PORTLAND, Maine — Editor's Note: The video above aired in Dec. 2020 when Silva was sentenced.
Maine’s supreme court has upheld the sentence of a 16-year-old driver who was behind the wheel at the time of a crash that killed three youths.
Timothy Silva, who is now 17, was ordered to be detained until age 21 after pleading guilty to manslaughter for the crash that killed passengers Emily Baker, 14, Ashlin Baker, 12, and Thomas Porfirio, 15.
The Supreme Judicial Court agreed with the juvenile court judge who concluded that a lesser sentence would minimize the seriousness of the conduct. In Maine, the maximum penalty for a juvenile is incarceration until age 21.
Silva's lawyers argued to the Maine Supreme Court in February the sentence goes against Maine law.
His attorneys said the judge who sentenced Silva did not consider what was best for his rehabilitation. They argued that keeping Silva on probation at home until he was 21 would better for his rehabilitation, which should be the priority for juvenile sentencing, the lawyers argued.
The high court said deciding whether to detain Silva was "an exceedingly difficult decision."
"The court was required to simultaneously consider the juvenile’s interests, the public’s interests, and the victims’ interests, knowing that whatever disposition it fashioned would neither heal the pain of the victims’ loved ones nor turn back the clock for Silva, whose life will also be forever changed by his actions," the court explained in its decision.
After review, the supreme court affirmed the sentence and said, "we cannot say that the court’s disposition, although imposing the maximum allowable institutional detention, was either error or an abuse of discretion."
The crash happened in Clinton when the car appeared to hit a patch of ice and then struck a tree in February 2020.