The StandDown Texas Project

Juvenile LWOP Resentencings Ordered in South Carolina

The South Carolina Supreme Court ruling in Aikens, et al v. Byars is available in Adobe .pdf format.

Justice Kaye Hearn wrote for the Court:

In this case brought in our original jurisdiction, fifteen inmates who were sentenced to life without parole as juveniles petition this Court for resentencing in light of the United States Supreme Court's decision in Miller v. Alabama, 132 S. Ct. 2455 (2012).  We hold their sentences violate the Eighth Amendment under Miller and the petitioners and those similarly situated are entitled to resentencing.

The Post and Courier reports, "South Carolina's high court orders new sentences for juveniles convicted of homicide," by John McDermott.

At least 15 felons facing mandatory life for homicides they committed in South Carolina as juveniles will be resentenced, the state Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.

The ruling cited the U.S. States Supreme Court's 2012 decision in Miller v. Alabama, which banned mandatory life sentences without parole in juvenile murder case and called them "cruel and unusual punishments" under the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Related posts are in the juvenile category index.  You can also jump to news and commentary on the U.S. Supreme Court's 2012 ruling in Miller.

Continuing Coverage of Bryan Stevenson's 'Just Mercy'

The New York Times Sunday Book Review contained, "'Just Mercy,’ by Bryan Stevenson."  It's by Ted Conover, a journalism professor and nonfiction author.  Here's the beginning:

Unfairness in the Justice system is a major theme of our age. DNA analysis exposes false convictions, it seems, on a weekly basis. The predominance of racial minorities in jails and prisons suggests systemic bias. Sentencing guidelines born of the war on drugs look increasingly draconian. Studies cast doubt on the accuracy of eyewitness testimony. Even the states that still kill people appear to have forgotten how; lately executions have been botched to horrific effect.

This news reaches citizens in articles and television spots about mistreated individuals. But “Just Mercy,” a memoir, aggregates and personalizes the struggle against injustice in the story of one activist lawyer.

Bryan Stevenson grew up poor in Delaware. His great-grandparents had been slaves in Virginia. His grandfather was murdered in a Philadelphia housing project when Stevenson was a teenager. Stevenson attended Eastern College (now Eastern University), a Christian institution outside Philadelphia, and then Harvard Law School. Afterward he began representing poor clients in the South, first in Georgia and then in Alabama, where he was a co-founder of the Equal Justice Initiative.

TIME posts, "10 Questions With Bryan Stevenson," by Belinda Luscombe.

Just Mercy is about getting legal help for poor people in Alabama. What are the biggest impediments?

We have a criminal-justice system that treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent. I don’t believe that America’s system is shaped by culpability. I think it’s shaped by wealth. The poor are very vulnerable in a system that relies so heavily on skilled advocates, then doesn’t provide skilled advocates. Until recently, [court-appointed] lawyers in Alabama could only be paid $1,000 for their out-of-court time. A lawyer could make more defending a traffic ticket than a capital case.

You say that 1 in 3 black men in the U.S. under 30 is in jail, on probation or on parole. Is this the scariest stat?

I think the newer statistic that 1 in 3 black males born in 2001 is expected to go to jail or prison during their lifetimes is more astonishing because it’s about the future. And 1 in 6 Latino boys. That wasn’t true in the 20th century.

The Huntsville Times posts, "'Slavery didn't end; it evolved,' Bryan Stevenson of Equal Justice Initiative tells 'Daily Show' host Jon Stewart," by Kay Campbell.

Because Americans have never understood the myths of their own history that made it possible to have slavery, "Slavery didn't end; it evolved," Alabama's Bryan Stevenson told Jon Stewart during the Oct. 16, 2014, "Daily Show."

Stevenson, the founder-director of the Montgomery-based Equal Justice Initiative, is one of the keynote speakers for the upcoming conference in Huntsville, Exploring Faith Intersections, Nov. 2-3, 2014. Stevenson is also the author of "Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption," which will be released from Random House on Tuesday, Oct. 21. Stevenson told Stewart about a few of the cases he has been involved in with the EJI in freeing people who had been unjustly accused in were blatant disregards for legal procedure.

Earlier coverage of Bryan Stevenson's book begins at the link.

A multi-city book tour kicks off October 22nd, at Washington, DC's legendary Politics & Prose.  You can order a signed book, and they will be happy to mail it to you after the event.

George Stinney

"Today in History for June 16, 2014," is a daily feature of the Associated Press.  It's via the Daily Republic.

On June 16, 1944, George Stinney, a 14-year-old black youth, became the youngest person to die in the electric chair as the state of South Carolina executed him for the murders of two white girls, Betty June Binnicker, 11, and Mary Emma Thames, 7. (George Stinney’s family, who maintains his innocence, is seeking to overturn his conviction.)

Jesse Wegman writes the editorial column, "A Boy’s Execution, 70 Years Later," in today's New York Times.

On the first page of the official sentencing report for George Stinney Jr., the outline of a boy is visible in a short string of numbers. Age: 14. Height: 5-1. Weight: 95. His complexion is listed as Black, his religion as Baptist, his occupation as None. Next to Build one word is typed: Small.

On March 24, 1944, George was arrested and charged with the murder of two young white girls, Betty June Binnicker and Mary Emma Thames, who were found beaten to death in a ditch in rural Clarendon County, S.C.

One month later he was tried and found guilty. He was executed on June 16, 1944 — the youngest person to be put to death in the 20th century. He was so small that the guards struggled to strap him to the electric chair, and the jolt of electricity knocked the mask from his face.

The sentencing report states that George Stinney was “legally electrocuted.” But to call what happened legal is to say only that this boy’s fate was decided in a courtroom, by a judge and jury, rather than by a throng of angry men with a rope.

In truth, George Stinney was lynched in slow motion.

WLTX-TV posts, "George Stinney, Jr. Supporters Erect Headstone," by Dakarai Turner.  There is video at the link.

Supporters of Stinney say that justice was not served when he was executed in 1944 and 70 years later, residents still aren't quite sure what happened.

"We heard so many different stories," said 54-year-old Alcolu resident Jeanette McCall."I hope the truth comes out."

Shonda Blackwell, 40, also a resident of the small town, echoed those thoughts.

"I don't know the full story of it, just bits and pieces of it, and that's just from my parents because I wasn't born during the time," Blackwell said.

But historian George Frierson said he has his own way of keeping the memory of that story from fading.

"We want the story to be told, and this was an adequate way to do that and also to remember him," Frierson said, standing next to the headstone he had placed in Alcolu.

"Memorial being unveiled to youth executed in SC," is Bruce Smith's AP filing, via the State.

"We are doing this to make sure he is never forgotten," said George Frierson, a School Board member who has been pushing to clear Stinney's name for almost a decade. "This is a travesty in the American judicial system."

The memorial unveiling in the town where the slayings occurred comes two days before the 70th anniversary of Stinney's execution. The youth was led to the electric chair June 16, 1944, with a Bible in his arm, the youngest person put to death in the nation in the past century.

"We want to make sure he is remembered and his execution is remembered," Frierson said. "He never had an opportunity to grow up, get married and have children."

Earlier coverage of George Stinney's case begins at the link.

A New OpEd Column From Linda Greenhouse

"Undecided," is the title of her latest OpEd column in today's New York Times.  Here's the beginning:

With the end of the Supreme Court’s term in view, the focus is naturally on the cases to be decided. So it’s worth pausing, before the final onslaught, over a case the court won’t be deciding, one that the justices turned away earlier this week although it cried out for their attention, and ours.

The question was whether a Pennsylvania prison inmate serving a mandatory life sentence without the possibility of parole for a murder committed in 1999 when he was 17 could get the benefit of a 2012 Supreme Court decision that found such sentences to be unconstitutional. The court’s ruling in Miller v. Alabama held that for offenders who committed murder before the age of 18, a sentence of life without parole could be imposed only after individualized consideration of the defendant’s age and circumstances.

In other words, the sentence is permissible at the end of the day, but it can’t be automatic, as it was at the time in more than half the states as an alternative to the death penalty, which a 2005 Supreme Court decision precluded for juvenile murderers. Pennsylvania has some 500 inmates, fully a quarter of the national total, currently serving no-parole life sentences for murder they committed as juveniles.

Related posts are in the juvenile category index.

More on the Case of George Stinney

The Charleston Post and Courier of South Carolina reports, "69-year-old death penalty case against George Stinney set for Jan. 21."  It's by Robert Behre.  It's among the most detailed news articles on the case.

On Jan. 21, a circuit judge is scheduled to hold a hearing in Sumter County's new judicial center to decide if a 1944 death penalty conviction against George Stinney, a 14-year-old Clarendon County youth, should stand.

Both the lawyer seeking to open the case and the 3rd Circuit solicitor said they simply want to present the facts and let the judge decide if Stinney - the youngest American executed in a century - received a fair trial or was railroaded by a community understandably shaken by the violent killing of two young girls.

The case has more than its share of oddities and racial overtones. Stinney was black, and the victims were white. His defense attorney called no witnesses and never appealed. Stinney was strapped in the electric chair 83 days after the guilty verdict.

Earlier coverage of George Stinney's case begins at the link.  Related posts are in the juvenile and race category indexes.

More on the 1944 South Carolina Execution of George Stinney

The Associated Press reports, "SC's execution of 14-year-old riled people in 1944."  It's written by Jeffrey Collins.  It's also available from Huffington Post with the title, "Retrial For Executed 14-Year-Old George Stinney Would Be Unprecedented In South Carolina."

Leaving a judge to decide whether to throw out the conviction of a 14-year-old boy executed in South Carolina in 1944 reminds supporters of George Stinney of how the teen's fate was also in one man's hands nearly 70 years ago.

Gov. Olin Johnston could have commuted Stinney's death sentence to life in prison if he wanted. He had 54 days between the time the black teen was convicted of killing two white girls in the tiny mill town of Alcolu in Clarendon County and his march to the electric chair with a Bible in his arm.

But Johnston was running for U.S. Senate in 1944, facing a challenger who took a much harder line on segregation. He refused clemency for Stinney, saying he trusted the police, prosecutor and jury. At 14, Stinney was the youngest person executed in this country in the past 100 years, according to statistics gathered by the Death Penalty Information Center.

Stinney's conviction is being challenged by a lawsuit filed by supporters asking for a new trial, a move unprecedented in South Carolina for someone already put to death. A hearing has been scheduled for Jan. 21.

Earlier coverage of the effort to win a posthumous new trial for George Stinney begins at the link.

Georgia Resentencings

WABE-FM, Atlanta public radio, posts, "Some Georgia Inmates Under Life Sentence With Parole To Be Re-sentenced," by Michell Eloy.  There is audio at the link.

Some Georgia prisoners serving life sentences without parole will be resentenced after a recent state Supreme Court ruling invalidated the terms under which those inmates were punished.

Those who qualify for resentencing would have been sentenced before they turned 18 and faced the death penalty. Stephen Reba, an attorney with Emory University’s Barton Child Law and Policy Center, says the majority of those who will see new sentences would be about 30 years old today.

“[The court decision] means they can’t be resentenced to an illegal sentence, and the court has said life without parole is an illegal sentence,” said Reba, who represents several men up for resentencing.

Reba is referring to is a recent state Supreme Court decision in the case of Marcus Moore, in which the court unanimously ruled Moore was too young to receive a life sentence without parole under a 2005 U.S Supreme Court decision.

In 2001, then-17-year-old Moore was found guilty of murdering Neiteka Wesbey and Corey McMillan, among other crimes committed in the commission of felony murder. Before the sentencing hearing, Moore entered a plea deal to avoid the death penalty. Under the terms, he agreed waive his rights to appeal in exchange for a life sentence without parole.

“In order to receive a life without parole sentence on that charge at the time – the defendant had to be death penalty eligible – had to be noticed with the death penalty first – in order to receive a life without parole sentence,” Reba said.

But in 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court said in Roper v. Simmons it’s unconstitutional to use the death penalty against offenders who were under the age of 18 at the time of their crime. That led the Georgia Supreme Court in October to unanimously rule Moore’s sentence void.

The article notes that approximately 10 inmates will qualify for the resententencing.  Related posts are in the juvenile category index. 

More on Roper v. Simmons, via Oyez.

New Push for Review of 1944 South Carolina Execution

"George Stinney, Black Teen Executed In 1944, May Get New Trial," is by Jeffrey Collins for Associated Press, via Huffington Post.  It's also available at the Grio.  Here's an extended excerpt from the beginning of the report:

Supporters of a 14-year-old black boy executed in 1944 for killing two white girls are asking a South Carolina judge to take the unheard-of move of granting him a new trial in hopes he will be cleared of the charges.

George Stinney was convicted on a shaky confession in a segregated society that wanted revenge for the beating deaths of two girls, ages 11 and 7, according to the lawsuit filed last month on Stinney's behalf in Clarendon County.

The request for a new trial has an uphill climb. The judge may refuse to hear it at all, since the punishment was already carried out. Also, South Carolina has strict rules for introducing new evidence after a trial is complete, requiring the information to have been impossible to discover before the trial and likely to change the results, said Kenneth Gaines, a professor at the University of South Carolina's law school.

"I think it's a longshot, but I admire the lawyer for trying it," Gaines said, adding that he's not aware of any other executed inmates in the state being granted a new trial posthumously.

The request for a new trial is largely symbolic, but Stinney's supporters say they would prefer exoneration to a pardon.

Stinney's case intersects some long-running disputes in the American legal system — the death penalty and race. At 14, he's the youngest person executed in the United States in past 100 years. He was electrocuted just 84 days after the girls were killed in March 1944.

The request for a new trial includes sworn statements from two of Stinney's siblings who say he was with them the entire day the girls were killed. Notes from Stinney's confession and most other information deputies and prosecutors used to convict Stinney in a one-day trial have disappeared along with any transcript of the proceedings. Only a few pages of cryptic, hand-written notes remain, according to the motion.

Time posts, "Youngest Person Executed In 100 Years May Get New Trial," by Charlotte Alter.

Stinney was convicted by an all-white jury after only ten minutes of deliberation. The boy allegedly confessed to police, although no written confession has ever been found nor did he have a lawyer present. Some reports say that police gave him ice cream during the interrogation in order to make him cooperate. Stinney was not read his Miranda rights, his parents were not allowed to see him in jail, and a lynch mob forced the family to leave town before his trial. Stinney’s court-appointed lawyer was a tax commissioner who allegedly called no defense witnesses to testify, and the trial lasted just over two and a half hours. Recently, two of Stinney’s siblings have sworn that they were with him all day when the girls were murdered.

George Frierson, a Claredon county School District board member who has been advocating for Stinney’s innocence since he first heard about the case eight years ago, says that Stinney would have been physically incapable of murdering the girls because their wounds indicated that they were inflicted by someone extremely large. At just over 5 feet tall and 90 pounds, Stinney had to have a specially fitted electric chair for his execution.

Related posts are in the race category index.

Life Sentences in the United States

The New York Times publishes an editorial, "Writing Off Lives."

The prison population in the United States has declined modestly in recent years after three decades of growth. This is partly the result of saner sentencing policies for nonviolent drug offenders, who are more likely to be given probation and drug treatment than in the past.

At the same time, however, the number of people in prison for life has more than quadrupled since 1984 and continues to grow at a startling pace. The zealous pursuit of these sentences began in the 1970s, becoming something of a fad; it is past time to revisit the practice.

A new study from the Sentencing Project, a research group, found that one in nine inmates, about 160,000 people, is serving a life sentence. Nearly one-third of these prisoners are serving life without parole. Many of these lifers were convicted of nonviolent crimes or of crimes that occurred before they turned 18.

For much of the 20th century, a sentence as harsh as life without parole was rarely used. Instead, a person sentenced to “life” — for murder, say — could be released after 15 years when the parole board determined that he or she had been rehabilitated and no longer posed a threat. This began to change during the drug war years. Harsher sentences once reserved for people convicted of capital crimes were expanded to include robbery, assault and nonviolent drug offenses. States restricted the use of parole and governors who feared being portrayed as soft on crime began to deny virtually all clemency requests.

The Sentencing Project report is, "Life Goes On: The Historic Rise in Life Sentences in America."  It's available in Adobe .pdf format.

"Report: 1 prisoner in 9 in U.S. is serving life," is by Tom Brown of Reuters, via the Columbus Dispatch.

The number of prisoners serving life terms in the United States has more than quadrupled since 1984, and so-called lifers now account for 1 in 9 people behind bars, according to a report released by the Sentencing Project.

The Washington-based research and advocacy group, which has long pushed for criminal-justice reforms, said in its report that nearly 160,000 people were serving life sentences in 2012, or 10.6 percent of the 1.5 million inmates being held in state or federal prisons.

“Life sentences have increased steadily over the years beginning with the first documented national census of this population in 1984,” the report said, adding that the total was up nearly 12 percent since 2008.

Nonwhites make up nearly two-thirds of the total population serving life sentences, with African-Americans accounting for nearly half, the report said.

