Sterling Cunio: Juvenile Life Sentence, Clemency, and Reentry

Sterling Cunio is an Oregon writer and justice-reform advocate who spent more than 27 years in prison for a double murder he committed at 16. He was convicted of two counts of aggravated murder for the 1994 kidnapping and killing of Ian Dahl and Bridget Camber near Albany, Oregon, and sentenced to two consecutive life terms plus additional time. Governor Kate Brown commuted his sentence in November 2021, and he was released. He now works in policy and legislative outreach for the Oregon Justice Resource Center.

The 1994 Kidnapping and Murders

In January 1994, Cunio and an accomplice, Wilford Hill, kidnapped 21-year-old Ian Dahl and 18-year-old Bridget Camber at gunpoint in Salem, Oregon. They forced the couple into a vehicle, drove them toward Albany in Benton County, and robbed them of jewelry and a wallet along the way. At a park in a rural area, the two victims were ordered out of the car and told to lie in a ditch. Cunio shot and killed Dahl. Hill shot and killed Camber.¹²

Afterward, the pair drove the victims’ vehicle to Dahl’s apartment in Salem and burglarized it. Both were arrested the same day.¹

Tried as an Adult at 16

Cunio was waived from juvenile court into adult court. In a stipulated-facts trial, he was convicted of two counts of aggravated murder, two counts of first-degree kidnapping, and two counts of first-degree robbery. The Benton County District Attorney’s Office prosecuted the case.³

The trial court imposed two consecutive indeterminate life terms for the murders, plus 280 months for the kidnapping and robbery counts. In 2012, the Oregon Board of Parole and Post-Prison Supervision set a projected release date of April 2042 on the life sentences, with the 280-month term to follow. Under that structure, the earliest Cunio could have left prison was April 2065, at age 88.¹⁴

How He Got Out of Prison

Cunio’s conviction was affirmed on direct appeal in 1995, and state post-conviction petitions filed in 1997, 2005, and 2013 were all denied. His 2013 petition leaned on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2012 decision in Miller v. Alabama, which held that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles violate the Eighth Amendment. He argued his consecutive sentences amounted to a de facto life-without-parole term. The Oregon Court of Appeals rejected the petition in 2017 as procedurally barred.¹

The Federal Ruling

Cunio then filed a federal habeas petition, Cunio v. Brown, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon. In February 2020, U.S. Magistrate Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai granted summary judgment in his favor, finding that his sentencing violated the Eighth Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process protections because Oregon had never given him a “meaningful opportunity for release” based on evidence of his maturity and rehabilitation. The ruling ordered the state to hold a release hearing before the parole board, which retained authority to deny release if he failed to show rehabilitation.²⁴

The Parole Hearing and Clemency

The Lewis & Clark Law School Criminal Justice Reform Clinic, led by Professor Aliza Kaplan, and attorney Ryan O’Connor represented Cunio at the parole hearing. The board shortened his sentence but, according to his lawyers, declined to give meaningful weight to his rehabilitation record, leaving him incarcerated until what they described as “old age.”⁵

In 2021, the clinic submitted a clemency petition to Governor Kate Brown. In November 2021, Brown commuted Cunio’s sentence, and he was released after more than 27 years in prison.⁵

Why His Case Became a Reform Flashpoint

Cunio was one of the “Oregon Five,” five people convicted of aggravated murder as juveniles in Oregon between 1989 and 1995 and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. Their cases drew advocates challenging how the state handled juveniles in the adult system.⁵

Oregon’s Measure 11, enacted in 1995, imposed mandatory minimum sentences for serious crimes and allowed youth as young as 15 to be prosecuted as adults. Data from 2012 showed Black youth were 26 times more likely to be indicted under Measure 11 than white youth.⁶

In 2019, Oregon passed Senate Bill 1008, which prohibited life-without-parole sentences for offenders under 18, ended automatic adult-court transfers for 15-to-17-year-olds charged with Measure 11 offenses, and created “second look” hearings for youth convicted in the adult system. The law was not retroactive. Cunio and the other Oregon Five members, sentenced before the reform, were ineligible for its protections.⁶ Kaplan and Bobbin Singh of the Oregon Justice Resource Center publicly urged Brown to use clemency to fill the retroactivity gap for people who had served more than 15 years and would have qualified for second-look hearings had SB 1008 reached back.⁷

