When Melody Marie Brown heard that the teenager who killed her husband had been sentenced to 40 years in prison, she felt vindicated. Nothing could bring Jerome McDaniel back after the .22-caliber bullet had pierced his heart, but at least Brown could feel like something approaching justice was done.

“I wanted him to rot,” she says of the defendant she always knew as Junior, who was 16 at the time of the killing.

Twenty years later, Junior asked a D.C. judge to be let out of prison early. Brown says that by that point, her feelings had changed, in no small part because of her two daughters.

“They forgave him. They said, ‘Ma, this is about forgiveness. He’s different now,’” she says.

The difficult questions around crime, punishment, rehabilitation, and forgiveness that Brown had to navigate are now at the heart of a political debate over whether more young offenders should be given a chance to have their prison sentences cut. Jessie Liu, the U.S. Attorney for D.C. who prosecutes all the violent crime in the city, says no, and is waging an unusually public battle to derail a bill before the D.C. Council. Some local officials, on the other hand, are accusing Liu of Trump-like “fear-mongering” over violent crime in urban areas.

And Liu’s vocal opposition is touching the third-rail of D.C. politics: frustration over the regular interference local lawmakers have to face from federal officials who play in outsized role in many parts of the city’s functioning and governance.

Two measures are at the center of the fight. The Incarceration Reduction Amendment Act was passed by the Council in 2016—it gives offenders who committed a violent offense prior to their 18th birthday and who have served 15 years in prison a chance to petition a judge for their sentence to be reduced. To date, 18 people, including Junior, have been granted reduced sentences and released from prison under IRAA. Proponents say none have been rearrested, and some have become active in violence-prevention efforts.

And there’s the the Second Look Act, introduced earlier this year, which would extend the provisions of IRAA to anyone who committed an offense before their 25th birthday and had served at least 15 years.

“It’s really a question on whether people are entitled to an opportunity to show that they have reformed, to show rehabilitation, or whether we’re going to say that mistakes that people made in their adolescent years are things that should be held against them for the rest of their lives,” says Josh Rovner, a senior advocacy associate at The Sentencing Project, which advocates for sentencing reforms nationally.

Rovner and other advocates say the two measures are critical steps towards undoing the tough-on-crime approach of the 1980s and ’90s, which resulted in long prison sentences for many offenders. And they say both IRAA and the Second Look Act were spurred by new research and legal decisions that have prompted a broad rethinking of juvenile crime and justice. Should a 16 year old who commits murder be treated the same way as a 30 year old? And if not, should that imply that different punishments be meted out?

“The law came about in large part as a result of a line of Supreme Court cases over the last 15 years that have looked at the difference between juveniles and adults in terms of decision-making, impulse control and capacity for change, and have established that juveniles, because of their differences, should be treated differently and less harshly than adults,” says James Zeigler, a local defense attorney who has represented felons who successfully had their sentences cut short under IRAA.

“The conditions these kids were living in and grew up in D.C. during [the 80s and 90s] mitigates their culpability. It doesn’t excuse it, it doesn’t say what they did was OK, but it provides necessary context for understanding what happened,” he adds.

Debate over the Second Look Act comes amid a spike in homicides in D.C. Last year, there were 160 killings, a 40 percent increase from the year prior. And so far this year there have been 108 homicides, 11 percent more than the same time last year. That is fueling opposition from Liu, who has served as the city’s U.S. attorney since late 2017.

“We’re seeing a lot of gun violence in the city, and so we think the focus really needs to be on public safety right now, and it’s not clear to us at all how this bill advances public safety,” she says.

“Expanding the universe of defendants who are eligible for early release from 16-and-17-year-olds as the bill currently stands to 18-to-24-year-olds, that’s a lot more people. And in this current environment with all of our public safety concerns, I just don’t think this is where the city needs to be going right now,” she adds.

Liu’s office has opposed almost all of the petitions for early release filed since IRAA become law. And her more recent position on the Second Look Act has gotten her the backing of the editorial board of The Washington Post, which called the proposed bill “unprecedented,” and Ward 6 Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Denise Krepp.

D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine, though, supports the bill.

Some city officials take issue not only with Liu’s arguments, but with how she is making them. They accuse her of trying to scare D.C. residents by linking the spike in homicides to the policy debate over sentencing, and question why she has decided to attack not just the Second Look Act, but IRAA, which is already law.

“Attacking [the bill] just seems like it’s fear-mongering,” says Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen, who chairs the Council’s judiciary committee. “It’s just trying to play to the worst instincts of people.”

No one from Liu’s office testified at a public hearing on the Second Look Act that took place in March, but earlier this month it put out a lengthy public statement warning that if the bill passes, it would make “over 500 violent criminals (including many rapists and murderers) immediately eligible for early release.” Allen quickly responded with his own statement lambasting the “Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney’s Office” and saying the city would not be a “pawn in making this Department of Justice’s efforts to show a tough on crime approach.”

Liu’s office denies that its position on the bill has been influenced by Trump or any other senior administration officials. But she is continuing the public fight against the bill. This week, Liu invited more than 300 Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners to a meeting in early September to discuss the bill, which she wrote “will negatively impact your community’s public safety.”

And she seems to have gotten one high-level ally: Mayor Muriel Bowser. While Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Kevin Donahue endorsed the Second Look Act at the March hearing (“criminal sentencing should be structured in a way that accounts for a person’s maturation,” he said), Bowser hedged when asked about the bill this week.

“I think there needs to be some balance. I think we’ve heard a lot about offenders, we haven’t heard enough about victims,” she said.

Liu—who is working closely with Bowser on increasing federal prosecution of gun cases—makes the same point, arguing that she is concerned over how the sentence reductions and possible early releases of some violent offenders, notably those convicted of murder or sexual assault, could impact victims.

“In speaking to victims, we discovered when they learn about the possibility of early release who have victimized them, in many sense it’s like being re-victimized, and they’re very upset about it,” Liu says.

Bridgette Stumpf, the executive director of the Network for Victim Recovery of D.C., which works with victims and survivors of crime, agrees that victims have to be front and center when a judge considers shortening a sentence or releasing an offender early. But she says victims aren’t all of one opinion on IRAA and the Second Look Act.

“I’ve worked with clients who personally did not agree with harsh sentencing approaches. I’ve also worked with clients who really strongly believed in the person who harmed them not being released or being given leniency in sentencing. So what’s important for us is to make sure that the process of how IRAA rolls out creates a mechanism to hear from the individual who was harmed in a meaningful way,” she says.

Allen says both IRAA and the Second Look Act—which isn’t yet scheduled for a Council vote—ensure that victims are heard.

“Victims don’t have just one way of thinking about crime,” he says. “What is important is they have to be listened to. Their input, their feedback has to be incorporated into a judge’s decision, and we legally require that it has to be. That’s what’s most important.”

In Brown’s case, she was given the chance to speak in support of Junior’s plea for a reduced sentence.

“I did get to talk for Junior,” she says. “We had eye contact. He had previously written me several letters. I had to see his eyes, I had to look in his face to feel how I felt inside. And I felt very genuine. If he was acting, he was a good damn actor that day.”

Brown has remained in touch with Junior, to the point that her friends now jokingly refer to her as his second mother. But she says her decision to support his early release couldn’t easily be replicated; she says every case requires its own consideration.

“I don’t think everybody deserves to come home, I really don’t. Some people should stay in jail as long as possible,” she says. “But I just think this particular young man … I think I made the right decision. Some people say I’m a fool for allowing him to be released. But I think I did the right thing.”

This story originally appeared on WAMU.