The Sentencing Project and other groups, including the London-based International Centre for Prison Studies, say the United States leads the world in the percentage of its population behind bars.

In addition to the overall increase in the number of inmates serving life sentences, the report said there has been a 300 percent rise in the number of prisoners serving life without parole since 1984.

That same population — of lifers condemned to sentences without parole — swelled to nearly 50,000 prisoners last year, and the number has increased more than 22 percent just since 2008.

The Daily Beast coverage is, "New Sentencing Project Report Reveals Scary Increase in Life Sentences," by Eliza Shapiro.

One in every nine prisoners is serving a life sentence, with or without the option of parole, and four times as many convicts are serving life sentences today as in 1984.

Those numbers spell serious trouble for our prisons, not to mention our national moral compass, says Ashley Nellis, the author of the report and a senior research analyst at the Sentencing Project.

Prisoners get more expensive as they age, Nellis says, so taxpayers will have to shoulder the cost of a growing population of convicts who will grow old behind bars.

And sentencing more convicts than ever to die in prison means we’re turning our backs on the possibility of redemption, Nellis says. “We’re a society that believes in second chances,” she says. “That is fundamental to the American perspective.”

Culling data from corrections officials state by state, the report found 110,439 prisoners serving life sentences and 49,081 serving life without parole, meaning 159,520 people are serving out the rest of their days in American prisons.

The report reveals some disturbing trends in the current lifer prison population, Nellis says. Mirroring the general prison population, lifers are disproportionately minorities: nearly one half of the lifer population is black; one in six is Latino.

Juvenile offenders also represent a significant portion of lifers. Ten thousand people are serving life sentences for offenses they committed before they turned 18.

Diane Jennings posts, "Six percent of Texas inmates serving life," at the Dallas Morning News Crime blog.

About one in 9 inmates in prison systems across the country is serving a life sentence according to a new report from the Sentencing Project. That’s 159,520 people in 2012.

In Texas the number in 2012 was 9,031 or about 6 percent of the state prison population. More than 500 of those inmates are serving life without parole.

Nationwide, inmates sentenced in 1991 could expect to serve an average of a little more than 21 years, the Sentencing Project reports. Lifers admitted after 1997 served an average of 29 years.

Related posts are in the incarceration and sentencing category indexes.

More From Bill Pelke

Bill Pelke is the founder of the Journey of Hope.  He appeared on Democracy Now, earlier today.  Video of, "Sister Helen Prejean & Bill Pelke on Freeing the Death Row Prisoner Who Killed Pelke’s Grandmother," is available at the link.

In a remarkable story on the journey from grief to forgiveness, Bill Pelke joins us along with renowned activist and "Dead Man Walking" author Sister Helen Prejean to discuss the latest victory for the movement against the death penalty.

On Monday, the state of Indiana freed Paula Cooper, the Indiana woman convicted for the 1985 murder of Pelke’s grandmother, elderly bible school teacher Ruth Pelke, in Gary, Indiana. At the time Cooper became the youngest person on death row. She had been the victim of child abuse and had attended 10 different schools by the time of her arrest. Her case galvanized human rights activists and death penalty opponents around the world, including Bill Pelke himself.

Partnering with Sister Helen, he campaigned against the death penalty and plead for Cooper to be granted clemency.

"I became convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that my grandmother would have been appalled by the fact that this girl was on death row," Pelke recalls. "I was convinced she would have had love for Paula Cooper and her family. I felt she wanted some of my family to have that same sort of love and compassion."

Earlier coverage of Paula Cooper's release begins at the link.

Paula Cooper's Path to Rehabilitation

"Ind. woman sentenced to death at 16 to leave prison," is by Tim Evans of the Indianapolis Star and Gannett News. Here's the beginning:

Paula Cooper was 16 when she was sentenced to death for killing an elderly Bible study teacher.

That made the Gary, Ind., teen the youngest person ever in the state to face the death penalty. At the time in 1986, she also was the youngest Death Row inmate in the United States.

To many, Cooper was a monster beyond rehabilitation. But others saw her as a victim of an abusive childhood and racist criminal justice system.

A legal challenge and international campaign to overturn her death sentence, which included an appeal from Pope John Paul II, saved Cooper's life.

The Indiana Supreme Court commuted the death sentence in 1989 and sent her to prison for 60 years. For the past 24 years, she has lived in relative obscurity.

On Monday, Cooper will try to put all of that behind her when she walks out of the Rockville Correctional Facility.

It will be the 43-year-old's first taste of freedom since her arrest in 1985.

Cooper was 15 when she was charged with murder in the grisly stabbing of 78-year-old Ruth Pelke during a robbery. Three other co-defendants - also teenage girls at the time - went to prison but have been released.

"Paula Cooper Released: Ind. Woman Sentenced To Die At 16 To Walk Free," is the AP report by Charles Wilson, via Huffington Post.

Cooper's sister, Rhonda Labroi, said she hopes people will see Paula as more than a killer. After getting in trouble 23 times during her time in prison, Paula Cooper turned to education, earning a bachelor's degree in 2001.

"She was just a child at the time that happened, and now she is an adult and people should wait and see and give her a chance," Labroi said. "Give her an opportunity. Maybe she'll do some wonderful things for children who are growing up and aren't so fortunate, like she was.

"There are second chances," she said. "It seems like God has given her another chance. I think if people give her a second chance, she'll do fine."

Bill Pelke, Ruth's grandson, is a leader in the death penalty abolition movement and the founder of the Journey of Hope.

A Proposal Going Nowhere

"Republican candidate Fuqua endorses death penalty for rebellious children," is the Arkansas Times post by Max Brantley.

Remember former Republican legislator Charlie Fuqua, running again for legislature with financial support from the Arkansas Republican Party and U.S. Reps. Tim Griffin and Steve Womack, among others? We've mentioned some excerpts from his book, "God's Law: The Only Political Solution."

I have more for you today. To save space, I've omitted the Biblical citation for Fuqua's endorsement of the death penalty for rebellious children. Fuqua doesn't think execution would have to be used often on children who defied their parents, but suggests the deterrent effect of its legality would be beneficial. Verbatim, from the writing of Charlie Fuqua, a former lawyer for the Arkansas Department of Human Services:

The maintenance of civil order in society rests on the foundation of family discipline. Therefore, a child who disrespects his parents must be permanently removed from society in a way that gives an example to all other children of the importance of respect for parents. The death penalty for rebellioius children is not something to be taken lightly. The guidelines for administering the death penalty to rebellious children are given in Deut 21:18-21:

…

This passage does not give parents blanket authority to kill their children. They must follow the proper procedure in order to have the death penalty executed against their children. I cannot think of one instance in the Scripture where parents had their child put to death. Why is this so? Other than the love Christ has for us, there is no greater love then [sic] that of a parent for their child. The last people who would want to see a child put to death would be the parents of the child. Even so, the Scrpture provides a safe guard to protect children from parents who would wrongly exercise the death penalty against them. Parents are required to bring their children to the gate of the city. The gate of the city was the place where the elders of the city met and made judicial pronouncements. In other words, the parents were required to take their children to a court of law and lay out their case before the proper judicial authority, and let the judicial authority determine if the child should be put to death. I know of many cases of rebellious children, however, I cannot think of one case where I believe that a parent had given up on their child to the point that they would have taken their child to a court of law and asked the court to rule that the child be put to death. Even though this procedure would rarely be used, if it were the law of land, it would give parents authority. Children would know that their parents had authority and it would be a tremendous incentive for children to give proper respect to their parents.

To date, Congressman Griffin and Republican Party Chair Doyle Webb have criticized some of the things Fuqua has said. Womack has said nothing. But no party official has demanded money back or urged Fuqua to withdraw from the race.

Fuqua is running for the Arkansas state legislature.

Continued Miller v. Alabama Commentary

"The Roberts Court’s Liberal Turn on Juvenile Justice," is David S. Tanehaus' OpEd in the New York Times.  He's the author of The Constitutional Rights of Children: In re Gault and Juvenile Justice., and teaches law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

THE Supreme Court’s decision this week to ban mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole for offenders younger than 18 is an emphatic rejection of the “get tough” juvenile justice policies of the 1980s and 1990s, which punished children as if they were adults. Writing for the majority, Justice Elena Kagan’s clear statement not only recognized the political and biological principle that children are different from adults but at last also inscribed it into constitutional law.

Treating children differently from adults may be a radical idea, but it’s also an old one, predating the American Revolution. The political philosopher John Locke argued that children’s lack of reasoning capacity, which disqualified them from participating in government, also made them less culpable for their criminal acts. By the turn of the 20th century, progressive child advocates embedded the principle that children are different from adults — and thus require individualized handling of their cases — into the foundation of the world’s first juvenile courts.

Today, all 50 states and the District of Columbia have juvenile justice systems that divert youthful offenders from the criminal justice system at large. In the 1980s and 1990s, though, in response to mounting concerns about juvenile crime, many states changed their laws to give prosecutors, instead of juvenile court judges, the authority to determine which court system would handle a particular child’s case. As a result, prosecutors now make the vast majority of decisions to transfer juveniles to criminal court. This dramatic departure from past practices threatened to undermine the longstanding principle that children’s cases should not be handled like those of adults. By the late ’90s, some critics even called for the abolition of the juvenile court.

"Sentencing policy," is the title of this week's Democracy in America column at the Economist.

AMERICA locks up too many people for too many things for too long, largely due to the prevalence of mandatory-minimum sentencing laws. These laws have eroded judicial discretion, rigged America's criminal-justice system in the prosecution's favour and produced wildly unjust results. Opponents of mandatory-minimums are no doubt cheering the Supreme Court's ruling last week, in Miller v Alabama, that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles convicted of capital murder violate the eighth amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishments. This ruling will have significant effects: some 28 states, and the federal government, have such statutes on the books; nearly 2,600 juveniles are currently serving life sentences without the possibility of parole; most of those sentences were mandatory. The court split along partisan lines, with Justice Kennedy siding with the liberal quartet.

Earlier coverage of Miller v. Alabama begins at the link.

Commentary on the Juvenile Sentencing Ruling

Andrew Cohen posts, "If You Think Monday Was Bad at the Supreme Court ...," at the Atlantic.  As usual, Cohen analysis is a must-read.  Here's an excerpt:

It is a shame on many levels that Miller came down on a day when it was overshadowed by other news from the Supreme Court. For in Miller v. Alabama, we see both the clear continuation of a trend on the Court -- and the passing of a torch. Even though Justice Kagan wrote the majority opinion in Miller, it was largely Justice Kennedy's precedent that she was following. More than that, it was Justice Kennedy (as senior member of the majority) who assigned the opinion to Justice Kagan to write.

Justice Kennedy is central to this story because he's literally written the law upon which Miller is based. In the beginning, there was Atkins v. Virginia, a 2002 case in which Justice Kennedy signed on to Justice John Paul Stevens' 6-3 ruling outlawing the execution of mentally retarded capital defendants. Next came Roper v. Simmons, in 2005, in which Justice Kennedy, writing for a 5-4 majority, outlawed capital punishment for murderers who committed their crimes before age 18.

Next came Graham v. Florida in 2010, in which Justice Kennedy, writing for another slender majority, outlawed life sentences for juvenile offenders who committed non-homicide crimes. "By denying the defendant the right to reenter the community," Justice Kennedy wrote, "the State makes an irrevocable judgment about that person's value and place in society. This judgment is not appropriate in light of a juvenile non homicide offender's capacity for change and limited moral culpability."

The Miller case was designed to explore one step further -- could mandatory life sentences for convicted murderers also run afoul of the "cruel and unusual punishment" clause of the Eighth Amendment? When I wrote a piece about the oral argument in the case back in March, I was struck by how many of the justices have children. I wondered at the time whether, in some way, their roles as parents would impact their perceptions of the issues raised in the case. Now I have my answer.

The essence of all these cases, including Miller, is that criminal defendants, especially those who are mentally, intellectually, and emotionally vulnerable, ought to be afforded a level of "individualized sentencing" that eschews "mandatory'' sentences. It's neater and more politically popular for state legislators to sentence offenders in broad categories. But as we have seen in so many capital cases, as we have seen in so many other cases, just because these classifications are convenient doesn't make them constitutional.

"Shall we lock up a child and throw away the key?" is George Will's Washington Post and syndicated column.

Because of their offenses, both Jackson and Miller were automatically tried as adults. Both were sentenced under mandatory sentencing laws.

On Monday, Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Anthony M. Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, held that the Eighth Amendment prohibits such sentences when they are mandatory. Previously, the court had held that, regarding children, such sentences are akin to the death penalty, which the court said requires individuation — consideration by sentencing authorities of each defendant’s characteristics and crime.

This ruling extends two others, one holding that the Eighth Amendment bars capital punishment for children under 18, the other that it bars life without parole for a juvenile convicted of a non-homicide offense. These decisions held that regarding culpability, and hence sentencing, children are constitutionally unlike adults. The decisions came in the context of accumulating scientific evidence about increased impulsivity and diminished responsibility because of adolescent brain development.

And:

The dissenters were right that a practice can be both constitutional and reprehensible. Even if sentencing 14-year-olds to die in prison is the latter — and it is — whether it is the former depends largely on the infrequency of such sentences. It is, however, to be hoped that the case the court decided Monday might prompt changes in social thinking that will give other cruel punishments, such as protracted solitary confinement, the infrequency requisite for making them sufficiently unusual as to be unconstitutional.

At the Dallas Morning News Views Blog, editorial writer Jim Mitchell posts, "High Court ruling presents a juvenile justice issue — even in Texas."

The Supreme Court has said life-without-parole is unconstitutional. But about three years ago, Texas abolished mandatory life without  parole for anyone under  age 17. So it would seem that Texas was ahead of the curve. However,  there are 27 people in Texas prisons who were sentenced to life without parole  before they turned 18, and the High Court ruling makes those cases problematic.

When the Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that death penalty for juveniles violated the Constitution, Perry commuted the death sentences for 28 prisoners on death row who were 17; those sentences were rolled into life sentences.

It is pretty clear that some sort of re-sentencing is necessary. The question is how it should be done.

"'Elite' Supreme Court sides with science and juveniles," by Jonathan Zimmerman at the Christian Science Monitor.  Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University.

Did the Supreme Court embrace an “elite vision” on Monday when it struck down state laws mandating life imprisonment for juvenile murderers?

That’s what Justice Samuel Alito said, in an angry dissent from the bench. By invalidating such laws, Mr. Alito fumed, the court’s 5-4 majority assumed that it knew better than the 28 state legislatures that have authorized mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole for killers younger than 18.

But the court’s majority really does know better. And there’s a simple reason for that: It relied on science – in particular, the science of adolescent brain development.

"A special status for violent children," is by Jessica S. Henry for the Bergen (NJ) Record.  She is associate professor in the Department of Justice Studies at Montclair State University.

Although the court did not foreclose the possibility of life-without-parole sentences for children, it recognized that “appropriate occasions for sentencing juveniles to this harshest possible penalty will be uncommon.”

A sentence of life without parole reflects the belief that there are offenders who are so dangerous or who have committed a crime so heinous that they can never and should never be released. When a life-without-parole sentence is imposed on a child, particularly when it is imposed as a mandatory sentence, we make the determination at the time of sentencing that this child is forever beyond redemption.

Miller permits us to question that presumption because it requires children to be recognized as not yet fully formed people who carry the potential for change.

Slate features an exchange between Emily Bazelon and Judge Richard Posner as part of it's Supreme Court Year in Review series.  Bazelon writes, "The justices seem to understand that juveniles aren’t like the rest of us."

I see this as a fairly small but still significant step in expanding the definition of cruel and unusual punishment—the Eighth Amendment standard for declaring a sentence off limits. It’s incremental because two years ago, the court ruled unconstitutional mandatory LWOP for teenagers who commit crimes other than murder. Today, the court simply extended the reasoning of that ruling, Graham v. Florida, to teenage killers. Not surprising, right? Especially since the whole idea behind Graham was that minors are less culpable than adults in part because their brains aren’t fully developed. Once again today, the court relied on the research of Laurence Steinberg at Temple University, whose studies of the adolescent brain have been crucial to this line of cases. Steinberg has found that teenagers tend to have less impulse control and more proclivity for risk, and as Kagan says, these findings mean the court’s decisions rest “not only on common sense—on ‘what any parent knows’—but on science and social science as well.”

I don’t want to imply, though, that Miller was a slam dunk. At oral argument, it seemed far from clear that five justices were willing to rule out mandatory LWOP for everyone up to age 18, no matter how brutal their crimes. It’s one thing to say that the judge should have had a more merciful option than life in prison for Kuntrell Jackson, who was 14 when he was convicted and sentenced for robbing a video store where a clerk was fatally shot, when Jackson didn’t fire the gun himself. It’s another to worry about the fate of Evan Miller, who Kagan acknowledges committed a “vicious murder” at 14, when he and a friend beat a neighbor and set fire to his trailer after drinking and getting high. But Kagan makes the best of these facts by noting Miller’s history of abuse and neglect at the hands of his parents.

