly, reconsider her steadfast opposition to the death penalty. But she’d never seen anyone like James Price.
He’s just so young, she told herself. Fourteen years, nine months and a day. He was even younger, one-hundred and ninety-eight days younger when the crime happened, November 11, 1992. How could this kid, this boy, have done what few men would? It was senseless beyond senseless. Geske didn’t understand it, and to some degree, she didn’t have to. The facts were not in dispute.
On that night in 1992, Price had rolled down the window of a stolen minivan and opened fire on Geronovic Spade and Francine Cook, two teenagers standing along East Garfield Street on Milwaukee’s north side. Spade fell and was later pronounced dead. Cook, wounded in the gunfire, screamed and ran inside her home dripping blood. Price and his buddies drove away.
Price had been charged as an adult but avoided a trial by entering an “Alford plea,” where he could maintain his innocence while acknowledging the state likely had enough evidence to convict him. The choice of what to do with him at sentencing was Geske’s.
Her wiggle room was limited. Wisconsin law demanded Price be sent away for at least 20 years. But was that already too much — or not nearly enough? Geske prided herself on decisiveness: weigh the facts, render judgment, move forward without regret. Some of those facts, in this case, were clear: Price, then barely 14 years old, committed a decidedly adult crime. But the sheer depravity threatened to overshadow important context as she pondered his sentence, and his potential to rise above what he’d done: What shaped James Price? What did justice for his victims require?
And what should redemption cost — for Price, and for the rest of us?
Justice as more than punishment
More than 30 years later, Mary Triggiano sits down across from me at the café inside Marquette University’s law school. Triggiano has known Geske and Price for years because of their shared interest in something called “restorative justice.” The concept differs fundamentally from traditional criminal justice. While courts simply determine what law was broken, who broke it and how they should be punished, restorative justice sees each crime as a community fracture that needs repair.
The court’s jurisdiction terminates once punishment is handed down. If the victim wants to forgive the offender, that’s fine. If the offender wants to better themselves in prison, terrific. But those things are beyond a judge’s purview as we know it. Restorative justice takes a more big-picture view. One that sees beyond punishment alone.
Restorative justice brings all parties — offenders, victims and the communities they share — together voluntarily to begin the hard work of mending what has been broken. When Triggiano asks her students whether they associate the word “healing” with the criminal justice system, no hands rise. Yet restorative justice, when all parties are open to it, can heal. And it starts with understanding the facts and circumstances.
At the time of Price’s crime, 18 was widely understood as the age of adulthood because it corresponds with the end of puberty. He was tried as an adult because of his crime’s severity, as many other youth offenders were, and are. That’s despite evidence that emerged, around the turn of the 21st century, suggesting the brain takes far longer to develop than reproductive organs or muscle mass.
In particular, the brain’s prefrontal cortex — which manages impulse control — does not reach full working capacity until 25. Should that change how Price appears in the eyes of justice — whether criminal or restorative?
It’s a very live question, still debated in wide-ranging places. Some state courts have in recent years struck down and even reversed life sentences without parole for youth offenders, calling such a punishment “cruel and unusual.”
The Supreme Court, starting with a case called Roper v. Simmons that banned the death penalty for minors in 2005, has also steadily accounted for emerging brain-development research. And in 2016, Utah joined a growing number of states, including Nevada and Wyoming, to ban life-without-parole sentences for minors.
“They’re not the same people when they’re 16, 17, 18 as they are when they’re 40 and 50 years old,” state Rep. Lowry Snow, a Republican, told The Washington Post at the time. “Utah is very prone to a recognition that there can be redemption.”
But the application of precedent can be fickle these days. North Carolina passed a law in 2019 that moved 16- and 17-year-olds into the juvenile system — only to reverse that law and override the governor’s veto in 2024 as concerns mount nationwide about youth crime and delinquency. The White House pointed to this perceived delinquency to justify the federal takeover of Washington, D.C., back in August, arguing that “caravans of mass youth rampage through city streets at all times of the day.”
