Quantel Lotts is shown at age 12, two years before he committed the crime that sent him to prison for life.

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The older teen, Michael Barton, 17, was dead by the time he reached the hospital. The younger boy, Quantel Lotts, 14, would eventually become one of Missouri’s youngest lifers.

Lotts was sentenced in Missouri’s St. Francois County Circuit Court in 2002 to life in prison without parole for first-degree murder in his stepbrother’s stabbing death.

It made no difference that at the time of the deadly scuffle, Lotts was barely old enough to watch PG-13 movie and too young to drive, vote or buy beer.

“They locked me up and threw away the keys,” Lotts, now 23, said from prison. “They took away all hope for the future.”

Lotts is one of at least 73 U.S. inmates — most of them minorities — who were sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in prison for crimes committed when they were 13 or 14, according to the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit organization in Alabama that defends indigent defendants and prisoners.

The 73 are just a fraction of the more than 2,000 offenders serving life sentences for crimes they committed as minors under the age of 18.

Across the country, most juvenile offenders and many adults are given a second chance. Charles Manson, convicted in seven notorious murders committed when he was 27, will be eligible for his 12th parole hearing in 2012. He’s been denied parole 11 times. Even “Son of Sam” killer David Berkowitz, who confessed to killing six people in the 1970s when he was in his 20s, has had four parole hearings, though he has said he doesn’t deserve parole and doesn’t want it.

But Quantel Lotts has no hope for a parole hearing. At least not yet

Lotts is part of a trend that has developed over the past two decades. Numerous studies have shown that In the 1970s and 1980s, minors were rarely given life sentences, let alone life without parole, experts said. By the early 1990s, according to the Department of Justice, an alarming spike in juvenile homicides spawned a nationwide crackdown, including a movement to try kids in adult courts.

“Criminal court doesn’t care they are kids,” said Melissa Sickmund, chief of systems research at the National Center for Juvenile Justice in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “Once they are there, it’s just another case.”

Today, there are only a handful of states — including Alaska, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico and Oregon — that prohibit sentencing minors to life without parole, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Proponents of the strict sentencing laws said public safety should be top priority. They argued that judges give certain criminals, regardless of their age, life sentences because the crimes are so abhorrent.

“There are some people who are so fundamentally dangerous that they can’t walk among us,” said Jennifer Jenkins, who co-founded the National Organization for Victims of Juvenile Lifers. The Illinois-based group fights legislation that would remove sentences of life without parole.

In the past three years, attorneys at the Equal Justice Initiative have appealed cases involving 13- and 14-year-old offenders in state and federal court. Attorneys argue that the sentences are “cruel and unusual punishment” given the tender years of the offenders.

Only 19 states punish children under 14 with life sentences without parole, according to a study conducted by the center.

Last week, the state of Missouri dismissed Quantel Lotts’ case in St. Francois County Circuit Court. The Equal Justice Initiative will challenge the decision in the Missouri Court of Appeals. A separate petition, filed in 2007, is pending in federal court in the Eastern District of Missouri.