The Slate conversation continues with "Justices should use more than their gut and “brain science” to decide a case," by Judge Posner.

I am struck by the court's reference to "brain science." The court has learned from brain science that teenagers are immature! But we knew that. The problem with using it as a basis for distinguishing between murderers of different ages is that many adult murderers have problems with their brains, too. Why is it not cruel and unusual to sentence them to life in prison? A categorical distinction between a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old seems arbitrary, and in any event a reflection of feelings about children (if teenagers can be called children) rather than of the teachings of brain science. If the court had said—what I imagine the justices in the majority feel, that emotion dictated the outcome—that a sentence of life imprisonment (with no parole of course) imposed on a 14-year-old is extremely distasteful, it would have the considerable virtue of candor.

"Supreme Court ruling on juveniles is a partial victory," by James Alan Fox of Northeastern University, and a regular contributor to the Globe.

MONDAY’S 5-4 Supreme Court decision disallowing mandatory life sentences without parole for defendants convicted of murder perpetrated before their 18th birthday moves us significantly closer to a rational system for punishing young offenders. It provides hope for hundreds of prisoners around the country, including more than 60 in Massachusetts, who until now saw no chance of ever walking free.

Massachusetts is one of 28 states affected by the court’s decision in not considering mitigating factors and special circumstances that might warrant parole eligibility. Belying the undeserved reputation for being soft on crime, the Commonwealth arguably has the nation’s stiffest sanction for juvenile murder. Anyone as young as 14 charged with murder is automatically tried as an adult, and if convicted of first-degree murder, receives a mandatory sentence of life without parole.

And:

For the growing network of legal experts and child advocates, the ruling is a partial victory, but falls short of the ultimate goal of bringing laws more in line with evolving standards around the world and developing science concerning adolescent brain development. In this struggle, change has come gradually.

Earlier coverage of Miller v. Alabama and juvenile sentencing begins in the preceding post.

News Analysis of Miller v. Alabama

"Sentencing Ruling Reflects Rethinking on Juvenile Justice," by Ethan Bronner at the New York Times.  For those following juvenile justice issues it's a must-read.  Here's the beginning:

The Supreme Court’s ruling on Monday barring mandatory life sentences for juveniles convicted of murder was the sharpest indication to date of a shift in how the American judicial system views young felons — from irredeemable predators to victims of circumstance with a potential for rehabilitation.

The change, manifest in court decisions starting in 2005, is a result of a confluence of factors: a drop-off in the crack-related crime wave that began in the late 1980s and that led states to move violent juveniles into the adult system and create mandatory prison terms for some crimes; an explosion in scientific research on adolescent brain development; a desire to cut costs by reducing prison populations; and the frustration of juvenile judges with mandatory sentencing.

Together, experts say, the developments seem to be opening a new chapter in juvenile justice only two decades after a markedly different approach took firm hold.

“What we are seeing is a very stark and important rethinking of how we treat juvenile criminal offenders,” said Marsha Levick, who co-founded the nonprofit Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia in 1975. “For years we were trying to convince the courts that kids have constitutional rights just like adults. Now we realize that to ensure that kids are protected, we have to recognize that they are actually different from adults.”

That sense of difference has fueled the Supreme Court decisions of the past seven years — first a ruling that barred the death penalty for juveniles in 2005; one that banned life in prison for juveniles convicted of crimes other than homicide in 2010; and now Monday’s ruling that rendered invalid state laws requiring youths convicted of homicide as well to die in prison. That decision will lead to resentencing hearings for about 2,000 convicts — some of them now well into middle age — in more than two dozen states.

"Life-Without-Parole for Juveniles Is Struck Down," is by Tony Mauro for the National Law Journal and Law.com.

Justice Elena Kagan announced the decision in Miller v. Alabama, 10-9646, for a 5-4 majority, asserting that juveniles' "lesser culpability" makes it unconstitutional for them to be sentenced under a scheme that does not give the judge the ability to consider factors such as the defendant's age, maturity and upbringing in determining the sentence. "Youth matters," Kagan said from the bench.

The ruling paves the way for roughly 2,000 inmates nationwide to seek reversal of their life sentences, according to Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative and the lawyer for the two inmates whose cases were ruled on by the high court.

Said Stevenson, "This is an incredibly important step forward in recognizing one of the great tragedies of our time," namely the large-scale incarceration of juveniles under sentences that give them no hope of release after rehabilitation.

But Stevenson warned of a coming crisis in finding enough lawyers to represent the inmates who are entitled to relief because of ruling. Many are in states that do not provide lawyers for indigent defendants on appeal.

The ruling marked the growing clout of Kagan on the Supreme Court, as well as the continuing importance of Justice Anthony Kennedy as the court's swing justice. He provided a fifth vote to the liberal-wing justices Kagan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer. As the senior justice in the majority, Kennedy gave the job of writing the decision to Kagan, a major assignment for a relatively junior justice. Kagan joined the court in 2010.

Reviewing the court's recent precedents, which have struck down the death penalty for juveniles and life without parole for nonhomicide juvenile offenders, Kagan wrote, "imposition of a state's most severe penalties on juvenile offenders cannot proceed as though they were not children."

Earlier coverage of Miller v. Alabama begins with the preceding post; commentary, next.  The Court's ruling in Miller v. Alabama is available in Adobe .pdf format.

Continued Editorial Support for Miller v. Alabama

There's continued support for the Suprme Court ruling in Miller v. Alabama, and lots of commentary.  In this post, editorials; followed by analysis in the next post; then, columns and commentary.

"Children in Prison for Life," is the New York Times' editorial.

The Supreme Court’s ruling this week prohibiting mandatory sentences of life without parole for juveniles convicted of murder is a measured and important step in a trend in juvenile justice begun more than two decades ago. The court left open the possibility that minors under age 18 could be sentenced to life without parole — but only if the sentencing judge has made an individualized finding that such a penalty is appropriate, weighing the defendant’s characteristics and the details of the crime.

The 5-to-4 majority opinion by Justice Elena Kagan, with Justice Anthony Kennedy joining the moderate liberals, held that the mandatory punishment is unconstitutional because it fails “to take into account how children are different, and how those differences counsel against irrevocably sentencing them to a lifetime in prison.”

The Christian Science Monitor editorial is, "Supreme Court ruling on life sentences for young criminals."

Is a child more capable of character reform than an adult?

In a string of rulings since 2005, the Supreme Court has accepted this popular perception in lessening harsh sentences for juveniles who commit crimes.

In its latest decision issued Monday, the court banned mandatory life sentences with no chance of parole for minors who commit murder. The ruling still allows such sentences. But judges and juries must first assess a minor’s capacity for reform. Only a small percentage of adolescents develop entrenched patterns of problem behavior, the court stated.

"Justice for juvenile criminals," in the Denver Post.

We've long opposed sentencing juveniles to life without any possibility of parole. That's why we supported changing state law in 2006 to ensure that juveniles convicted of murder become eligible for parole after serving 40 years in prison.

But what about the 50 Colorado inmates who are serving life sentences right now without any possibility of parole because the 2006 law wasn't retroactive? This week the U.S. Supreme Court provided an answer: They too cannot be ignored. It is unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment to impose mandatory life-without-parole sentences on juvenile murderers.

The court's decision doesn't mean inmates in Colorado convicted as juveniles under this state's prior harsher standard will be freed anytime soon — or necessarily ever. Becoming eligible for parole doesn't mean you actually will be released.

"Court gets it right," in the Buffalo News.

The Supreme Court issued two smart rulings on Monday, one striking down most of Arizona's constitutionally reckless immigration law and the other prohibiting automatic sentences of life without parole for juveniles convicted of murder.

And:

In the other ruling, decided in a 5-4 vote - closer than it should have been - the court decided that it is cruel and unusual to impose automatic sentences of life without parole on murderers who were under 18 when they committed their crimes.

State and federal courts generally have moved too far in removing discretion from judges who are, after all, supposed to judge. The Supreme Court struck down laws in 29 states that prohibited judges from considering mitigating circumstances.

"Court's decision sensible on teen killer sentences," is the Ventura County Star editorial.

The law cannot fly on automatic pilot, which is what state legislatures periodically try to do by taking certain decisions out of the hands of judges and juries, particularly with mandatory minimum sentences.

A particularly egregious example of bypassing judicial discretion are laws requiring youths younger than 18 convicted of murder to be sentenced to life without parole, regardless of the circumstances of the crimes or such factors as a brutally dysfunctional home life.

This week, by a 5-to-4 decision the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court said such mandatory life sentences for juveniles under 18 violated the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

And:

The court's majority made a sensible ruling, though one that won't force any changes in California. Here, state law already allows discretion in sentencing juveniles for murder.

Earlier coverage of Miller v. Alabama and juvenile sentencing begins at the link; continued coverage in the next two posts.  Related posts are in the juvenile category index.

Additional Miller v. Alabama Coverage

The Washington Post has an interview with Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, who argued the juvenile cases decided in Miller v. Alabama.

The intervew, "Bryan Stevenson, the man behind the juvenile justice cases decided by the Supreme Court," is conducted by Eva Rodriguez.  Here's a brief excerpt from this must-read:

Why did you get involved in these types of cases? Why do you feel so strongly?

Stevenson: I started representing children on death row 20 years ago, and I was struck by how desperately they wanted and needed mentoring, parenting, guidance. They were in every sense of the word “kids,” and that surprised me initially. . . . What I saw was that not only were they vulnerable and disabled and exposed in ways that adult clients weren’t, but they were also responsive in ways that adult clients weren’t. . . . The second thing was just seeing how exposed kids are in the adult system, how victimized, how brutalized.

Have you ever come face to face with a victim of one of your clients?

Tragically, I know more about victimization than I wish I knew. My grandfather was murdered when I was 16 by juveniles, four kids in a low-income project in south Philadelphia. Members of my immediate family have dealt with very serious crimes. It’s not a lack of awareness. We spend a lot of time with victims of violent crime. . . . I think we should be doing something radically better by people who are victimized by violent crime. But what we’ve done in the last 30 years is promised them revenge, mostly; we promised them blood and executions and extreme punishments.

We do very poorly in providing them with counseling and support and recovery or the promise of a new society where there’s going to be less crime because we’re doing something constructive to help people who are at risk or hopeless or marginalized.

I also think that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice. And if we don’t commit in a complete way to justice for everybody, we risk perpetuating the dynamics that have been so injurious to American progress. And I do believe we should spend a lot more time thinking about how we treat people who are disadvantaged and disfavored in evaluating our progress, our decency, our character, because, ultimately, that’s how we’re going to be judged.

If a juvenile has committed the most heinous of crimes and the jury has adjudicated that individual guilty, why is it offensive to the Constitution for that juvenile to be subjected to a mandatory life without parole?

Children are different than adults. We recognize that children need extra protection. Their maturity, their judgment, their development doesn’t permit us to treat them like adults. That’s the reason why we don’t let even the smartest kids smoke or drink or vote or drive cars before they’re eligible.

We protect children under the law except in the criminal justice system, and in the last 30 years, we have essentially dropped the protections for kids, put them in the adult criminal justice system, where I think many of them have been really unfairly sentenced and condemned. . . . We do it mostly to kids who are poor and kids of color, and that makes this sentence “unusual.”

I believe that to say to any child that you’re only fit to die in prison is “cruel.” It’s true that some of these crimes are very disturbing, but it’s also true that the lives that many of these children have lived are also disturbing. They’re in many ways some of the most vulnerable kids in society, and we owe them more than to simply throw them away.

You can view Bryan Stevenson's Ted Talk, "We need to talk about an injustice," noted in this post.

There is additional news coverage of the ruling in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Courthouse News Service, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, MSNBC, and NPR.

What Miller v. Alabama Means for Texas

The Texas Tribune posts, "Decision on Juvenile Sentences Stirs Questions in Texas," by John Wayne Ferguson.

Twenty-eight states currently allow mandatory life without parole for juveniles and will now have to change their laws to accommodate the rulings. The decision still allows for such sentences, but judges must now consider the age of the convicted individual.

Texas already abolished mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles in 2009. But the Texas law stipulated that no one under the age of 17 could receive the sentence.

There are currently 27 individuals incarcerated in Texas who were sentenced to life without parole before they were 18. All 27 were convicted of capital murder, and all but two are male. Seventeen of them were 17 years old at the time of their offense. The others were 16 or younger. Nationwide, 2,300 individuals are serving life without parole sentences for murders committed before they were 18. Only about 79 were under the age of 14. Ninety percent of them are serving mandatory life sentences.

And:

After the Supreme Court in 2005 decided that the death penalty for juveniles was unconstitutional, Gov. Rick Perry commuted the sentences for 28 17-year-olds on death row. All 28 were given life sentences with the possibility of parole in 40 years.

After Monday's ruling, the state is still determining what action to take. “The Governor’s Office is working with the Attorney General, the Board of Pardons and Paroles, prosecutors and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to determine how many individuals may be affected by this ruling and what the appropriate steps will be for Texas going forward,” Josh Havens, a spokesman for the governor’s office, said in a statement.

Jason Clark of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice said his office began preparing soon after the court’s announcement, and identified the 27 convicts in anticipation of any requests from the attorney general or governor’s offices.

Earlier coverage of the Supreme Court ruling on juvenile sentencing begins with the preceding post.

Editorial Support for Miller v. Alabama Ruling

Newspaper editorial boards across the country are praising yesterday's Supreme Court ruling on sentencing for juvenile offenders, Miller v. Alabama.

"Juvenile murderers and justice," is the Los Angele Times editorial.

In a 2005 ruling prohibiting capital punishment for juveniles, the court, reflecting the findings of psychologists and neurologists, cited three differences between younger teenagers and adults: Adolescents are likelier than adults to display a "lack of maturity and an underdeveloped sense of responsibility"; they are more susceptible to negative influences and peer pressure; and "the character of a juvenile is not as well formed as that of an adult." Using the same reasoning, the court in 2010 ruled that states could not sentence juveniles to life in prison without the possibility of parole for non-homicide crimes.

In her majority opinion, Justice Elena Kagan cited the 2005 and 2010 cases, but she also based her ruling on precedents in which the Supreme Court outlawed mandatory death sentences for adults and required that sentencing judges take into account possible extenuating circumstances. She concluded that "the confluence of these two lines of precedent leads to the conclusion that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles violate the 8th Amendment." It is not unconstitutional, however, for judges to impose such sentences at their discretion (though Kagan predicted legitimate uses of that authority would be "uncommon").

Perhaps this limited approach was necessary to win the vote of JusticeAnthony M. Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinions in the 2005 and 2010 decisions. In those cases he cited trends against imposing the death penalty on juvenile murderers and sentencing adolescents to life in prison without possibility of parole for non-homicide offenses.

"A welcome vote of compassion for teen offenders," in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The Supreme Court's landmark ruling Monday barring mandatory life sentences for teenage criminals offers the welcome glimmer of hope for parole for thousands of lifers across the nation.

In Pennsylvania prisons nearly bursting with inmates who were locked away as teens, the mandatory-term ruling poses a major challenge in righting a potential wholesale injustice.

No other state has thrown away the key on so many juvenile offenders — with around 480 serving life terms for crimes committed before age 18. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has been asked to order the review of hundreds of those cases, and the court has a duty to move decisively in that direction now.

Every sentence should be reviewed as a result of the high court ruling, even if the state courts eventually conclude that the life sentences should stand under the narrow discretion the Supreme Court allowed.

"Juvenile life sentence ruling is wise," in the Austin American-Statesman.

Sentencing children to die in prison is cruel and unusual and therefore unconstitutional.

So said the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday when it ruled that state laws mandating that defendants younger than 18 who are convicted of murder be sentenced to life in prison without parole violated the Constitution's Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.

It's a decision that reflects an ongoing evolution in our understanding of the juvenile brain and an appreciation for limits on juvenile justice. Mandating life without parole for juveniles takes away a court's discretion, can lead to punishment that is not proportional to a defendant's role in a crime and fails to account for the profound differences between adolescents and adults.

Texas legislators wisely banned life without parole of juvenile defendants in 2009, but the state's law failed to make the prohibition retroactive.

Thus, 27 juveniles who were convicted of capital murder as adults between 2005, when the U.S. Supreme Court banned the death penalty for juveniles, and the passage of the new 2009 law are sitting in prison without any chance for parole. Monday's ruling should lead to new punishment hearings for these individuals.

There will be more on the ruling's application in Texas in the next post.

"Supreme Court rules wisely on immigration, juveniles," in the Kansas City Star.

The court helped build a fairer, more compassionate society with its 5-4 ruling that will stop courts from sentencing juvenile offenders to life in prison without a chance of parole.

The decision, written by Justice Elena Kagan, builds upon previous rulings banning death sentences for juveniles and life sentences for young people convicted of crimes other than homicides.