Public opinion, meanwhile, is even less settled — especially when victims of youth violence offer vivid, horrifying testimonials, often followed by condemnation. When youth and violence collide in our justice system, it challenges the stories we tell ourselves about mercy, punishment and the chasm between them. It forces a confrontation with the open-ended arithmetic of what justice requires. Of what is owed, and to whom.
Restorative justice, Triggiano insists, offers one answer. And even if forgiveness and redemption are not requirements, “if you have both of those things as part of it,” she adds, “it can be transformative.”
Restorative justice dares to ask, she explains, what can be accomplished when we see past justice as punishment. And it teaches that redemption, if it can be achieved at all, starts not with one person, but with people who believe it is possible. People who don’t need redemption themselves, but who believe in the idea of redemption anyway.
People like Judge Janine Geske.
A jurist’s origin
Growing up in 1950s Cedarburg, Wisconsin — a settlement 30 minutes north of Milwaukee, then caught somewhere between its mill town past and suburban future — Geske was raised by schoolteacher parents. In their close-knit community where families walked to school and church and rarely drove anywhere, she was the model child, never daring to misbehave after her mother promised she’d always get caught.
In 1966, her parents allowed their even-tempered, well-mannered daughter to spend 11th grade at a Belgian boarding school. “By the time I came back a year later,” Geske says, “I was dreaming and thinking in French.” She also brought back a more global perspective to overwhelmingly white Cedarburg, informed by young women from the then-Belgian Congo, Jewish girls and more.
“All sorts of other things,” she adds, “that I had never been exposed to in Cedarburg.” Which led her to start asking some big questions. Among them: What did she believe? And what did she really want to do with her life?
Her divorce at 30 prompted a spiritual quest through Milwaukee’s churches — Lutheran, Episcopal, Methodist, Unitarian — until finding a Catholic parish that drew people “from 40 ZIP codes.” Around that time, in 1979, she also befriended a fellow Marquette faculty member and Jesuit scholastic who decided to drop his pursuit of the priesthood after seven years of training. They married in 1981 and both remain practicing Catholics.
Restorative justice takes a big-picture view. It sees every crime as a crack in the social fabric that needs to be repaired. Punishment can be part of that, but it’s not the only part.
Originally wanting to pursue juvenile law, Geske found her professional calling in criminal court. Following graduation from Marquette’s law school in 1975, she took a job at the Legal Aid Society of Milwaukee. “I started with about 700 clients, all with court cases,” she says. “I was in court from early morning till night, and then working with clients afterward.”
It was here that her developing sense of justice became more pronounced. “I got to see courtrooms and processes that were fair to people who had nothing,” she says, “and I got to see many places where people didn’t have any respect for (them).”
That informed her judicial perspective when she was appointed to the bench in 1981 by Republican Gov. Lee Sherman Dreyfus. “Justice — whatever justice is, and whatever your judicial viewpoint of justice — you can arrive at it in most cases, not always, by using a good process,” she says. Meaning everyone is heard; every point is considered; and you keep an open mind. Or so she told herself.
James becomes ‘Compton’
James Price remembers himself as a good kid. As a kid who earned As and Bs; whose favorite subject was science. Growing up in the ’80s, he rode bikes. He was a soft-spoken Boy Scout who perked up around his friends. He hooked bluegill and softshell turtles on summer afternoons. And he loved sports.
Football. Baseball. Basketball. He idolized Michael Jordan. Price wanted to be an athlete, too, back in those days. He wasn’t sure what kind. Maybe a boxer. He was always good at fighting.
Born in Illinois in 1978, Price bounced between a smattering of towns there and urban Milwaukee. His mom, a descendant of the Great Migration, which saw five million African Americans flee the South starting in 1910, endured the long, unpredictable hours of a nurse. His dad worked in Illinois steel mills. They’d separated before Price was old enough to notice or understand what that meant.
For most of the year, he lived with his mom and three half-siblings in a brown, four-bedroom house where he was taught to cook for himself when she wasn’t home. In the summer, he lived with his dad, alone, because he was his dad’s only son. People often told him he was well on his way, in those days, to becoming a real man. That he was a leader. But he had questions. And without his dad around for most of the year, he started looking for answers elsewhere.
He’s trying to restore his humanity. Trying to restore the community’s trust in him.
