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Fourteen years ago this week, Michael Brown, then 16, buried his head in a pillow in his room while two teenage friends butchered his grandparents with knives from a chopping block in the elderly couple's Rio Rancho kitchen.

He never held the knives that night, never inflicted one of the 58 stab wounds that killed Ed Brown, or any of the six jabs that killed Marie Brown.

He was 16 then, and in about three to four hours on that cold and bloody Feb. 3, 1994, night he had consumed nine to 10 beers and three-fourths of a fifth of gin.

In the blur of his teenage stupor, he recalled being angry that his grandmother had stopped his little drunken get-together. He had wished his grandparents dead, joked about killing them.

But it was a bad joke, he said, not a blueprint for murder.

Jurors disagreed, convicting him a year later of two counts of first-degree murder and five other charges. Prosecutors had convinced them that Brown planned the killing and told co-defendants Jeremy Rose, 17, and Bernadette Setser, 16, where the knives were; convinced them that Brown had done nothing as his grandparents died.

"I panicked," he says of that fateful moment of apparent paralysis. "I was 16, and I was drunk out of my mind."

Brown is 30 now, locked away in prison for almost half of his life after becoming one of the first juveniles in New Mexico to be sentenced as an adult.

By the time he is eligible for parole, he will be nearly 70.

But Brown, now incarcerated at the Western New Mexico Correctional Facility in Grants, has not given up hope that he might be freed far sooner than that.

He has not given up hope that he might get a second chance.

You met Brown in a 2006 series The Tribune did on juvenile justice. His story begged the question: Is it right to treat all serious youthful offenders as adults, lock them away without any chance at rehabilitation?

Since the article, Brown has waited 14 long months for the day his neatly handwritten 33-page petition to reconsider his case is heard.

State District Judge George Eichwald in Bernalillo gave the OK for the case to proceed shortly after The Tribune article ran. Later this month, public defender Brian Tucker will ask that the case be re-assigned to state District Judge Louis P. McDonald, the original trial judge who had shown no mercy to Brown, Rose or Setser.

Should McDonald maintain Eichwald's decisions, Tucker said he expects Brown's petition could be heard this summer.

The petition contends Brown's conviction and sentencing violates his Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and Fourteenth amendment rights and "newly discovered evidence" was not taken into consideration.

That evidence is a brief bit of testimony in 1998 by co-defendant Rose in which Rose attempted — and failed — to contest his life sentence.

In transcripts, Rose apparently admits that the idea to kill the Browns was his own.

"Nobody else made me do it. I did it myself," Rose says.

Rose, Brown contends, implicated Brown at trial as part of a plea deal in which Rose would testify to that in exchange for a more lenient sentence.

McDonald ultimately did not bestow that leniency to Rose, believed to have inflicted the most stab wounds that night.

"Not 12 hours after the offenses, Rose voluntarily confessed his direct involvement in the murder of Ed and Marie Brown," Brown writes in his petition. "Not until 10 months later, after speaking with his parents and attorney, after he began pursuing a plea bargain and after becoming angry that Setser and petitioner were blaming him did Rose, for the first time, implicate petitioner."

Much of Brown's petition duplicates one by co-defendant Setser, Tucker said.

Last December, McDonald denied her petition. Setser, who had also renewed her argument that her mental instability should have been considered, remains imprisoned on a life plus 41 years sentence.

"It's going to be an uphill battle," Tucker predicts of Brown's chances.

For now, it is all Brown has, the sins of youth paid long into adulthood.