“Mandatory life without parole for a juvenile precludes consideration of his chronological age and its hallmark features — among them, immaturity, impetuosity, and failure to appreciate risks and consequences,” Kagan wrote. “It prevents taking into account the family and home environment...”

The decision doesn’t mean that juveniles who commit the most serious crimes should escape justice. But it correctly rejects the notion that lives at 14 or 15 years of age are beyond redemption.

Detroit Free Press columnist Jeff Gerritt writes,"Supreme Court strikes down Michigan's barbaric juvenile lifer law."

A Wayne State University survey found that, when given alternatives, only 5% of state residents support forcing judges to give some kids as young as 14 life sentences, without possibility of parole. Michigan’s juvenile lifer law contradicts science, legal tradition, public opinion and plain common sense. It’s also immoral, a symptom of a society that has all but given up on the idea of redemption and second chances.

Brain imaging research shows what every parent knows: Teenage brains are more impulsive and unstable than adult brains — even without the abuse and neglect that many of these young people have faced. Juveniles don’t have the same legal rights and responsibilities as adults because they lack the maturity and judgment to handle them. Nor should they suffer the same punishments.

Without the courage or compassion to strike down the state’s draconian juvenile lifer law, Michigan's politicians have left it to the Supreme Court to drag the state into the 21st Century.

Earlier coverage of Miller v. Alabama and juvenile sentencing begins at the link.

Supreme Court Bars Mandatory LWoP for Juvenile Offenders - UPDATED

The Supreme Court. ruling in Miller v. Alabama is available in Adobe .pdf format.

The New York Times posts, "Justices Bar Mandatory Life Terms for Juveniles," written by Adam Liptak and Ethan Bronner.

Some 2,000 juvenile offenders serving life sentences without parole were given hope of eventual release by the Supreme Court on Monday. The court ruled that laws requiring youths convicted of murder to be sentenced to die in prison violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

The 5-to-4 decision divided the court along ideological lines, with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy joining the four members of the liberal wing. Justice Kennedy also provided the decisive vote in two other decisions issued Monday — on Arizona’s immigration law and on a sequel to the court’s decision in the Citizens United campaign finance case.

Writing for the majority in the decision concerning juvenile offenders, Justice Elena Kagan said the Constitution forbids “requiring that all children convicted of homicide receive lifetime incarceration without possibility of parole, regardless of their age and age-related characteristics and the nature of their crimes.”

In barring the punishment for killings committed before age 18, Justice Kagan drew on two lines of precedent, both rooted in the court’s death penalty jurisprudence.

The first concerned harsh penalties imposed on juvenile offenders. In 2005, in Roper v. Simmons, the court eliminated the juvenile death penalty. In 2010, in Graham v. Florida, the court ruled that sentencing juvenile offenders to life without the possibility of parole was also unconstitutional, but only for crimes that did not involve killings. That decision affected about 130 prisoners convicted of committing, before they turned 18, crimes like rape, armed robbery and kidnapping.

The new decision did not draw a categorical line. Instead, the majority looked to a second line of cases, these barring mandatory death sentences and insisting instead that judges and juries, in Justice Kagan’s words, “consider the characteristics of a defendant and the details of his offense before sentencing.”

The cases before the court concerned two men who were involved in killings when they were 14.

"Supreme Court: teen murderers must get parole chance," is by Jim Vicini for Reuters Legal.

The ruling could affect nearly 2,500 prisoners serving sentences of life in prison without parole for murder committed under the age of 18. The United States has more than 2.2 million inmates in prisons or jails.

The decision does not mean the prisoners must be released, only that they get the chance for parole.

The ruling is the court's latest at a time when juvenile sentencing trends are reflecting get-tough efforts by states to abolish parole and to prosecute juveniles in the regular criminal justice system for especially heinous crimes.

The Supreme Court in 2010 declared unconstitutional sentences for juveniles of life in prison without parole for crimes other than murder, and in 2005 abolished the death penalty for juveniles.

Opponents of harsh sentences for juvenile offenders have argued they are less responsible for their crimes than adults are due to their emotional immaturity and that they can change and be rehabilitated while in prison.

Bloomberg posts, "Life Sentences for Young Murderers Limited by High Court," by Greg Stohr.

A divided U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states can’t impose mandatory life-without-parole sentences on juveniles who are convicted of taking part in a murder.

The justices, voting 5-4, said states violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment when they don’t allow for the option of a shorter sentence.

Juvenile sentencing has been an area of concern for the nation’s highest court over the past decade. In 2005, the court outlawed the death penalty for juveniles, saying their lack of maturity made them “categorically less culpable than the average criminal.” In 2010, the court extended that reasoning to bar life-without-parole sentences for youths convicted of a crime other than murder.

And:

Thirty-eight states, along with the federal government, have laws that permit life-without-parole sentences for youthful murderers. Even so, those sentences are rare for the youngest offenders. Miller and Jackson are among 79 people serving life- without-parole sentences for crimes committed at age 13 or 14, according to their lawyers.

"Court: No more life without parole for juveniles," is the AP filing via USA Today.

The Supreme Court says it's unconstitutional to sentence juveniles to life in prison without parole for murder.

The high court on Monday threw out Americans' ability to send children to prison for the rest of their lives with no chance of ever getting out. The 5-4 decision is in line with others the court has made, including ruling out the death penalty for juveniles and life without parole for young people whose crimes did not involve killing.

The decision came in the robbery and murder cases of Evan Miller and Kuntrell Jackson, who were 14 when they were convicted.

"SCOTUS: Alabama juvenile wins ban against life-without-parole sentences," is Mary Orndorff's Birmingham News post.

Life-without-parole sentences for juveniles are unconstitutional, according to a 5-4 opinion this morning from the U.S. Supreme Court that involved a 14-year-old convicted of murder in Alabama.

Evan Miller was convicted of arson and murder in Lawrence County, but his life without any possibility of parole sentence violates the Constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment, according to the justices.

The opinion was written by Justice Elana Kagan.

The ruling, which also includes a case from Arkansas, is another in a line of decisions that don't allow the criminal justice system to give up hope that the youngest criminals can be rehabilitated.

"By requiring that all children convicted of homicide receive lifetime incarceration without possibility of parole, regard- less of their age and age-related characteristics and the nature of their crimes, the mandatory sentencing schemes before us violate this principle of proportionality, and so the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment," according to the opinion that was just released this morning.

Earlier coverage of the two juvenile cases begins at the link.  Related posts are in the juvenile category index.

Juvenile Sentencing Issues Return to Supreme Court

This morning, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the cases of Miller v. Alabama and Jackson v. Hobbs on the constitutionality of life without parole sentences for 14 year-old juveniles convicted of murder.  It seeks to refine the Court's 2010 ruling in Graham v. Florida, which ruled LWoP unconstitutional for non-homicidal crimes committed by juvenile offenders.  The links above will take you to the oral argument transcirpts.  The SCOTUSblog case files contain all briefing in the two cases.

Reuters posts, "Supreme Court weighs if teen murderers must get chance of parole," by James Vicini.

The U.S. Supreme Court considered on Tuesday whether juveniles can be sentenced to life in prison without parole for murder, struggling to reach a consensus on where to draw the line in setting an age for such sentences.

Several justices appeared sympathetic to arguments that juveniles who are 14 years old or younger when they commit murder should at least get the opportunity for a parole hearing, but they seemed reluctant to apply it across-the-board to all cases involving juveniles.

During arguments, the justices appeared troubled by such mandatory sentences that leave no discretion in taking into account the defendant's age or maturity when committing the crime.

The Supreme Court heard appeals from convicted juvenile murderers from Alabama and Arkansas arguing that life imprisonment without parole violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

"Court Questions Life Without Parole for Juveniles," is Mark Sherman's AP filing, via ABC News.

The Supreme Court debated Tuesday whether young teenagers convicted of killing someone may be locked up for life with no chance of parole, the latest in a line of cases seeking a second chance for young people.

The justices are looking at two cases involving teenagers serving life sentences. In one, 14-year-old Evan Miller in Alabama beat a man, then set fire to his home. In the other, 14-year-old Kuntrell Jackson in Arkansas didn't pull the trigger, but was in on an attempted robbery in which another boy shot and killed a store clerk.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote earlier opinions ruling out the death penalty for juveniles and life without parole sentences for young people whose crimes did not involve killing. He seemed again to be the pivotal justice in Tuesday's arguments.

Roughly 2,300 people are behind bars for life with no chance of winning their freedom for crimes they committed before their 18 birthday. Only 79, however, are in prison for crimes that took place when they were 14 or younger.

Lyle Denniston provides SCOTUSblog's analysis in "Argument recap: Compromise on youth sentences?"

Moving further along the constitutional line between adults and children in the criminal courts, the Supreme Court on Tuesday turned to life-without-parole sentences for youths who commit murder, and appeared to be reaching for a compromise.  If the indications from a one-hour hearing hold, the Court might allow such sentences to be imposed on youths, but not as a mandatory matter for younger teenagers.  And it could choose to forbid that penalty at all for some, but where that line might be drawn was far from clear – although it might wind up at 12 or younger.  In more than 90 minutes of argument in two cases, there was no sign that a majority would come together on a flat ban for such a sentence for anyone under age 18 — the preferred outcome sought by two youths’ lawyer.

For decades, the Court has been drawing lines on criminal punishment for the young, and it has not been an easy process.  Although the Court has regularly accepted the notion that children are less responsible for their conduct than adults, and that the Constitution must account for that, it has divided deeply as it applied that to the severity of the punishment it will allow.   So far, it has barred the death penalty for any youth under age 18 for any crime, and it has similarly nullified life-without-parole for any minor whose crime did not result in someone’s death.

And:

In the cases of Miller v. Alabama (10-9646) and Jackson v. Hobbs (10-9647), most of the Justices appeared to share the sentiment expressed early by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy that the Court did not want to be forced to choose between two opposite choices: no life-without-parole sentences for any minor, or no limit on the sentence for anyone no matter how young.  And there also seemed to be considerable support for Kennedy’s apparent willingness to focus mainly on the question of whether such a sentence should be mandatory and, if so, whether that should be keyed to a specific age.   Kennedy’s views may be crucial, since he has been the author of the Court’s key rulings on youths’ sentencing.

Nina Totenberg's preview of the cases for NPR is, "Do Juvenile Killers Deserve Life Behind Bars?"  There is audio at the link.

Bryan Stevenson, the lawyer who represents the boys in both of these cases, will make two basic arguments before the Supreme Court. The first is that a mandatory punishment of life without parole for a 14-year-old is cruel and unusual punishment because the defendant's age and background are irrelevant and cannot mitigate punishment.

"Judges can't consider it. Juries can't consider it. No one can consider it," says Stevenson.

The states counter that the juvenile's age has already been considered by taking the death penalty off the table.

"If the defendant is not going to get the death penalty, then at the very least, the defendant ought to get life without parole" to counterbalance the harm he has inflicted, says Alabama Solicitor General John Neiman.

But the big question before the Supreme Court on Tuesday is whether life without the possibility of parole is itself an unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment when it is applied to juveniles.

Defense lawyer Stevenson notes that the American legal system treats minors as both less culpable and less responsible. Fourteen-year-olds, for instance, are not allowed to drink, to marry, to vote, to serve on juries or even to drive.

"We're not saying that juvenile offenders who commit homicide can't be punished severely," Stevenson says. "They may even end up spending the rest of their lives in prison. But it's premature, excessive and unfair to say we know this juvenile will never be rehabilitated."

Earlier coverage of 2010's Graham v. Florida ruling begins at the link; more on the Court's 2005 ruling in Roper v. Simmons is via Oyez.  Related posts are in the juvenile index.

Bryan Stevenson will be the keynote speaker at a UT Law symposium, Lynching and the Death Penalty, this Friday; symposium details at the link.

9th Circuit Miranda Case

The Recorder, Law.com California paper, reports, "Ninth Circuit Reaffirms Habeas Relief After High Court Reversal."  It's written by Ginny LaRoe.

The Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals today refused to back off its decision to grant habeas relief for a teenage mass murderer despite being told to reconsider by the Supreme Court. For the second time, a split en banc panel held that the suspect was improperly informed of his Miranda rights and that his confession was not voluntary.

Despite direction from the Supreme Court to review that holding in light of a recent Miranda-related opinion, Florida v. Powell, the majority again held that 17-year-old Johnathan Doody's advisement of rights "completely obfuscated the core precepts of Miranda," and that the "relentless overnight questioning of a sleep-deprived teenager by a tag team of officers overbore the will of that teen, rendering his confession involuntary."

Doody was convicted of taking part in the murder of nine people, including six monks, whose bodies were found face down in a circle, each with a bullet to the head, in a Buddhist temple in Arizona in 1991.

In a concurrence, Chief Judge Alex Kozinski explained that Powell doesn't change the analysis, rather it "reaffirms the standard for determining Miranda compliance that its prior cases had established." And the facts in Powell are different in that the High Court said any misleading Miranda statement was cured by a final warning that the suspect had a "right to use any of these rights at any time."

"Not so here," Kozinski wrote in Doody v. Ryan. "The Miranda warnings Doody was given were affirmatively misleading."

Enter Judge Richard Tallman and his colleagues in dissent. They began by noting the "Supreme Court has repeatedly told us to adhere to the highly deferential standard of review of the state court judgments" required under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act in federal habeas cases.

And:

In response, Judge Johnnie Rawlinson colorfully wrote for the majority in the first opinion, and left intact today: "The dissent would prefer that we simply parrot the findings made during the state court proceedings and call it a day. However, if we succumb to the temptation to abdicate our responsibility on habeas review, we might as well get ourselves a big, fat rubber stamp, pucker up, and kiss The Great Writ good-bye."

"9th Circuit rules, for third time, that Thai teen's confession in slayings was invalid," by Carol J. Williams for the Los Angeles Times.

The appeals court ruled that Maricopa County sheriff's deputies distorted their reading of Doody's Miranda rights, telling him he was entitled to an attorney only if he had committed a crime.

The 8-3 ruling by a full panel of the western appeals court was identical to one the judges issued last year, deeming Doody's confession to the killings after 13 hours of interrogation involuntary and inadmissible in any subsequent trial of the now-36-year-old defendant.

Arizona authorities had appealed the 9th Circuit's ruling last year to the Supreme Court, which sent the case back with an order to reconsider whether the confession should be judged as voluntary in light of a similar case from Florida in which the high court ruled that a suspect's confession was valid.

Wednesday's ruling said the 9th Circuit judges reviewed the high court's position in Florida vs. Powell, about a criminal defendant's right to have an attorney present during interrogation, but still concluded that Doody's rights were violated. The appeals court ordered Arizona authorities to free him or try him again for the killings without the confession.

Courthouse News Service reports, "Conviction for Temple Murders Stays Vacated."  It's written by Barbara Leonard.

A full panel of the 9th Circuit on Wednesday reaffirmed its 2010 decision to vacate the conviction of a man who confessed as a teen to participating in the 1991 murders of nine people, including six Buddhist monks, at an Arizona temple.

In 67-page decision, which prefaces a nine-page concurrence from Chief Judge Alex Kozinski and a 39-page dissent on behalf of three judges, the court notes that its original en banc panel in Seattle "held that nearly thirteen hours of relentless overnight questioning of a sleep-deprived teenager by a tag team of officers overbore the will of that teen, rendering his confession involuntary."

At 113 pages in total, Wednesday's decision just tops the 106-page ruling from the 8-3 court in February 2010.

Johnathan Doody was a 17-year-old high-school student when he confessed to participating in the 1991 murders at the Wat Promkunaram Buddhist Temple near Phoenix. The victims, including six Buddhist monks, two nuns and a novice, were found lying face-down in a circle, each shot in the head.

Doody was arrested and later convicted for all nine murders. He was sentenced to 281 years in prison. Another minor, Alessandro Garcia, testified against Doody and was also convicted as an accomplice after pleading guilty. Garcia was sentenced to 271 years.

A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit reversed the District Court's denial of Doody's habeas petition in 2008, and the full court ruled that Doody deserved a new trial because he was prejudiced by extensive interrogation and inadequate Miranda warnings.

Juveniles in the Adult Criminal Justice System in Texas

That's the title of a new report by Michele Deitch of UT's LBJ School of Public Affairs.  Juveniles in the Adult Criminal Justice System in Texas is available in Adobe .pdf format.

This is from the news release announcing the report:

LBJ School Senior Lecturer Michele Deitch has published a new report titled Juveniles in the Adult Criminal Justice System in Texas (LBJ School of Public Affairs, 2011). The report provides a comprehensive look at Texas’s methods for dealing with the state’s most serious juvenile offenders. It gathers all available Texas data with respect to certified juveniles—those youth who are transferred to adult criminal court—and compares them to the population of determined sentence juveniles who are retained in the juvenile justice system. The report also compares the significant differences in programming and services for the two populations of juvenile offenders—those who get sent to adult jails and prisons, and those who receive placements in the Texas Youth Commission (TYC).