Some came from extended family. He was especially close with his cousin, Ishé. They were inseparable. Always competing, playing basketball. He recalls family barbecues, with Motown hits on the speakers and hot coals searing burgers on the grill. “Us all being together,” he says. “Family being family.”
Other answers came from the street. His neighborhood was a multicultural melting pot of Latinos, Vietnamese immigrants and more. He was Black, but his best friends were Puerto Rican. “We always knew never to be alone,” he remembers. “When we walked each other home, and it came down to the last two people, we always stayed at the house.”
Outside those houses, Wisconsin’s murder rate was steadily climbing, from fewer than 200 every year before 1990 to 240 by 1991. Gang presence was also growing, with the several groups establishing territory in Price’s neighborhood of Walker’s Point.
Many of the men around him were already members. He saw in them a sense of brotherhood. A sense of belonging he’d found nowhere else. They fancied themselves protectors of the neighborhood. He was happy to indulge these role models who told him he was a good guy, a good man, for standing up for himself and his community. He knew, after all, that the neighborhood could be violent.
He’d heard the pop of gunfire, seen the blood it left behind. He’d once tripped over a loaded handgun hidden inside a 25-cent bag of Doritos. It scared him then. But where he grew up, gang membership wasn’t really a choice. It was the default expectation. “I didn’t even know I was in a gang,” he admits. But soon enough, Price was affiliated with a well-known Latino group. And soon after that, he’d toss around “check the chip bag” as a useful concept for hiding firearms in plain sight.
Price learned many things from his gang life, but the most consequential was this: If someone hits you, you hit them back harder. Don’t back down, for any reason. To do so was to show weakness, and in his environment, weakness would get you killed.
Price was shot at for the first time at 12. By 14, he’d dodged bullets multiple times. A friend had killed himself playing Russian roulette. Another had been shot in the face. And one more he’d seen die in his friend’s mother’s arms. “That damaged me,” he says. “I was hurting, and I needed someone to talk to, and I didn’t know who to talk to.”
He hid his questions from his mom, who didn’t know about his gang involvement. As far as she could see, he was just hanging out with friends. He kept it that way on purpose. A man wouldn’t burden his mother with his own pain. She was the type of mom to stay on top of his grades; to insist he work hard in school. But he was still doing enough boy things — playing flag football, or shooting hoops — to keep her from looking more deeply. She worked, and she had four kids to raise, after all. She figured her son was fine.
The summer before Price’s life changed forever, a series of coincidences catalyzed an already-brewing catastrophe. First, for unknown reasons, he didn’t stay with his dad that summer. His cousin, Ishé, had also just moved to Las Vegas. Ishé’s mom asked James’ mother to let him spend the summer with them, but no, James’ mother told her. He was her baby. She wanted to keep him close. Finally, an electrical fire tore through their brown, four-bedroom house, destroying a lifetime’s worth of family history.
Combined with the influence of his gang, that summer turned into a crucible. Price didn’t know how to express his feelings amid so much change. He didn’t think men were supposed to express feelings, in fact. Real men fought their way out of trouble.
Friends called him Compton, for his fandom of the LA-based rap group N.W.A. He developed a reputation. A name to defend. He was a man, he believed. A man who didn’t need guidance. He was not to be messed with. He would show anyone who tried.
Even someone who didn’t.
A tipped hat
Price was looking for vengeance when he stole a tan minivan on the evening of November 11, 1992. Maybe vengeance for the friend who’d been shot a few months earlier. Maybe for the multiple times he’d been shot at himself. The exact reason is fuzzy, but this much is clear: He and two friends headed to north Milwaukee with retaliation on their minds. “We believed,” he says, “we knew where the people was who did it.”
Vengeance was one thing. Killing was something else. Their intent was not to kill, but to instill fear. That’s how gang retribution worked: You hit us, we go into your neighborhood and hit whoever we can find. “That’s how it was played then,” Price says.
Still, he would shoot low. That was his plan, and he was deliberate about it. The seismic risks involved did not register with his 14-year-old mind. Of course he could shoot at someone without killing them.