Writing and Mentoring Inside

During his incarceration, Cunio became a two-time PEN America Prison Writing Award winner, recognized in 2018 for his essay “Going Forward with Gus” and the co-authored play The Bucket.⁸ He received a 2019 Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship and was named a 2019–2020 PEN America Writing for Justice Fellow. During the fellowship he wrote Austin’s Echo, a dramatic work comparing the prison experience of Austin Reed, believed to be the first African American to write a memoir about incarceration in the 1830s, to that of a present-day prisoner. He staged a works-in-progress tele-performance of the play in 2020 from the Oregon State Penitentiary, working through lockdowns, wildfires, and the pandemic.⁹

In April 2020, he published an op-ed in The Oregonian titled “To those behind bars or patrolling them, COVID-19 represents a shared threat.”⁹ He also contributed to the anthology The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting a Writer’s Life in Prison, published by Haymarket Books.¹⁰

Beyond writing, he volunteered in prison hospice care, mentored younger inmates, and worked to mediate gang conflicts using restorative justice principles. Kaplan called him “without question not the same person he was as a teenager” and a “model of how youth and young adults are capable of true reformation.”⁷

The Victims’ Families Objected

The commutation drew sharp opposition from victims’ families and prosecutors. Gladys Camber, Bridget Camber’s mother, said the grant reopened her grief: “It made me start the grieving process all over again knowing he was free, and they are dead.” Relatives of victims in other Oregon Five cases joined district attorneys in a lawsuit against Brown, alleging she had failed to follow state laws requiring notification of victims and prosecutors during the clemency process. Rosemary Brewer, executive director of the Oregon Crime Victims Law Center, said the governor’s office had declined requests to meet with families to explain specific grants. “For whatever reason, the governor has decided that these commutations take precedence over the rights of victims or even a thought for victims frankly,” Brewer said.¹¹

What Cunio Does Now

After his release, Cunio completed a bachelor’s degree in crime, law, and policy through the University of Oregon’s Prison Education Program.¹² He initially worked part-time for the Lewis & Clark Criminal Justice Reform Clinic, assisting on other juvenile clemency cases.⁵

He is now a policy and legislative outreach coordinator with the Oregon Justice Resource Center, where he works on healthcare access, higher education, and security issues for formerly incarcerated people, meeting with legislators, providing testimony, and participating in coalition efforts. He has also worked on transitional housing for people reentering society.¹² He serves as lead consultant with the Ubuntu Climate Initiative and volunteers with the Transformative Justice Initiative. In early 2025, he spoke at the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission Summit in Salem about incarceration, commutation, and reentry.¹³ His story is the subject of Cellblocks to Mountaintops, a podcast and documentary series on restorative justice that premiered in 2024.¹⁴

1
Findlaw. Sterling Ray Cunio v. Premo
2
OregonLive. Federal Judge Orders Release Hearing for Oregon Man Sentenced at Age 16
3
Oregon Crime Victims Law Center. OCVLC Represents Four of the Victims of the Oregon Five
4
Prison Legal News. Oregon Federal Court: 8th and 14th Amendments Mandate Miller Hearing
5
Lewis & Clark Law School. Criminal Justice Reform Clinic
6
Oregon Justice Resource Center. Youth and Measure 11 in Oregon
7
The Appeal. He Entered Prison as a Whiskerless Kid. Will Oregon Ever Let Him Out?
8
PEN America. Sterling Cunio
9
PEN America. Writing for Justice Fellowship 2019-2020
10
PEN America. The Sentences That Create Us
11
OregonLive. Gov. Kate Brown’s Historic Push to Release Prisoners Surpasses 1,200 but Not Without Backlash
12
University of Oregon. Sterling Cunio
13
KBOO. Success After Commutations
14
Common Justice. Cellblocks to Mountaintops: Restorative Justice