The report and its findings are especially timely during the Texas Legislature’s ongoing effort to reform and restructure the state’s juvenile justice system.

Among the report’s most significant findings about juveniles transferred to the adult system are these:

• Minimal differences exist between certified juveniles in the adult criminal justice system and determinate sentence juveniles in TYC, except for county of conviction.
• Certified juveniles do not represent the “worst of the worst”—they are neither more violent nor more persistent in their criminal behavior than those retained in juvenile court and sent to TYC.
• While the large majority of certified juveniles have committed violent offenses, only 17% have committed homicide.
• About 15% of juveniles transferred to adult court are charged with non-violent felonies, including state jail offenses.
• 72% of certified juveniles do not have a prior violent criminal history,
• 29% of certified juveniles are first-time offenders.
• 89% of certified juveniles have never been committed to TYC, indicating that most certified youth have never had the opportunity to benefit from effective rehabilitative programs in the juvenile justice system, such as TYC’s highly regarded Capital and Serious Violent Offenders Program, which has a 95% success rate.

The report also examines what happens when juveniles are housed in adult prisons and jails in Texas. National research shows that housing juveniles in adult prisons and jails compromises both public safety and the personal safety of the youth. Juveniles housed in adult prisons and jails face vastly higher risks of suicide, sexual assault, physical assault, and mental illness, and they have been shown to have a 100% higher risk of violent recidivism.

In Texas, juveniles as young as 14 who are certified as adults and awaiting trial are sent to adult county jails, where they can languish in isolation for periods of a year or more.

Brandi Grissom writes, "Report: Hundreds of Youths in Adult Prisons," for the Texas Tribune, today.

Texas judges, particularly in Harris County, are sending hundreds of adolescent, first-time violent offenders to state prison, a punishment lawmakers intended for youths considered the worst of the worst, according to a report set for release today.

“Adult jails and adult prisons are simply the wrong place to hold these kids,” says Michele Deitch, a professor at the University of Texas LBJ School of Public Affairs and author of the report "Juveniles in the Adult Criminal Justice System in Texas."

And:

From fiscal year 2005 to fiscal year 2010, Texas courts certified nearly 1,300 youths as adults. During that same time, about 860 youths received determinate sentences. According to the report, though, there was little difference in the criminality among youths sentenced to the adult system and those who were sent to youth facilities. In both cases, the majority committed a violent crime like aggravated robbery or sexual assault, and had one or no previous juvenile court cases.

In most cases, the obvious difference was where the offender was tried. Harris County courts certified twice as many juvenile offenders as adults as any other county over the four-year time period studied. Judges in Harris County certified 301 youths as adults. Dallas County, by comparison, certified 141 offenders as adults during the same time period.

The problem with sending so many youths to adult facilities, particularly those who are not repeat violent offenders, is that they are not designed to rehabilitate and educate adolescents, Deitch said. Youths who are sent to adult prisons, she said, have a 100 percent greater risk of committing future violent offenses, according to the Centers for Disease Control. They are also more likely to develop mental health problems in prison, to be physically and sexually assaulted and to commit suicide.

In 2009, Deitch issued, "From Time Out to Hard Time: Young Children in the Adult Criminal Justice System," noted in this post.  She was part of last month's Barbara Jordan forum.

Related posts are in the juvenile index.

Barbara Jordan Freedom Foundation Program Next Week

The annual Barbara Jordan Forum  kicks off next week with an keynote by State Senator Rodney Ellis, and contains some excellent criminal justice programming. 

Details are in the news release, "Weeklong Tribute to Honor Life and Work of Barbara Jordan Feb 21-25.
LBJ School of Public Affairs Joins with The Barbara Jordan Freedom Foundation to Commemorate Jordan’s Landmark 75th Birthday."

Events are free and open to the public, but you must register to attend Senator Rodney Ellis' Keynote Opening Day’s Symposium.  All events are at the LBJ School of Public Affairs.

Discussions of particular items to readers in the Austin area on Monday:

1:15 p.m. – 2:15 p.m.  – “Reducing Risk and Building Strength Through Educational Reform and Early Childhood Interventions”
Roundtable discussion with:
Dr. Gregory Vincent, UT Vice-President for Diversity and Community Engagement
Prof. Norma Cantu, UT College of Education and School of Law
Kara Johnson, Texas Early Childhood Education Coalition
Prof. Julian Heilig, UT College of Education
Dr. Lynda Frost, Hogg Foundation for Mental Health

2:30 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. – “The Need for Juvenile Justice Reform”
Lead Speaker: Shay Bilchik, former head of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and Executive Director, Georgetown University’s Center for Juvenile Justice Reform

Responders:
Vicki Spriggs, Executive Director, Texas Juvenile Probation Commission
Senior District Judge Jeanne Meurer, Travis County juvenile judge
Prof. David Springer, UT School of Social Work

4:15 p.m. – 5:45 p.m. – “Mass Incarceration, Race, and Criminal Justice Reform”
Lead Speaker: Marc Mauer, Executive Director, The Sentencing Project

Responders:
Steve Martin, Attorney and Corrections Consultant; author of “Texas Prisons: The Walls Came Tumbling Down”
District Judge John Creuzot, Dallas County criminal judge (invited)
Ana Yanez Correa, Executive Director, Texas Criminal Justice Coalition
Prof. Michele Deitch, LBJ School of Public Affairs

On Friday, February 25:

12:15 – 2:15 p.m.--“From Time Out to Hard Time: Young Children in the Adult Criminal Justice System” featuring Prof. Michele Deitch
Sponsored by the Center for Health and Social Policy (CHASP) and Social, Health, Economic, and Education Policymakers (SHEP)
SRH 3.122
Bass Lecture Hall

The Center for Health and Social Policy and SHEP present LBJ School Senior Lecturer Michele Deitch, a Board member of the Barbara Jordan Freedom Foundation and an expert on juvenile justice and criminal justice policy.  She will discuss the prevalence and implications of trying juveniles as adults and incarcerating them in adult prisons and jails.

Related posts can be found in the juvenile index; earlier items from Michele Deitch, at the link.

CCA Rules LWoP Suitable for Juveniles

"Life without parole OK for juveniles, Texas court rules; Sentence is not too harsh for teens convicted of murder, judges say, is the title of Chuck Lindell's report in today's Austin American-Statesman.

Sentencing juvenile murderers to life in prison without any chance of parole is not unreasonably harsh, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled Wednesday.

Chris Joshua Meadoux, convicted of killing two San Antonio friends when he was 16, argued that his no-parole sentence violated the U.S. Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment because juveniles lack maturity, judgment and an adult's sense of responsibility.

But in a 7-2 ruling, the state's highest criminal court said that juveniles may be less morally culpable than adults, but some actions justify imposing the second-harshest penalty available in Texas.

"Given the enormity of the crimes committed by juvenile capital offenders, the Legislature could reasonably conclude that such offenders are incorrigible \u2026 and that the only prudent course of action is to separate them from society forever," said the opinion, written by Judge Charles Holcomb.

Although Texas law no longer allows the practice, life without parole was available for juvenile capital murder defendants who were tried as adults from 2005 to 2009. Twenty teens were sentenced to remain jailed until they die, including Meadoux, now 20.

A dissenting opinion by Judge Lawrence Meyers said the court should have ordered new punishment hearings for Meadoux and the other juvenile offenders.

Meyers noted that after the U.S. Supreme Court banned executing juvenile killers in 2005, sentences for the affected inmates were commuted to life terms with the possibility of parole after 40 years served. "It's ridiculous to say that a juvenile who was not even eligible for the death penalty" should receive a harsher no-parole sentence, he wrote in the dissent joined by Judge Cheryl Johnson.

In 2005, the Texas Legislature voted to let jurors choose life without parole or execution for capital murder.

Four years later, the law was amended to ban no-parole sentences for those who committed murder while younger than 18. Several legislators said the move was intended to correct an oversight in the 2005 law, but the no-parole ban was not made retroactive.

And:

Last May, the Supreme Court added another limitation, ruling that juveniles may not be sentenced to life without parole for crimes that do not include murder.

That ruling, however, recognized "a moral line" between murder and other violent offenses that justifies no-parole sentences in capital cases, the Texas court said Wednesday.

The ruling in Meadoux v. Texas and the dissent are available in Adobe .pdf format.

Related coverage in the juvenile index includes the posts:

• A Small Class of Texas Juvenile Offenders
• Rick Casey on Juvenile Sentencing

Coverage of the May 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Graham v. Florida begins with the post, "Broad National Editorial Support for Graham Ruling on Juvenile Sentencing."

A Small Class of Texas Juvenile Offenders

Mary Alice Robbins writes, "A Minor Issue: Appeal Impacts Parole Eligibility for Juveniles Convicted of Capital Murder Under Old Law," for the current issue of Texas Lawyer.  Here's an extended excerpt:

Chris Meadoux, who turns 20 on Oct. 1, is serving life in prison without the possibility of parole for slaying two people in 2007 when he was 16 years old. If Meadoux had committed the murders this year, he would have a chance at parole after serving 40 years behind bars because he committed the crime as a minor. However, Meadoux killed the pair before the Texas Legislature passed Senate Bill 839 in 2009.

Texas' position on permitting parole eligibility for juveniles convicted of capital murder has changed over the years. Prior to 2005, juveniles who committed capital murder could receive the death penalty or a life sentence with the possibility of parole after 40 years. But in 2005, the Texas Legislature changed that law to say all capital offenders could never be released from prison, according to the Senate Research Center's analysis of S.B. 839.

Then in 2009, lawmakers changed their mind and passed S.B. 839, eliminating the sentence of life without parole for juveniles certified to be tried as adults for capital murder. The bill took effect on Sept. 1, 2009, but does not apply retroactively.

According to information provided by Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Jason Clarke, Meadoux is one of 20 juvenile offenders serving life without parole in this state. Houston criminal-defense solo Brian Wice says there are 19, because an appellate court recently remanded the case of one of his clients for a new trial.

In Meadoux v. State , a case of first impression, Cheves Ligon, of counsel at the Bexar County Appellate Public Defender's Office, will argue on Meadoux's behalf Sept. 15 before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. He will try to persuade the court that sentencing a juvenile to life without the chance of parole constitutes "cruel and unusual punishment" under the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Noting that Meadoux was 16 at the time of the murders, Ligon says, "Someone who was this age when he committed an offense . . . is not developed enough as a person to act with such a degree of culpability that we should place him in jail until he dies."

Referring to the young people now serving life without parole, Bexar County First Assistant Criminal District Attorney Cliff Herberg says, "The juries heard the cases and decided that was the appropriate sentence."

Herberg says the Legislature could have chosen to make S.B. 839 retroactive, but it didn't.

"It's possible the Legislature was quite aware of these cases and decided to let the jury verdicts stand," he says.

But state Sen. Juan Hinojosa, D-McAllen, a solo and author of the bill, says, "It was an oversight. In this type of situation, my intent would have been to make the law applicable to this case."

State Rep. Jim McReynolds, D-Lufkin, House sponsor of S.B. 839, says it was not the Legislature's intent that juveniles convicted of capital murder before the bill took effect should serve life in prison with no chance for parole.

"That was not the intent of where we are going," McReynolds says.

And:

Wice says if the CCA finds that the Eighth Amendment prevents life-without-parole sentences for juveniles, Meadoux would be eligible, upon request to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, for commutation of his sentence to life.

Wice represents Litrey Demond Turner, who originally was sentenced to life without parole for capital murder. Houston's 1st Court Appeals remanded Turner's case for a new trial in July 30's Turner v. State. Turner was 15 years old at the time he allegedly committed his crime. [See "1st Court overturns conviction of prisoner who allegedly committed capital murder at age 15," Tex Parte blog, Aug. 3, 2010]

If the CCA rules against Meadoux, he still might have a chance at parole after he serves 40 years. Hinojosa says he plans to file a bill in 2011 that will clarify his intent in S.B. 839.

Notes Hinojosa, "I want to make it clear that this law is retroactive."

Robbins notes the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Graham v. Florida earlier this year.  The Court ruled that a life without parole sentence is unconstitutional for juveniles convicted of non-homicide offenses.  The Bexar County District Attorney's office argues that the Meadoux case is outside of the Graham ruling.  Earlier coverage of the Graham ruling in May begins with this post.

In 2004, in the Missouri case of Roper v. Simmons, the Court ruled that the death penalty was an unconstitutional punishment for juvenile offenders.  related posts are in the juvenile index.

Broad National Editorial Support for Graham Ruling on Juvenile Sentencing

Since the Supreme Court issued Graham v. Florida on Monday, there has been broad national praise for the ruling by editorial boards.  That's been especially true in Florida, where the record showed that most juvenile life without parole sentences had been handed down.  Here's a roundup of the editorials by state.

California
 Los Angeles Times:
  Life sentences without parole: too cruel to the young
Sacramento Bee
  Why 'throw away key' for juveniles?

Colorado
Aurora Sentinel
  High court rightfully realigns sentencing standards

Delaware
Delaware News Journal
  Simple justice gives teen offenders a second chance

Florida
Miami Herald
  High court ban on youths' life sentences right call
Florida Today
  Supreme Court ruling on teen sentencing a victory for fairness
Sarasota Herald Tribune
  Ruling on Florida case offers justice for juveniles
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
  Supreme Court ruling on juveniles is humane
Pensacola News Journal
  A Fair Chance at Freedom
St. Petersburg Times
  Court opens door to more humane justice system
Tallahassee Democrat
  Second Chances

Kentucky
Louisville Courier-Journal
  Measure of Decency

Maine
Portland Press Herald
  Supreme Court hits right balance on youth sentences

Michigan
Battle Creek Enquirer
  Holding Out Hope

New Jersey
Newark Star-Leger
  U.S. Supreme Court makes right decision on juvenile sentences
Bergen Record
  High court on inmates

Nevada
Las Vegas Sun
  Supreme Court tussles with finding the right sentence for juvenile offenders
Las Vegas Review-Journal
  Juvenile justice

New York
Watertown Daily Times
  Juvenile justice

Pennsylvania
Philadelphia Inquirer
  Fitting punishment
Daily American
  Opportunity for Review

Washington
Seattle Times
  Treating juvenile offenders differently

And then, there is this from the Washington Times contrarian view, "Juvenile injustice."

Steve Chapman's Chicago Tribune column is, "Sentencing Kids to Life."

Earlier coverage begins with this post.  Editorials in the New York Times and Washington Post are noted here.

Rick Casey on Juvenile Sentencing

His column in today's Houston Chronicle is, "That liberal legislature ... in Texas."

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday barred sentences of life without parole for juveniles who committed crimes other than murder. The vote was 5-4.

This will surprise a lot of Texans — and even more outsiders — but a year ago the Texas Legislature went the Supreme Court one farther.

It barred sentences of life without parole for juveniles who commit capital murder.

And the vote wasn't even as close as the Supreme Court's.

The Senate passed the bill 30-1. The House passed it 124-21, a ratio of 6-1.

And Gov. Rick Perry signed it.

This is a rare case of the U.S. Supreme Court following Texas, not vice-versa.

The Supreme Court gave hope to 129 prisoners serving sentences of life without parole for crimes they committed as juveniles, but not a single one was in Texas. In Texas, life without parole is only given in capital murder cases.

We do have 20 juvenile offenders serving life without parole for capital murders, who were saved when the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005 ruled, 5-4, that the death penalty could not be given to those who were under 18 when they committed a crime. Of the 20, three were 15 when they committed capital murder. Four were 16 and the rest 17.

Under a Texas law that covered all capital murders, the only punishment available other than death was life without parole. Sen. Juan Hinojosa (D-McAllen) carried last year's bill, arguing that science had shown that teenagers were not mentally and emotionally fully developed and should not be classified as being beyond rehabilitation.

The law is not exactly lenient. It requires that convicts serve a full 40 years, with no reduction for good behavior, before they are even eligible for parole. What's more, it doesn't help those 20 already in prison, since it applies only to crimes committed after last Sept. 1.

And:

Defense lawyers are already talking about asking the Supreme Court to bar life without parole for juveniles convicted of murder.

It's not hard to imagine them arguing that if the Texas Legislature bans it, then it must be outside of societal norms.

Earlier coverage of the Graham v. Florida ruling begins with this post.  There's been almost universal praise for the ruling from editorial boards across the nation.  Later today, I'll link to the editorial coverage.

News Coverage of the Graham Ruling

"Justices Limit Life Sentences for Juveniles," is the title of Adam Liptak's report in the New York Times.

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that juveniles who commit crimes in which no one is killed may not be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Five justices, in an opinion by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, agreed that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment forbids such sentences as a categorical matter.

“A state need not guarantee the offender eventual release,” Justice Kennedy wrote, “but if it imposes the sentence of life, it must provide him or her with some realistic opportunity to obtain release before the end of that term.”

The ruling marked the first time that the court excluded an entire class of offenders from a given form of punishment outside the context of the death penalty. “ ‘Death is different’ no longer,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in dissent.