Cruising along East Garfield Street, in an area dominated by triangular-roofed family homes, power lines and tall, leafless trees, Price found what he was looking for: Two teenagers, a girl and a guy, who was wearing a cap tilted to the right. That was a signifier.
“If it wasn’t straight forward or straight back, you belonged to something,” Price says. “It identified you.” His own gang wore their hats to the left. So this guy, whose name was Geronivic Spade, was a rival. Whether he was involved in any of the violence that had inspired Price and his friends to make this trip, he had no idea. But targeting him would send a message. One of his friends handed Price a handgun. “Shoot the flake,” the friend said, which identified their target as an outsider.
“What’s up, flake?” Price shouted through an open window as he started firing. Spade pushed his girlfriend, Francine Cook, out of the way and ducked.
Price shot about six times, and he saw Geronovic Spade stagger and fall. Francine Cook screamed, then stood in shock as they sped away. Price didn’t consider the possibility Spade could die. He’d shot low, after all, and didn’t intend to kill.
On the way home, Price and his friend argued over directions. Their erratic driving attracted police attention, which led them to flee. Price was caught, at which point he thought he’d be going down for the stolen van. But his friend still had the gun on him. He didn’t know it had become a murder weapon. And since he hadn’t ditched it, law enforcement had hard, physical evidence tying Price and his friends to the crime.
When questioned by police, the friend told the whole story. Geronovic Spade was dead by then. When he ducked, he’d been shot twice in the back of the head. And Francine Cook had seen it all: three young faces that she was able to identify, made visible only by the flash from each spent bullet. Price was charged with first-degree murder.
Geske’s verdict
Geske had read about the shooting in the newspaper. And it was horrific.
Normally, she tried to consider all viewpoints in a crime. She tried to walk around in everyone’s shoes. With Price, with what he’d done, it was a challenge. “It was not sympathetic,” she says. “You got a kid that just blows away another kid because his hat’s tipped wrong.” She’d had juveniles charged as adults, but usually they were 16 or 17, charged with armed robberies and other “lesser” crimes. Back then, she believed “they ought to be treated like adults because they’re committing adult crimes.” She said so publicly. But a 14-year-old with a murder charge was unprecedented in her courtroom.
She nevertheless tried to approach it like any other case: by considering punishment, protection, rehabilitation and deterrence. Judge Geske never much believed in deterrence on murder cases. Punishment was obviously needed, meanwhile, and protection was certainly warranted. The tricky piece was rehabilitation.
“How cold-hearted is this kid?” she wondered. “Is he so ruined that he’s always going to be dangerous?” That’s the question she returned to again and again: Is this kid savable?
The kid himself remembers tearing up in the dusty old courtroom. He remembers apologizing to his victim’s mother. He explained that he never intended to kill. But he’d also begun to reckon with the fact that he did.
Especially in the face of testimony from his victims and their loved ones. They told stories of potential snuffed out too soon. Of fear that followed them everywhere. Price doesn’t remember much about that now, he admits. At the time, he was focused on his own fate.
Heading into sentencing, Price thought he faced a maximum of 13 years. That was incorrect. Since he’d been charged as an adult, he faced the same potential sentence as any adult killer: life in prison.
The exact numbers on a “life” sentence varied in Wisconsin at the time, giving judges somewhat wide discretion to set parole eligibility. “I obviously wanted to give him a chance,” Geske remembers. So she decided to make him eligible for parole after 25 years. By then, he’d be 40 years old.
Price was stunned. His life was over. He said so aloud.
“No,” Geske told him. Price could use his time in prison to turn things around. “Your life is not over,” she said.
The words didn’t register with Price in the moment. He didn’t even notice them until several years later, when he requested his sentencing transcript. Even then, he didn’t believe Geske believed them. He hardly believed them himself.
Toward ‘human again’
At 14, Price was mistakenly sent to Dodge Correctional Institute — a maximum-security prison — before a warden’s daughter noticed his age. Her father, admitting the mistake, had Price transferred to Ethan Allen School for Boys. But the juvenile facility proved equally dangerous.