The overall vote was 6-to-3, though that is a little misleading. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. voted with the majority in saying that the inmate who brought the appeal had received a sentence so harsh that it violated the Constitution. But the chief justice endorsed only a case-by-case approach, saying that an offender’s age could be considered in deciding whether a life sentence was so disproportionate to the crime as to violate the Eighth Amendment.

Robert Barnes writes, "Supreme Court restricts life without parole for juveniles," for the Washington Post.

The decision follows the court's 2005 decision that, no matter what crime they commit, juveniles may not be executed. It also reinforced the court's view that the Eighth Amendment's protections against harsh punishment must be interpreted in light of the country's "evolving standards of decency."

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority, said states must provide juveniles who receive lengthy sentences a "meaningful" chance at some point to show they should be released.

"By denying the defendant the right to reenter the community, the state makes an irrevocable judgment about that person's value and place in society," Kennedy wrote. "This judgment is not appropriate in light of a juvenile nonhomicide offender's capacity for change and limited moral culpability."

The National Law Journal has, "Justices Rule on Prison Time for Juveniles, Sex Offenders," written by Tony Mauro and Marcia Coyle.

The ruling included a sharp exchange between retiring Justice Stevens and Justice Clarence Thomas. Writing separately, Stevens criticized Thomas for a "rigid" interpretation of the Eighth Amendment. "Society changes," wrote Stevens. "Knowledge accumulates. We learn, sometimes, from our mistakes. Punishments that did not seem cruel at one time may, in the light of reason and experience, be found cruel and unusual at a later time."

In a curt response, Thomas in his dissent wrote that he agreed with Stevens about learning from mistakes. "Perhaps one day the Court will learn from this one." Justice Antonin Scalia joined Thomas' dissent, and Justice Samuel Alito Jr. wrote a separate dissent.

Another subtext of the dueling opinions was the debate over the importance of foreign law in Supreme Court decision-making. Kennedy wrote that life without parole for juveniles was "a sentencing practice rejected the world over." He added, "This observation does not control our decisions." But in dissent Thomas wrote that "such factors are irrelevant to the meaning of our Constitution or the Court's discernment of any long-standing determination in this nation."

"Supreme Court restricts life sentences without parole for juveniles," by David Savage for the Los Angeles Times.

A Washington lawyer representing the National District Attorneys Assn. denounced the ruling. The court's decision "creates a whole new category of constitutionally protected criminals, essentially a 'get out of jail free' card for underage criminals repeatedly convicted of adult heinous violent crimes," said attorney Gene Schaerr.

But others saw it as a step forward.

"None of us are the same people we were as teenagers," said Marsha Levick, deputy director of the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia. "When it comes to sentencing youth, we should not make irrevocable decisions."

Human Rights Watch says the United States has 2,574 inmates serving life terms for crimes they committed before age 18. The vast majority of young criminals who get life terms were involved in homicides.

Of the 129 prisoners directly affected by Monday's ruling, 77 are in Florida. In addition to California, the other states with at least a few such prisoners are Delaware, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Virginia.

"Court limits harsh terms for youths," by Joan Biskupic and Martha T. Moore in USA Today.

Baylor University criminal law professor Mark Osler said Monday's decision arises against the backdrop of a broader national re-examination of harsh sentences, but it is most significant in how it views offenders who are under age 18.

"It reinforces the idea that children are different," Osler said, adding, "We are at a point that some people are perceiving that the pendulum has swung too far" toward harsh sentences for young offenders.

Dissenting justices, led by Clarence Thomas, stressed that "states over the past 20 years have consistently increased the severity of punishments for juvenile offenders."

Yet Kennedy noted that most prosecutors and judges have not taken advantage of state laws that eliminated the chance of parole for juveniles whose crimes fall short of homicide. He said that of the 129 juvenile offenders serving life without parole for a non-homicide crime, 77 are behind bars in Florida. The other 52 criminals are in just 10 states and the federal system.

"Justices Restrict Life Terms for Youths," by Jess Bravin is in the Wall Street Journal.  It's accompanied by a graphic.

The case came from Jacksonville, Fla., where Terrence Graham, then age 16, and three school-age accomplices attempted to rob a restaurant. As part of a plea bargain, he promised to turn his life around and received three years probation.

But a year after his plea, Mr. Graham was caught after allegedly joining two adult accomplices in a home-invasion robbery. He was found in violation of probation, which allowed a judge to sentence him for the earlier crime.

A presentencing report from the state Department of Corrections recommended a maximum of four years. The judge sentenced Mr. Graham to life in prison.

"The only thing I can do now is to try and protect the community from your actions," the judge said. Florida has no parole, meaning Mr. Graham would die in prison absent a pardon. State courts upheld the sentence.

For the past century, the court has interpreted the Eighth Amendment to reflect the "evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society," as Chief Justice Earl Warren phrased it in 1958.

Justice Kennedy in recent years has led the court in refining that analysis. Although 37 states and the District of Columbia permit juvenile life-without-parole sentences, he wrote that in practice the sentence is highly disfavored.

By the court's count, only 11 states actually hold prisoners under such sentences. He said 77 of the 129 youths serving life without parole for nonhomicide offenses are in Florida.

That made the sentence unusual, Justice Kennedy said. It also was cruel, he wrote, because it lacked "any legitimate penological justification."

Some Florida Democrats praised the ruling. Gubernatorial candidate Alex Sink, the state's chief financial officer, said "it was obvious that Florida was out of line with the rest of our country." The ruling means that states will have to resentence affected juvenile offenders serving life terms or at least provide them parole hearings.

Justice Kennedy's earlier rulings ending the death penalty for juvenile offenders and for nonhomicide crimes have been excoriated by conservatives, in part because they have cited the near-universal global consensus against such punishments as evidence of evolving standards of decency. Some conservatives say foreign practices are irrelevant to U.S. law.

Undaunted, Justice Kennedy used his opinion in Monday's case, Graham v. Florida, to reassert that approach to the Eighth Amendment. "[T]he judgment of the world's nations that a particular sentencing practice is inconsistent with basic principles of decency demonstrates that the court's rationale has respected reasoning to support it," he wrote.

"Supreme Court puts limits on life sentences for juveniles," by Warren Richey in the Christian Science Monitor.

Earlier coverage begins with the preceding post; the opinion is here.

Editorials Praise Graham Ruling

Today's New York Times carries the editorial, "A New Standard of Decency."

Monday’s welcome Supreme Court decision, banning sentences of life without parole for juvenile criminals who do not commit murder, recognizes that children mature and should not be irrevocably punished for a childhood act short of killing. But it also recognizes that nations mature — that standards of justice and constitutional principles change over the centuries and should be reinterpreted by new generations.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for a five-member majority, acknowledged that permanent life sentences for juveniles might not have been historically recognized as cruel and unusual punishment but should now be considered unconstitutional because of “evolving standards of decency.”

Justice John Paul Stevens stated the case simply and elegantly in a concurring opinion:

“Society changes,” he wrote. “Knowledge accumulates. We learn, sometimes, from our mistakes. Punishments that did not seem cruel and unusual at one time may, in the light of reason and experience, be found cruel and unusual at a later time.”

That, of course, infuriated the strict constructionists on the court, who said the Constitution’s framers meant “cruel and unusual” to refer to torture and nothing more. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for two other justices, said the court was overstepping its bounds by interpreting the clause to ban disproportionate punishment.

Viewing the case from that 18th-century perspective, however, means ignoring recent scientific evidence showing a fundamental difference between the minds of juveniles and adults. Justice Kennedy, expanding on his landmark 2005 decision that banned the death penalty for juveniles, noted that the brain matures through late adolescence. He said juvenile actions are less likely to be evidence of an “irretrievably depraved character.”

"Too young for life without parole," is the title of the Washington Post editorial.

The Supreme Court's decision on Monday in Graham v. Florida guarantees that those who have committed serious crimes as teenagers get an opportunity for release once they reach adulthood even while leaving intact the government's ability to keep incarcerated those deemed too dangerous to release. This is the right call.

Some 37 states, the District of Columbia and the federal government allow life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for serious juvenile offenders convicted of nonhomicide crimes. Roughly 129 juveniles are serving such sentences, 77 in Florida. Terrance Jamar Graham was one of them. Mr. Graham was hit with a mandatory life sentence at age 17 after violating his probation for his involvement in a home invasion robbery; the year before he was involved in an attempted robbery of a Florida restaurant.

These crimes warrant serious punishment. But a mandatory life sentence for a juvenile offender without the possibility of release is unconscionable, largely because it holds juveniles accountable as adults even though scientific data show that they are less able to assess risk, control impulses and comprehend consequences. It also ignores their capacity to change.

Coverage of the ruling begins with this post; the opinion is here.  I'll link to news coverage of the ruling in the next post.

Bryan Stevenson on Today's Graham Ruling

Bryan Stevenson, Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, argued the companion case, Sullivan v. Florida in the Supreme Court.  EJI has issued a news release, "Court Strikes Down LWOP for Juvenile Non-Homicide.  Decision Called 'A Significant Victory for Children'."  Here's an excerpt:

The U.S. Supreme Court today issued an historic ruling in Graham v. Florida that holds life-without-parole sentences for juveniles convicted of non-homicide offenses unconstitutional. Terrance Graham, sentenced to life without parole at 17, is now entitled to a resentencing hearing.  Dozens of other juveniles sentenced to life without parole are now entitled to relief, including Joe Sullivan, whose case also was argued on this issue. 

In his majority opinion, Justice Kennedy explained a categorical rule barring life imprisonment without parole sentences "gives all juvenile nonhomicide offenders a chance to demonstrate maturity and reform.  The juvenile should not be deprived of the opportunity to achieve maturity of judgment and self-recognition of human worth and potential."   Discussing Graham's case, the majority wrote, "[t]he State has denied him any chance to later demonstrate that he is fit to rejoin society based solely on a nonhomicide crime that he committed while he was a child in the eyes of the law.  This the Eighth Amendment does not permit."

“This is a significant victory for children. The Court recognized that it is cruel to pass a final judgment on children, who have an enormous capacity for change and rehabilitation compared to adults,” said Bryan Stevenson, Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, who represents Joe Sullivan. “I am very encouraged by the Court's ruling.  It's an important win not only for kids who have been condemned to die in prison but for all children who need additional protection and recognition in the criminal justice system.”    

Stevenson noted that many of the people affected by the ruling do not have lawyers and will need effective legal representation for the sentencing hearings that the Court’s ruling now requires. Today’s decision provides juveniles sentenced to life without parole in non-homicide cases an opportunity to have their sentences reviewed but not the right to automatic release.

The Court cited scientific studies showing that the same immaturity and flexibility that make teenagers more susceptible to peer pressure and external influences also make them strong candidates for rehabilitation.  The majority wrote, "Life in prison without the possibility of parole gives no chance for fulfillment outside prison walls, no chance for reconciliation with society, no hope."

Earlier coverage begins with this post.

Supreme Court Rules on Juvenile Sentencing

The Supreme Court has ruled out life without parole sentences for juvenile offenders convicted of nonhomicidal crimes.  The ruling in Graham v. Florida is in Adobe .pdf format.

The initial AP dispatch is, "High court rules out life sentences for juveniles," by Mark Sherman. 

The Supreme Court has ruled that teenagers may not be locked up for life without chance of parole if they haven't killed anyone.

By a 5-4 vote Monday, the court says the Constitution requires that young people serving life sentences must at least be considered for release.

The court ruled in the case of Terrance Graham, who was implicated in armed robberies when he was 16 and 17. Graham, now 22, is in prison in Florida, which holds more than 70 percent of juvenile defendants locked up for life for crimes other than homicide.

"The state has denied him any chance to later demonstrate that he is fit to rejoin society based solely on a nonhomicide crime that he committed while he was a child in the eyes of the law," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion. "This the Eighth Amendment does not permit."

And:

Those inmates are in Florida and seven other states - California, Delaware, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska and South Carolina - according to a Florida State University study. More than 2,000 other juveniles are serving life without parole for killing someone. Their sentences are not affected by Monday's decision.

SCOTUS Blog's "Today’s orders and opinions," has this:

In Graham v. Florida (08-7412), the Court reverses and remands, in an opinion again by Justice Kennedy.  The vote is 6-3, with Justice Thomas dissenting, joined by Justice Scalia and in part by Justice Alito.  Justice Alito files a separate dissenting opinion for himself.   Justice Stevens, joined by Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor, concurs, even though all three join the majority opinion, and the Chief Justice concurs in the result alone.

• Holding:  It is unconstitutional to sentence a juvenile offender to life in prison without parole when the crime does not involve murder, given the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual” punishment.

The Court dismisses Sullivan v. Florida (08-7621) as improvidently granted, in this per curiam opinion.

I'm sure we will be seeing more coverage and commentary in the hours ahead.  Earlier coverage of the issue begins with this post.

Juvenile Justice Roundup

First, there is word that the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee completed markup of S. 678 yesterday, legislation to renew of the Juvenile Justice Delinquency and Prevention Act of 1974.  Main Justice posts, "Senate Panel Approves Juvenile Justice Bill Renewal.

The Senate Judiciary Committee endorsed legislation today that would reauthorize certain juvenile delinquency program funds.

The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Reauthorization Act of 2009 would renew the program funding provisions in the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974 until fiscal year 2014. The 1974 legislation was due for reauthorization three years ago. The program authorizes funding to states with special practices for handling youth in their justice systems.

The panel voted 12-7 on the 2009 bill this morning at its markup. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) was the only Democrat to vote against the bill, agreeing with Republican concerns over the projected $4 billion price tag for the legislation.

Feinstein, who also sits on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said the bill calls for a “huge authorization” that would be hard to justify with the $1.7 trillion federal deficit.

“I would be very hard pressed to appropriate these sums of money for this purpose at this particular point in time,” Feinstein said at the panel markup.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who is a sponsor of the bill, cited a New York Times editorial from yesterday that called on the Senate to move on the bill. He first introduced the reauthorization legislation in 2008.

“The Senate Judiciary Committee reported this important bipartisan legislation last year,” Leahy said in a statement. “We should ensure that it passes into law in this Congress.”

More information on the bill is here, via THOMAS; the text, here.  Earlier coverage of the legislation is here.  A hat tip to the Crime Report.  The ACLU issued a news release, "Senate Judiciary Committee Passes Landmark Juvenile Justice Legislation," following the Judiciary Committee's action.

Also, the Florida Times-Union reports, "Florida Supreme Court justices unshackle juvenile defendants."  It's written by Dana Treen.

The Florida Supreme Court has approved a dramatic change in the use of shackles, handcuffs and other restraints on juveniles in the state’s courtrooms.

The justices Thursday approved a new court rule that prohibits restraints unless a judge determines they are necessary for one of three reasons: preventing physical harm to the child or other people, a defendant’s history of disruptive courtroom behavior or a strong belief there’s a substantial risk of flight.

Since the early 1980s the shackling of juveniles has evolved as a security measure in Florida courtrooms, said Rob Mason  of the Public Defender’s Office in Jacksonville. Mason said juveniles brought from detention centers to appear before a judge are shackled and remain so in the courtroom.

“It’s really a pathetic sight when they bring them in,” said Mason, former chairman of The Florida Bar’s Juvenile Court Rules Committee that recommended the change.

Mason said the restraints make it difficult for the young prisoners to raise their hands when they swear to tell the truth. He also said the state’s juvenile justice system is supposed to be set up differently than adult court. He advocated for the change before the justices in June.

“It’s a monumental victory for Florida’s children,” Mason said. “A juvenile is supposed to be different.”

The aim of juvenile courts is to provide a safe environment and focus on rehabilitation, he said.
He said experts on juvenile development suggest shackling can cause emotional harm, may cause the juvenile to feel as if they are somehow dangerous and increase resentment of authority.

For the past couple of years, courts in Miami-Dade County have taken the shackles off juveniles with little negative effect, Mason said.

The new rule takes effect statewide in January.

Related posts are in the juvenile index.

Juvenile Justice

Today's New York Times carries the editorial, "De-Criminalizing Children."  It addresses renewal of the Juvenile Justice Delinquency and Prevention Act of 1974, which the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to take up today.

As many as 150,000 children are sent to adult jails in this country every year — often in connection with nonviolent offenses or arrests that do not lead to conviction. That places them at risk of being raped or battered and increases the chance they will end up as career criminals.

To fix this problem, Congress needs to properly reauthorize the Juvenile Justice Delinquency and Prevention Act of 1974, under which states agreed to humanize juvenile justice policies in exchange for more federal aid. This act was largely bypassed in the 1990s when unfounded fears of an adolescent crime wave reached hysterical levels.

When it reauthorizes the law — it is already three years late — Congress should make it illegal for states to place children in adult prisons, perhaps with the exception of truly heinous criminals.