His choices were to be victimized, or to fight. He fought. By 16, he’d returned to adult facilities, where his gang affiliation offered some protection. In 1994, he briefly crossed paths with Jeffrey Dahmer, the infamous cannibal serial killer, at Columbia Correctional. Five days into Price’s stay there, Dahmer was murdered. If killers could get to Dahmer, he thought, they could get to him. So once again, he fought.
Hard and often, which led to lengthy stays in solitary confinement. Between 1993 and 2001, Price estimates he spent a total of about five years in “segregation.” In an 8-by-8 cell, 23 hours per day, underneath a ceaseless fluorescent light.
To pass the time, he mostly read, wrote and slept. He learned a lot about who he was, and who he wanted to be. With nothing but time to ponder those big questions, he requested his old court transcripts and scoured them, line by line, hoping to find — something. Perhaps a mistake that would grant him an early release. Or maybe just something to hold on to.
Whatever the intent, Price stumbled upon the parting words of Judge Geske. Words that meant nothing to him in the courtroom, but meant something in his cell.
“Your life is not over.”
He turned the phrase over in his mind.
He also earned his GED, took up beadwork as meditation and found Islam. Though raised Christian, he was drawn to the faith after noticing Muslim inmates were consistently the most principled and peaceful across every facility. Wanting what they had, he converted in 1996.
By the early 2000s, Price was trending away from fighting. His prison journey reached a climax during a three-year stay at a supermax facility, followed by a few more tame stops. He was no longer classified as high-risk. Which, eventually, led him to the medium-security Fox Lake.
There, between an endless march of soy-based meals, essentially the only protein the mess hall served, he met a chaplain who taught classes in restorative justice. The process involved sitting with other convicts, victims and community stakeholders — cops, neighbors, whoever — and listening. Price felt like he’d never been listened to, until then. “It made me feel human again,” he says.
Approaching his release date, he was growing into something new. And he wasn’t the only one.
Names remembered and forgotten
A few months after Geske sentenced Price to life in 1993, another Republican governor appointed her to a 10-year term on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Sometimes, during those years, she thought about Price. But more often, she thought about what she really wanted.
After five years interpreting statutes, she attended a Jesuit-led religious retreat in the Dominican Republic. After a rigorous process of discernment, she decided to leave the Supreme Court early in 1998.
She wanted to work with people instead of laws. She’d long been visiting prisons, honing her skills in the hard work of restorative justice. She facilitated victim-offender dialogues. And at Marquette, she capped her career by founding the Andrew Center for Restorative Justice. It wasn’t just her work that had evolved; so had her views.
Those old quotes about how youth offenders ought to be treated like adults now make her cringe. And advancements in our understanding of adolescent brain development suggested she had been wrong. Many youth offenders, she realized over time, grow out of a desire to commit crimes. By the time they reach middle age, they tend to either be in for life — or completely reformed.
Price stumbled upon the parting words of Judge Geske — words that meant nothing to him in the courtroom, but meant something in his cell. “Your life is not over.”
The latter bunch, she came to believe, could find redemption by “turning (their) face toward the holy.” By using bad experiences from their past to become wiser, and by using that wisdom to “serve God and live out (their) faith,” if they’re religious. If not, making a positive difference in the lives of others works, too. That’s what her Catholic faith tells her — especially the Jesuit influence, given the order’s guiding light of living as “men and women for others.”
Through it all, she’d still sometimes remember that 14-year-old boy. When the Supreme Court ruled that minors couldn’t be sentenced to life without parole, for example, she couldn’t remember whether she’d condemned him to such a fate. Sometimes she looked through old newspaper clippings, trying to figure out what had become of him. But she couldn’t remember his name.
Price, meanwhile, would never forget hers.
From Milwaukee to Rwanda
Released in 2020 at age 41, Price celebrated his freedom with a feast at Applebee’s, though a full night’s sleep remained elusive. Despite prison construction experience with Habitat for Humanity, steady employment also proved challenging. He worked odd jobs and hazardous waste removal until finding his calling in 2021. Through the Medical College of Wisconsin’s Comprehensive Injury Center, Price was hired that June as a “violence interrupter” with an outfit called 414 Life.
The job puts him right back where he was as a boy: on the front lines of youth violence in Milwaukee. He’s supposed to be someone kids can trust, given his similar life experience; someone who gets to know them — and has the credibility to guide them away from the bad choices he knows all too well.