The House has yet to introduce a new bill; in the Senate, an updated version has yet to be voted out of the Judiciary Committee. The Senate bill is less than ideal, but it does encourage the states to de-emphasize the practice of detaining children in adult jails before trial and requires them to better protect young people who end up there. Several states have begun to reform their systems: housing young people in juvenile facilities — where they are better protected and can get mental health treatment — even if they have been convicted in adult courts. The current version of the law threatens states with loss of federal aid if they make that decision. The Senate bill would do away with that language.

Our friends at Change.org are urging those concerned with juvenile justice to reach out to their home state senators via this link.

Related posts are in the juvenile and federal legislation category indexes.

Developmental Psychologist Says Teenagers Are Different

That's the title for, "A Conversation With Laurence Steinberg," conducted by Claudia Dreifus for the New York Times science section.

Laurence Steinberg, a developmental psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia, is one of the leading experts in the United States on adolescent behavior and adolescent brain biology. Dr. Steinberg, 57, has won the $1 million Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize, which will be awarded to him at a ceremony in early December in Switzerland. Here is an edited version of two conversations with Dr. Steinberg last month:

Q. YOU HEAR PARENTS SOMETIMES SAY, “I’M LIVING WITH AN INSANE PERSON. MY CHILD IS A TEENAGER.” ARE THEY BEING HYPERBOLIC?

A. I’m not one of those people who labels adolescence as some sort of mental illness. Teenagers are not crazy. They’re different.

When it comes to crime, they are less responsible for their behavior than adults. And typically, in the law, we don’t punish people as much who are less responsible. We know from our lab that adolescents are more impulsive, thrill-seeking, drawn to the rewards of a risky decision than adults. They tend to not focus very much on costs. They are more easily coerced to do things they know are wrong. These factors, under the law, make people less responsible for criminal acts. The issue is: as a class, should we treat adolescents differently?

Q. IS THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM BEGINNING TO TAKE THESE DIFFERENCES INTO ACCOUNT DURING SENTENCING?

A. It’s been coming up in cases. I went to Washington in November to watch the oral arguments in two related cases before the Supreme Court that ask: should someone who committed a crime as a teen be subjected to life imprisonment without a chance for parole, ever?

With these cases, and another in 2005 where the high court threw out the death penalty for adolescents, I was scientific consultant to the American Psychological Association on its amicus brief. What we said in the death penalty case — and now — was that we have considerable evidence showing that adolescents are different from adults in ways that mitigate their criminal responsibility. But since 2005, there’s been a lot of new scientific evidence supporting this position.

Q. WHAT IS THE NEW EVIDENCE?

A. In the last five years, as neuroscience has moved forward with functional magnetic resonance imaging and with research on animals, there have been dozens of new studies of adolescent brain development. These show that the brain systems providing for impulse control are still maturing during adolescence. Neuroscientists have shown that the part of the brain that improves most during adolescence is the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in complicated decision-making, thinking ahead, planning, comparing risks and rewards. And the neuroscientific research is showing that over the course of adolescence and into the 20s, there is this continued maturation of this part of the brain. So now, we have brain evidence that supports behavioral studies.

Moreover, we’re seeing that behavior can change once the brain more fully matures. Take thrill-seeking, for instance. What happens is that when people move out of adolescence, they become less interested in it. For example, I can’t stand riding on a roller-coaster now. I liked it as a teenager. I can’t stand driving fast now. I liked driving fast when I was a teenager. What has changed? I’m not as driven today by this thrill-seeking sensation. And in our studies, we’ve shown that there is a kind of normative decline in sensation-seeking after middle adolescence. A lot of adolescent crime is driven by thrill-seeking.

Q. HOW DOES THIS NEW INFORMATION lead to concluding that the courts shouldn’t sentence some adolescents to life in prison without parole?

A. Given the fact that we know that there will be a developmental change in most people, the science says that we should give them a chance to mature out of it. No one is saying that kids who commit horrific crimes shouldn’t be punished. But most in the scientific community think that we know that since this person is likely to change, why not revisit this when he’s an adult and see what he’s like?

Earlier coverage of Dr. Steinberg is here; an OpEd he co-wrote, noted here.  Steinberg is on the board of directors of the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center.

Earlier coverage of  Graham v. Florida and Sullivan v. Florida begins with this post.

The Keeper and the Kept

That's the title of a new report from the W. Haywood Burns Institute that will be issued Tuesday.  Shadi Rahimi writes, "National Leader in Juvenile Justice Poised to Release New Report."

For the families of the more than 90,000 youth in custody of the juvenile justice system any given day, Thanksgiving delivers heartbreak. A majority of incarcerated children in the U.S. are youth of color held for mostly nonviolent offenses. For this, our society pays a high moral and financial price, says James Bell, Executive Director of the W. Haywood Burns Institute (BI) and lead author of its new report on juvenile justice, The Keeper and the Kept.

“As a society we do not demand nor expect excellence, fairness, rationality or accountability from our child-serving justice systems. But there is too much at stake for our democratic principles and our ability to compete in a global knowledge-based world,” Bell says. “As a country, we are not well-served when we have so many uneducated youth of color undeservedly lost in the American juvenile justice apparatus. We can do better. But in order to, we must demand accountability from our juvenile justice systems.”

Systemic problems in juvenile justice are at the forefront of conversation today, particularly regarding juvenile imprisonment for life without parole. On a national level, Black youths are serving life without parole at a rate of about 10 times that of White youths, according to Human Rights Watch. At the same time, the federal Juvenile Justice And Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA) is overdue for reauthorization and is expected to go before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. The BI, along with the coalition Act4JJ, is pushing for JJDPA reauthorization for reasons including: 1) reducing racial and ethnic disparities in juvenile justice; 2) preventing youth awaiting trial in criminal court from adult lock-up; 3) limiting the time that children who are truant, runaway or violate curfew may be held in juvenile lock-up.

Continued Coverage of Juvenile Sentencing Reform

Adam Liptak's latest Sidebar column is, "Standards for Juvenile Punishment."  It's available at the New York Times website and is scheduled for tomorrow's print edition.  An extended excerpt:

The law is made up of rules and standards.

Here is an example of a rule, established by the Supreme Court in Roper v. Simmons in 2005: If you commit murder even hours before your 18th birthday, you cannot be put to death for your crime. The same killing a few hours later may be a capital offense. The court drew a bright-line rule at 18.

Here is an example of a standard, one proposed by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. this month at Supreme Court arguments over whether juvenile offenders may be sentenced to life without the possibility of parole: Why not, the chief justice asked, interpret the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment to require sentencing judges to consider the defendant’s age on a case-by-case basis?

“If you do have a case where it’s the 17-year-old who is one week shy of his 18th birthday and it is the most grievous crime spree you can imagine, you can determine that in that case life without parole may not be disproportionate,” Chief Justice Roberts said. “If it’s a less grievous crime and there is, for example, a younger defendant involved, then in that case maybe it is disproportionate.”

The lawyers in the two cases the court heard — one involving a rape committed at 13, the other an armed burglary at 16 — had at least two answers to the chief justice’s proposal. One was that it is too soon to tell at sentencing whether unformed teenagers will later change for the better. The other was that states already take age into account but do so in very different ways.

And:

But there is a third possible retort, one that draws on the Supreme Court’s 2002 decision in Atkins v. Virginia barring the execution of the mentally retarded. That sounds like a rule, in that it made an entire class of people categorically ineligible for the death penalty. But it turns out to be a standard.

Proving age is pretty straightforward, and inmates who were under 18 when they committed the crimes that sent them to death row promptly had their sentences commuted after the court’s decision in Roper. The Atkins decision, on the other hand, “has spawned extensive, intricate and bitterly contested litigation,” Carol S. Steiker and Jordan M. Steiker wrote in the DePaul Law Review last year.

The Supreme Court in Atkins said mental retardation requires proof of three things: “subaverage intellectual functioning,” meaning low IQ scores; a lack of fundamental social and practical skills; and that both conditions were present before age 18. The court said IQ scores under “approximately 70” typically indicate retardation.

How has this standard been applied in practice?

A new study from three law professors at Cornell, one that resonates with potential lessons for juvenile life without parole, shows that states making case-by-case determinations have taken wildly different approaches.

The study, conducted by John H. Blume, Sheri Lynn Johnson and Christopher Seeds, tried to collect all determinations concerning retardation in capital cases in the six years after Atkins, finding 234. That means about 7 percent of the nation’s roughly 3,200 death row inmates have claimed to be mentally retarded.

Nationwide, the claims have succeeded about 38 percent of the time. But state success rates vary widely.

North Carolina courts heard 21 Atkins claims and ruled in the inmate’s favor 17 times. Alabama courts heard 26 claims and ruled for the inmate 3 times.

Recall that the Supreme Court said an IQ of “approximately 70” should usually satisfy the first part of the test. In Alabama, Mississippi and Texas, four inmates with IQ scores of 66 and 67 were held not to be retarded. But in Pennsylvania, an inmate whose score ranged from 70 to 75 won an Atkins claim. In California, a score of 84 did the trick.

Professor Johnson said there was a lesson here.

“If you look at Atkins, which is supposed to be a categorical rule but has some play in the definitions, you get enormous pushback from the states that don’t want to do it,” she said. Were the court to adopt Chief Justice Roberts’s approach for juvenile life without parole, she added, “the problem of Atkins’s application would be greatly magnified.”

"Teenage 'lifers': Court should end no-parole terms for youths," is the title of a Newark Star-Leger.

Khalif Williams was 16 when he was charged with raping and robbing a 19-year-old East Orange woman at gunpoint while she waited at a Newark bus stop in 2007. He was charged as an adult and, in May, he was sentenced to 15 years in state prison.

Under state law, Williams, now 18, must serve about 12 years of his sentence before becoming eligible for parole. Had he committed this crime in Florida, however, the teenager could have been made to live out his life in prison without the possibility of a second chance.

"To sentence someone under 18 to life in prison without acknowledging the possibility of rehabilitation is wrong," says Cecilia Zalkind, executive director of Association for Children of New Jersey in Trenton.

And:

The Supreme Court banned the death penalty for juveniles in 2005, saying adolescents do not have the same maturity to determine right and wrong as adults and noting their potential for rehabilitation.

It was a wise decision. But given that reasoning, it is cruel and contradictory for the court to approve sentencing juveniles to life in prison with no chance of release.

Many states, including New Jersey, have made sentencing juvenile offenders a more rehabilitative process. The state has invested time and resources into reentry programs that focus more on helping teenagers turn their lives around than punishing them. And while these programs do not give a pass to serious juvenile offenders like Williams, they do have a greater emphasis on educational and social programs than punishment.

Serious crimes call for serious time, but locking up teenagers and throwing away the key will do nothing to help them change for the better. The court is expected to make a decision by spring. We hope it will rule in their favor.

Earlier coverage of Graham v. Florida and Sullivan v. Florida begins with this post.  More on Atkins v. Virginia in the mental retardation category index.

Another Call for Juvenile Sentencing Reform

Toaday's Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania carries the editorial, "Chance for change: Life sentence removes hope for juvenile reform."

The question before the U.S. Supreme Court is: Do we believe juveniles sentenced to life in prison can reform?

Last week, the justices faced this question in a case involving two men serving life sentences for serious crimes they committed as teenagers.
Attorneys for the two Florida prisoners argue that not giving adolescents hope for parole violates the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution and its prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

As it is, the United States is the only nation that sentences teenagers who are convicted of a nonhomicide crime to life in prison with no chance of parole. The number of prisoners nationwide is 109 and 77 of them are incarcerated in Florida.

The two men at the center of the Supreme Court case are hardly poster children for leniency, and no one would argue they should get anything other than tough sentences for their crimes.

And:

The age of a person sentenced to prison for serious crimes must be considered.

There is no mold that every criminal convicted of armed robbery or rape fits into. Juveniles might deserve to spend many years in prison but in the end, they must be given a sense that society believes they can change.

The words of Justice Anthony Kennedy during the Roper vs. Simmons case decision hold true for this discussion as well: “From a moral standpoint, it would be misguided to equate the failings of a minor with those of an adult, for a greater possibility exists that a minor’s character deficiencies will be reformed.”

Earlier coverage of Graham v. Florida and Sullivan v. Florida begins with this post.

Another Call for Juvenile Sentencing Reform

Today's Silicon Valley Mercury News carries the editorial, "For kids, life in prison without parole is cruel and unusual punishment."

Five San Jose teenagers sit in jail today, facing the possibility that they will spend the rest of their lives behind bars. Two were charged as adults Tuesday in the stabbing death of a 15-year-old boy. The other three will be charged as adults in connection with the vicious Halloween attack on two boys.

The cases come just as the U.S. Supreme Court is considering a lawsuit brought by two Florida men convicted of violent crimes in their teens. Both received life in prison without the possibility of parole, which their lawyers argue constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

These kinds of violent crimes are horrific and shocking. But denying teenagers the opportunity for parole is not consistent with our understanding of the nature of children or with our sense of decency. The practice should be declared unconstitutional.

Juveniles such as those being charged in San Jose deserve very harsh punishment if they are convicted. Many, however, are capable of rehabilitation, and in a civilized society they should have the chance to work hard to demonstrate that they deserve another chance.

With rules about driving, voting and drinking, Americans acknowledge that kids are different. Their character is still developing, and they are more susceptible to the influence of their peers and their environment, which is often filled with neglect, violence and poverty.

As Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative put it in his brief to the court: "Like a car with a powerful accelerator but weak brakes, a young teenager's brain is fully developed in the part responsible for emotional arousal and sensitivity to peer pressure (the gas pedal), but the parts in the frontal lobes that control impulses and allow long-term thinking, planning, and resistance to peer pressure (the brake) are still developing."

The court itself agreed with similar reasoning in 2005, when it declared the death penalty for juveniles unconstitutional.

In that case, Roper v. Simmons, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority, "It would be misguided to equate the failings of a minor with those of an adult, for a greater possibility exists that a minor's character deficiencies will be reformed.

"Juveniles have a greater claim than adults to be forgiven for failing to escape negative influences."

Earlier coverge of Graham v. Florida and Sullivan v. Florida begins with this post.

Continued Commentary on Juvenile Sentencing Cases

Over the weekend there was a great deal of commentary -- editorials, OpEds, and column -- on the need for juvenile sentencing reform.  Because of the sheer volume, I'm going to limit excerpts, but those interested in the issues raised in Graham v. Florida and Sullivan v. Florida should visit all the links.

I'll start with the OpEds.

"The Young and the Reckless," by Elizabeth Scott and Laurence Steinberg.  They are the co-authors of Rethinking Juvenile Justice.

Those who hope the court will ban this sort of sentencing point to the 2005 decision in Roper v. Simmons, in which the court abolished the juvenile death penalty. They believe that the logic the justices applied in Roper to exclude minors from capital punishment should extend to life without parole as well.

Those who hope the justices will retain life sentences for juveniles argue that “death is different,” and that the court should exercise restraint, as it typically does when reviewing non-capital sentencing decisions for fairness under the proportionality principle.

Certainly, death is different. But the sentence of life in prison without parole is also different from even lengthy conventional sentences; it is a judgment that an offender will never be fit to rejoin civil society, however long he lives. This punishment may be suitable for adults who have committed terrible crimes, but it is never a fair sentence for a juvenile, whose character is unformed and whose involvement in crime reflects the immature judgment of adolescence.

A crucial lesson of the Roper case is that the developmental differences between adolescents and adults are important under the Eighth Amendment, as they are in other areas of constitutional law. In deciding to end the juvenile death penalty, the court repeatedly emphasized the relative immaturity of minors, even at age 17, as compared to adults — a point that is well established in behavioral research and finds growing support in brain science.

More on Laurence Steinberg in this post.

Today's Philadelphia Inquirer has the OpEd, "The limits of juvenile sentencing," by Marsha Levick and David Fassler.  Levick is deputy director of the Juvenile Law Center; Fassler a University of Vermonth clinical professor of psychiatry.

Even in the face of the recent scandal involving the Luzerne County juvenile court, Pennsylvania can be proud of its leadership in protecting children in the justice system. Since 1995, the state has emphasized balanced, restorative justice as a core principle in the disposition of juvenile offenders.

Pennsylvania is among a minority of states that allow every juvenile transferred to adult court the opportunity to have the case returned to juvenile court for trial. Because of its progressive record, it was the first state the MacArthur Foundation chose to participate in its juvenile justice reform initiative.

But Pennsylvanians might be surprised to learn that we also hold a more dubious distinction with regard to youthful offenders: We have more children sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole than any other state in the country.

Young offenders must be held accountable, but affording them the chance to have their sentences reviewed later in life is hardly inconsistent with this goal. Adolescents who have served significant time behind bars should have the opportunity to demonstrate that they have been rehabilitated and deserve release. Juvenile life sentences ignore the likelihood that the offenders will be very different people after they serve extended sentences.

John Bajger, a Florida Assistant Attorney General writes, "If crime isn't murder, life without parole is too much," at the Palm Beach Post.