He works mostly with victims and perpetrators of gun violence. Whenever there’s a shooting involving youth in the city, Price is there to try and deescalate. It doesn’t always work. “The most difficult part of the job is not being able to help people,” he says. “Not being able to put the fire out when you know that you can, but they don’t want to.”
But it can also be fulfilling. He’s seen kids graduate high school. Go to college. Start businesses. And that begins, he believes, with a willingness to meet them where they are, without judgment. He’d like to continue that work — eventually by leading his own nonprofit that will help kids process their trauma. That will give them the listening ears he never had. He really likes a line from a song he heard recently: “Hurt people hurt people.”
Some of his past is still hard to approach. When his employer participates in an annual R&B festival along Garfield Avenue each July, he stays away. Even though the festival doesn’t overlap with the precise location of his crime, the street name alone is too close. “I don’t attend,” he says. “I don’t care what’s going on — I just don’t want to be a part of it.”
He does, however, take every opportunity to say his victims’ names, as a testament to their memory. And he lives with his childhood sweetheart in Oak Creek, about 20 minutes southeast of where he grew up. They reconnected in 2020, and he plans to marry her even though he still struggles with life outside prison.
He calls dinner “chow” without thinking. He’s had to adjust to smartphones. And for years, he never — not once — slept through the night. Not until a recent trip to Rwanda, where he visited a village that had been ravaged by killing. He sat in justice circles with survivors and “perpetrators” alike, listening. He wanted to know how they could live together.
In the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, forgiveness and redemption were the only way Rwanda could move forward, they told him. There was simply no other way to make progress. “You hear the story from a perpetrator that might have killed 50 people because of propaganda, right?” Price says. “And then you have the survivors that forgave. Whole ’nother level.”
Price wanted to know how that was possible. The answer was stunningly simple: We’re capable of more than our worst moments. And if we really want to move forward, we should never forget victims — but we also need to remember that redemption is not something that can be earned alone. It must also be given.
Sleep finally found him. Yet something else still nagged.
Back in Milwaukee, Price was attending philosophy classes at Marquette, thanks to the school’s Education Preparedness Program. He and other former convicts discussed ideas like Plato’s allegory of the cave.
In that story, people are chained to a wall and can see only reflections projected from the outside. This becomes their entire reality. Socrates, the parable’s narrator, suggests that if these prisoners were to be released, many of them would walk into reality and find that it burned their eyes. They’d beg for a return to the comfort of the cave. It tends to resonate with former prisoners. “I might have to go through a little bit of this struggle with my eyes hurting,” Price says, “but it probably ain’t that bad.”
Then one day in early 2024, he happened to have a class that took him to Marquette’s law school. There, the new James Price spotted an old name on a door.
Reunion
He knew who she was immediately. You never forget the person who sent you away. “That’s the lady,” he thought then, “that gave me all that damn time.” Just to make absolutely sure, he checked with program director Theresa Tobin. Is that the Janine P. Geske who was a judge? Yes. The one who served Branch 23, of the circuit court courthouse, who went on to be a Supreme Court justice? Yes, again.
He asked to set up a meeting, but first, he did some research. Before meeting Geske, he wanted to understand her. He learned about her eventual turn toward restorative justice, and he realized she was doing valuable work with communities he knew. But in meeting her, he had an objective. He wanted to know why Geske gave him as much time as she did. And, though he wasn’t fully conscious of it, he also had something to say to her.
Tobin organized the meeting at Marquette’s law school café in early 2024. For Geske, then 74, the details were vague. She knew there was a guy who wanted to meet her named James. She knew she’d sentenced him. But she didn’t know what for, and she didn’t want to embarrass him by asking. It would come out eventually, she figured.
The group walked inside together. Price, then 45, insisted on buying everyone’s lunch. Then, near one end of a squiggle-shaped table that rests beneath a cluster of dangling, oblong light fixtures, with his face hidden beneath the brim of a ballcap, he started talking. And for about 45 minutes, he did not stop.
Geske’s curiosity grew. As Price talked about his work as a violence interrupter, she kept wondering why he’d wanted to meet with her. Why he’d felt compelled to be there. When he mentioned his time in prison, she knew she must’ve sentenced him to incarceration. With his gray stubble and full build, she didn’t then suspect she’d sentenced him as a kid.
Then he mentioned he’d been sentenced as a juvenile. That got her closer. She hadn’t had many juveniles. Finally, he mentioned shooting someone. It couldn’t be, she thought.
“Was it a tipped hat?” she asked.
She had her answer. Here was the very same kid she’d thought about all those years, doing important, dangerous work. Here was that boy, made man at last.
Price, meanwhile, never did ask about why she’d given him so much prison time. At least not directly. But between that meeting and more research, he started to understand. Geske had spent her career working with victims of violence, and she wanted to be fair to them.
By the end of their conversation, she was asking him to join some of her restorative justice work. He was happy to. Both were pleased, finally, to have closure. Especially following a bombshell from Price; that “something” he’d had on his mind all these years.
He could’ve told her his sentence was unfair; he sure thought it was. Instead, he told her about finding her words in that court transcript, and how they stuck with him through his time in prison. “Your life is not over.”
In the same way she sometimes pondered him and his fate, he’d ruminated on those words. Thought through their significance time and again. Redemption, if he could achieve it, started with him — but it ended with others believing in him. And here was someone who, before many others, did.
Beneath the oblong light fixtures, surrounded by otherwise preoccupied law school students, Geske fell on her bad knee. Price helped her up from the hard linoleum. “You’ve fallen for me already?” he joked, impressed that she laughed off her fall. Then the two of them hugged, judge and convict no more. The moment bookended a story over 30 years in the making.
Yet something about it felt incomplete.
The victim speaks
Earlier this year, I found Price’s one living victim. Price himself had long ago decided against reaching out. His mission was one of atonement; not necessarily forgiveness. And it would be disrespectful, he concluded, to intrude on Francine Cook’s life more than he already had. He had never, for the same reason, so much as searched her name on Facebook.
Francine Cook was 15 at the time of the shooting. She had been dating Geronovic Spade, 17, for about a year, she told me. At 6-foot-4, Spade towered over her, but it was his personality that really won her over. Within their group of friends at Fulton Middle’s after-school program, he was just so funny, so charming. “It would catch anybody’s eye,” she told me.
Spade was also an amateur barber, but most of his free time was spent on the basketball court. He had multiple college scholarship offers.
On their last night together, Spade walked Cook home after dark. At her house, they listened to the radio. It was getting late, and Spade knew he had to be home by 11. Before he left, though, Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” belted across the airwaves. It was the first time Cook had heard it. Spade, she remembers, dedicated the song to her.
When it was over, they walked downstairs, hugged, kissed and opened the front door. They spotted a van idling on the corner. “It was a rough neighborhood,” Cook admits, “but everybody knew everybody on that block.” Cook playfully grabbed Spade’s hat. She giggled as he asked for it back and tossed it onto his head, where it happened to land tilted toward the right. “As soon as they seen that,” she remembers, referring to the van, “they pulled right up.”
The hail of gunfire, from her perspective, came fast and slow at once.
The shooting never left Cook, physically or mentally. Fear became her constant companion — fear of the dark, of letting her children out of sight, of being around strangers. She’s haunted by what-ifs. Like what if she hadn’t teased her boyfriend about his hat?
One of the terrible things about our culture right now is that people don’t believe in redemption.
Today, she remembers her own version of what Geske told Price at his sentencing. “This was a senseless act that should never have happened, and now I have to sentence children to prison,” she remembers Geske saying. Then she remembers the judge turning to Price. “You still have your life, and you can get out, and you can turn your life around.”
Cook was fine with that at the time, because with Price behind bars for at least the next 25 years, she had the security she needed to start moving on. Which, back then, was all she really wanted: A chance to rebuild knowing the man who took so much from her was off the streets. Once, about 15 years ago, she looked him up, and found that he was still locked up. Good, she thought then.
When she learned he was out now, she had a question. She wanted to know whether he had changed. I told her what I knew. About his work with at-risk youth. About restorative justice. His quest to make amends through his actions.
One part of her, she admitted, was frightened to know she could run into him at any time. But mostly, she sounded — happy.
“I didn’t feel like he had a soul at the time,” she said. “But now, (hearing) he changed his life around, that’s good for him.”
She closed our conversation by saying she might even be open to, someday, sitting down with the man who shot her.
James, a man
A year and a half after their first meeting, Geske and Price met again. This time, in September, I joined them in the same café, under the same oblong light fixtures. There were fewer mysteries hanging between them, but a few big ones still lingered.
Geske sat beside Price and mulled one of the questions I’d flown to Milwaukee to ask: Was Price’s sentence, with the benefit of 32 years hindsight, fair after all? “I think it was fair for what I knew at the time,” she finally said. “But it’s hard to say.” What, after all, makes a sentence “fair”?
Justice, she argued, isn’t as absolute as we sometimes like to imagine. It requires a careful examination of many factors. Redemption, even more so. “One of the terrible things about our culture right now is that people don’t believe (in redemption),” she says. “They think that if you’ve committed a crime, you ought to be ostracized. You ought to not have a job. You shouldn’t get an education. And so we isolate people, which only creates more of a problem.” For anyone who thinks that way, she points toward Price.
Look at the incredible work he’s doing. Look at who he’s become. Mary Triggiano, who now leads the restorative justice center Geske founded, doesn’t see it as redemption, exactly. The better word, she believes, is restoration. “He’s trying to restore his humanity,” she explains. “Trying to restore the community’s trust in him.” He’s done enough to that end that when she happened to see him in the café, she stopped in to say hi and offer a hug of her own.
Geske understands why the sentence would come across, from Price’s perspective, as unfair. But she doesn’t regret it. “I didn’t think it was an unfair sentence,” she told me, “even though he was really young.” She had to think about the victims and risk to the community. About Geronovic Spade and Francine Cook, and what they were owed for what had been taken.
Price, with his own decades of hindsight, appreciates that now, too. Not a day goes by, he insists, that he doesn’t think about what he did. “That’s something I’ll wrestle with my whole life,” he said. If he could give his life for Spade’s, he adds, he would.
But like Price learned in Rwanda, redemption is not something that can be earned alone. It must also be given. Geske gave the then-14-year-old Price a harsh sentence, yes. But she also gave him something else. She told him he could be redeemed. She only grew more convinced of that potential over the years. As, thanks in part to her, did he.
Now, more than 30 years since cruel circumstances first brought them together, they’re working in unison toward the same ends: reducing violence and encouraging redemption. “I don’t know if ‘friends’ is the correct term,” Price says, “but we talk to one another, which is pretty cool.” One time he mentioned he was visiting Door County, in upstate Wisconsin, to pick cherries. Geske told him she had a guest house up there; that he’s welcome any time.
Yet in Price’s line of work, legends still tell of Compton. He loves that. He’s glad people still whisper about Compton and what Compton did. Because then they meet him, and he is not Compton. He is the opposite of Compton. He is James. A man.
What kind of man? The kind who picks cherries upstate. The kind who proves himself not through violence, but through de-escalation. And the kind who said he, too, would be open to meeting with Francine Cook and anyone else who loved his victims. “My door is always open,” he told me. “They don’t have to, but I would like to tell them that I’m sorry.”
Most of all, though, Price is the kind of man who would not trade his life now for anyone’s. He said so in September, emerging from an elevator into the reverberant law school parking garage alongside Geske. He has regrets, to be sure. If he could change the past, if he could give his life for his victim’s, he would. But he tries not to let those regrets define him.
Instead of dwelling, he fawned over his Acura MDX, which he purchased after five years of saving. It’s also the same car Geske drives. And when Geske mentioned her husband was getting new tires at Costco, Price smiled.
Reaching into his wallet, he pulled out a black slab of plastic: an executive-level Costco card. It wasn’t the first time he’d said so that day, nor would it be the last, but it was worth repeating: “I wouldn’t trade this life for nothin’ in the world,” he said, holding the card up to Geske. She smiled, too.
And beneath the brim of his straight-ahead ball cap, James Price is probably smiling still.
This story appears in the December 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.