In 1924, Clarence Darrow took a stand against the death penalty in a case involving 19-year-old Nathan Leopold and 18-year-old Richard Loeb, stating: "I am pleading for the future, for a time when hatred and cruelty will not control the hearts of men, when we can learn by reason and judgment and understanding and faith that all life is worth saving, and that mercy is the highest attribute of man."

Nearly 80 years later, the Supreme Court adopted Darrow's vision of the future in Roper, and the justices should heed his plea once more and declare that sentencing juveniles to life in prison without parole is unconstitutional. If the court does not, Floridians should insist that the state end this unjust practice.

Onto the columns.  "America's Prison Spree Has Brutal Impact," is Stuart Taylor's latest Opening Arguments column at National Journal.

But a far more important imprisonment story gets less attention because it's a running sore that rarely generates dramatic "news." That is our criminal-justice system's incarceration of a staggering 2.3 million people, about half of them for nonviolent crimes, including most of the 500,000 locked up for drug offenses.

Forty percent of these prisoners are black, 20 percent are Hispanic, and most are poor and uneducated. This has had a devastating impact on poor black families and neighborhoods, where it has become the norm for young men -- many of them fathers -- to spend time in prison and emerge bitter, unemployable, and unmarriageable. (These numbers come from studies cited by Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a reform group.)

America imprisons seven times as many people as it did in 1972, several times as many per capita as other Western nations, and many more than any other nation in the world.

Yes, violent criminals should be locked up for long enough to protect the rest of us. But the mass, long-term imprisonment of nonviolent, nondangerous offenders in recent decades and excessive terms for others has made us no safer while ruining countless lives and converting potentially productive
citizens into career criminals.

The Oregonian carries, "Life without parole: A juvenile's case comes before the Supreme Court," by Elizabeth Hovde.

The editorials.  Today's Orlando Sentinel carries the editorial, "Don't throw kids away."

The Supreme Court appeared to be divided on the issue during arguments. Regardless of how the majority rules, Florida shouldn't have to be told that its practice of forever locking away minors who don't commit murder is as unreasonable as it is unusual.

"Juvenile lifers deserve second look," in the Tampa Tribune.

Juveniles who commit serious crimes deserve to serve serious time, perhaps even a life sentence. But they should have an opportunity someday to show they have changed and are deserving of another chance at freedom.

"Locked up," in the Chicago Tribune.

As a matter of general policy, there are reasons to be skeptical about jailing a youthful criminal for the rest of his life. Juveniles lack the judgment and impulse control to be fully responsible for their actions, and they may be more amenable to rehabilitation than adults. With 77 inmates serving life without parole for non-homicide crimes committed as juveniles -- twice as many as all other states combined -- Florida clearly puts excessive reliance on this option.

"Review of life without parole for juveniles should spur a new discussion," in the Las Vegas Sun.

"A chance for redemption," in the Baltimore Sun.

"Don't eliminate hope," in the San Diego Tribune.

"Our Position: Nature of crime, not age, should determine sentences," in Iowa's Council Bluffs Daily Nonpareil.

"Juvenile Sentencing" was a topic on PBS' Religion and Ethics Newsweekly.

Earlier coverage of Graham v. Florida and Sullivan v. Florida begins with this post.

Continued Support of Juvenile Sentencing Reform

Today's Nashua Telegraph in New Hampshire carries the editorial, "Life with no parole too severe for teens."

Of the 111 juveniles serving such sentences in the nation, 77 are doing their time in Florida prisons. In all, 2,570 juveniles are serving life-without-parole sentences in the United States, the vast majority for crimes that resulted in someone’s death.

While that represents a tiny percentage of those serving life sentences today, that there are any makes us rather unique in our treatment of juvenile offenders. The United States is the only country in the world that imposes life-without-parole sentences for crimes committed prior to the age of 18, according to Human Rights Watch, an international human rights organization.

In Germany, for example, the maximum sentence that can be imposed on someone under 18 for any crime is 10 years; in Italy, it’s 24. And in England, the maximum sentence is based on about half of that given to an adult under similar circumstances.

And:

“The age of 18 is the point where society draws the line for many purposes between childhood and adulthood,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote on behalf of the 5-4 majority in Roper v. Simmons. “It is . . . the age at which the line for death eligibility ought to rest.”

We believe that’s also where the line for lifetime imprisonment for juveniles should be drawn, particularly for those cases that did not end in death. Locking a 17-year-old up with no chance of parole for an armed robbery conviction certainly pushes the boundaries of cruel and unusual punishment.

To be clear, we’re not saying that these teens shouldn’t be punished appropriately. Nor are we even saying that life sentences should be off the table for more heinous offenses.

But we are suggesting that no juvenile should ever receive a life sentence knowing he or she will never have the opportunity to at least seek supervised release once they reach adulthood.

"Giving young offenders another chance," is the title of Signe Wilkinson's column in the Philadelphia Daily News.

THE SCIENCE is now undisputed: Adolescents' brains make them more impetuous, more susceptible to peer pressure, and less able to make good decisions. This lessens their culpability for the crimes they commit.

But adolescents' brains also make it easier for them to change, and to be rehabilitated.

The question before the U.S. Supreme Court - and the country as a whole - is whether to follow the science or cling to "throw away the key" policies that have filled our prisons with many young people who could, if given the chance, be rehabilitated and go on to lead productive lives.

And:

Much of the research on adolescents and crime has been done by Temple University psychology professor Laurence Steinberg, who this week was awarded a $1 million prize from a Swiss philanthropic organization to continue his work.

Steinberg's research, among other scientific findings listed in a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center, provides strong pushback against the fad of recent years to try children as adults. The research counters the idea that screams out at us from TV dramas or from people who want to establish their crime-fighting bona fides by giving up on young people. For example:

* Adolescents who are violent in their teen years are not necessarily destined for lives of crime. Far from being irredeemable, juvenile offenders often "grow out of" criminality, even without being arrested or punished first. One study found that 30 percent of boys who were examined had committed one or more violent acts by age 18 - for which few were arrested. Yet more than than three-fourths had stopped being violent by the time they reached 21 and beyond.

* The possibility of being locked away the rest of their lives does not deter juvenile crime. The same impulsiveness documented in brain studies explains why teenagers wouldn't stop to think of the legal consequences before they acted.

It turns out that, even without the science, the founders of the juvenile-justice system got it right 100 years ago. Juvenile court held adolescents accountable for their actions, but provided at least one more chance to set their lives right. Juvenile offenders should get the chance at parole, and redemption; we hope the court concurs.

Yancy Bonner writes, "Some Young Criminals Should Have Second Chance," for Wyoming's Powell Tribune.

The U.S. Supreme Court this week is debating the constitutionality of sentencing juvenile criminals to life sentences without the possibility of parole.

A group of high-profile people — among them an actor/director, a former assistant U.S. attorney, a critically-acclaimed poet and retired U.S. Senator Alan Simpson — all former juvenile offenders, argue that courts should have discretion in deciding whether young criminals in non-homicide cases should, at some point, have a second chance.

Two cases being appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court have brought the issue to national attention. Lawyers for the defendants in each case argue that life sentences with no chance for parole amount to cruel and unusual punishment — and consequently violate their clients’ constitutional rights.

Make no mistake about it: No one is downplaying the severity of the crimes committed — in these two cases or others nationwide.

Supporters of the appeals simply maintain that cases involving juveniles should be scrutinized on a case-by-case basis instead of being dictated by mandatory sentencing rules.

In a recent opinion piece in The Washington Post, Simpson wrote, “If ... a parole board finds out that a miscreant hasn’t changed, then keep him or her in prison. But some juvenile offenders make real efforts while they are in jail, and we should make honest adjustments for them.”

It’s a rare adult who can say he or she never did anything stupid or reckless in their teenage years. Consequences are akin to a foreign language for many teens, but as adults those same people often begin to make better choices.

Earlier coverage begins with this post; more on Laurence Steinberg, here.

Continuing Coverage & Commentary on the Florida Juvenile Cases

Let's start with editorials.  Wyoming's Casper Star-Tribune has, "Simpson: 'All rivers can change course'."

Former U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming eloquently described why a juvenile offender who hasn't killed anyone shouldn't be locked up with no chance of parole: When "a young person is sent 'up the river,' we need to remember that all rivers can change course."

Simpson's certainly did. As he has pointed out for years, his career as a lawyer and politician might never have happened if he hadn't been given a second chance after being caught shooting out mailboxes in Cody and slugging a Laramie police officer, which earned him a night in jail.

He joined several other high-profile former juvenile offenders this week who shared their backgrounds in a legal brief in support of two Florida inmates who have appealed their life without parole sentences for juvenile crimes to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Simpson is on the right side of this issue. The United States, which is the only nation in the world that imposes such a sentence for non-homicide juvenile offenses, has 109 inmates in that category. Seventy-seven of them are in Florida prisons.

And:

It's not a matter of being tough on crime. As Simpson said, "We're not talking about just letting them out. We're talking about looking it over carefully and saying in each case whether there is a chance here that this person can go on with his life at 30, 40 or 50 years old."

Let's join the rest of the world by offering juveniles a second chance.

The Anchorage Daily News has the editorial, "Our view: Juvenile injustice?"

The cry "adult time for adult crime" ignores the fact that juveniles don't yet have adult judgment. Even in older adolescents, the parts of their brains that handle impulse control, responsibility, forward thinking and other socially important behavior have not fully matured, according to generally accepted medical research given to the U.S. Supreme Court. Most adults know someone who was out of control as a teenager but later became a responsible adult.

Adolescents' inherent bad judgment can lead them to commit serious crimes, and when they do, they need to suffer serious consequences. But in these cases, where no one was killed, the offenders also need a chance, somewhere along the way, to show they can put their lives on a socially acceptable path.

And:

BOTTOM LINE: Being tough on young offenders doesn't require life without parole for crimes where no one has been killed.

"Florida leads nation in locking up kids in adult jails," is the report in today's St. Petersburg Times written by Colleen Jenkins.

This week, as the U.S. Supreme Court heard appeals in two Florida juvenile cases, scholars took note that the state leads the nation in locking up kids for life who committed crimes in which no one died.

That isn't Florida's only distinction.

The state sends more children to adult jails and prisons, period. Laws make it easy for prosecutors to pluck young people out of the juvenile justice system before they turn 18.

And in sheer numbers, Hillsborough County transferred more juvenile cases to the adult system than any other county in fiscal year 2007-08, a St. Petersburg Times review of Florida Department of Juvenile Justice data shows. Percentage-wise, Palm Beach County ranked No. 1, with Pinellas following as a close second among the state's largest counties.

Six Tampa Bay area counties — Hillsborough, Pinellas, Pasco, Hernando, Citrus and Manatee — deemed juveniles in 1,410 cases bad enough to be charged as adults. On the other end of the spectrum, seven counties in Florida didn't send any young people to the adult system.

Local prosecutors say the numbers reflect an aggressive stance against juvenile crime, but they stress that the decision to charge teens as adults isn't made lightly. Kids who wind up in felony court can still walk away with juvenile sanctions.

"It gives them one more bite at the apple, but we have a much bigger hammer over their head," Hillsborough Assistant State Attorney Pam Bondi said.

Advocates for juvenile justice reform argue that the statutes Florida enacted in the 1990s response to a surge in juvenile crime need updating. Researchers say the laws fail to consider that adolescents, less developed than adults, are often capable of change. Or that, all things equal, juveniles are more likely to re-offend if convicted in adult court.

The stain of an adult conviction, they say, threatens a young person's ability to join the military, get a job or enroll in school.

"You essentially pull the rug out from under these kids, and it's no wonder that they end up back in the system," said Liz Ryan, chief executive officer of the Campaign for Youth Justice in Washington, D.C., an organization dedicated to keeping youth out of the adult criminal justice system.

Statewide during the 2007-08 fiscal year, the number of juveniles transferred to adult court increased to 3,592. That's a 45 percent jump since 2003-04, but only about half as many transfers as the state had at its peak in the mid 1990s.

Hillsborough County prosecutors sent 660 juvenile cases to adult court in 2007-08, the most in the state. Hillsborough also had the most juvenile arrests in 2007 and 2008, according to data from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

Gerry Shih posts, "Kids or Young Adults? Facing Life in Prison," at the New York Times' The Bay Area blog.

In Washington this week, the Supreme Court heard arguments over whether judges should take into account the age of a convicted juvenile offender when considering issuing life sentences. The court may be leaning in favor of this outcome, some reports indicate.

Meanwhile in San Francisco, the Board of Supervisors voted yesterday to push through a sanctuary ordinance banning local officials from reporting undocumented youth who are accused of felonies to federal immigration authorities. Adults, in contrast, will continue to be reported to immigration authorities when arrested for felony crimes.

San Francisco’s board is hardly the high court, and the legal and moral questions of the two cases intersect somewhat obliquely, but they do have one issue in common: the question of whether the law should treat young convicted criminals differently than adults.

Earlier coverage of  Graham v. Florida and Sullivan v. Florida begins with this post.  Senator Alan Simpson's must-read OpEd is noted here.

Recognition for a Leader in Adolescent Developmental Studies

If I had a Good Timing category, this would be filed there.  Temple University has issued a news release, "Psychology professor honored for exceptional scientific achievement impacting the lives of young people."  Dr. Laurence Steinberg acted as scientific consultant on the amicus curiae brief submitted by the American Psychological Association in Sullivan v. Florida and Graham v. Florida.

Laurence Steinberg, Distinguished University Professor and Laura H. Carnell Professor of Psychology at Temple University, has been named the recipient of the inaugural Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize in the field of youth development. The prize was announced today by the Jacobs Foundation, one of the largest foundations in Europe.

Presented to individuals in recognition of outstanding scientific accomplishments that represent groundbreaking contributions to improving the lives of young people, the Jacobs prize carries an award of one million Swiss francs, the equivalent of one million U.S. dollars.

“I am honored to have the work my colleagues and I have done recognized,” said Steinberg, a member of Temple’s psychology faculty since 1988. “But I’m also proud that our field is receiving this recognition. The Jacobs prize draws attention to the fact that the scientific study of adolescent development is an important enterprise.”

And:

An internationally recognized expert on psychological development during adolescence, Steinberg is a former President both of the Society for Research on Adolescence and the Division of Developmental Psychology of the American Psychological Association. 

He is a frequent consultant to state and federal agencies and lawmakers on juvenile justice issues and public policy.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2005 ruling in Roper v. Simmons, abolishing the juvenile death penalty, relied significantly on the argument advanced by Steinberg and his colleagues that adolescents are fundamentally different from adults in ways shown by scientific studies of brain and behavioral development.

Steinberg also served as scientific consultant on the amicus curiae brief submitted by the American Psychological Association in Sullivan v. Florida and Graham v. Florida. These landmark juvenile justice cases, argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on Nov. 9, raise questions about the constitutionality of sentencing juveniles to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. 

“In many respects adolescents are just as smart as adults. But it is crucial to understand that brain systems responsible for logical reasoning and basic information processing mature earlier than systems responsible for self-regulation and the coordination of emotion and thinking,” said Steinberg.

Compared to adults, adolescents are more susceptible to peer influence, less oriented to the future, more sensitive to short-term rewards, and more impulsive."

Steinberg’s research findings have not only transformed legal policy and practice, they have also changed the way society thinks about teenagers. In addition to his current work on teen decision making, risk taking and crime, Steinberg has been a leader in the study of parent-adolescent relationships, school achievement, and the employment of teenagers in after-school jobs. He currently chairs the National Academies’ Committee on the Science of Adolescence.

Steinberg is the author or co-author of 11 books, including Adolescence, the leading college textbook on adolescent development, now in its eighth edition; You and Your Adolescent: A Parent's Guide for Ages 10 to 20; Beyond the Classroom: Why School Reform Has Failed and What Parents Need to Do, which The New York Times cited as one of the decade’s most important books on education; The Ten Basic Principles of Good Parenting, which has been translated into ten languages; and Rethinking Juvenile Justice.

Related posts are in the juvenile and scholarship category indexes.  Steinberg is on the board of directors of the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center.

More Commentary on the Juvenile Sentencing Cases

"Ugly Truth: Most U.S. Kids Sentenced to Die In Prison Are Black," is the title of Liliana Segura's post at AlterNet.

Monday's oral arguments covered a lot of ground, including whether life-without-parole is comparable to the death penalty (which has been banned for juveniles); whether the purpose, ultimately, is about deterrence or retribution -- "What is the State's interest in keeping ... the defendant in custody for the rest of his life if he has been rehabilitated and is no longer a real danger?" --  whether, for sentencing purposes, there's any practical difference between a 13-year-old or a 10-year-old -- or, for that matter, an 18-year-old and a 17-and-11-month-old ("the line has to be drawn somewhere.") At points, it got downright philosophical ("Why does a juvenile have a constitutional right to hope, but an adult does not?" asked Justice Kennedy.) But at the center of the argument was the question of whether children -- and their potential for rehabilitation -- should be judged by the same standards as that of grown-ups. "To not recognize the difference between a child and an adult is cruel and unusual," defense attorney Bryan Stevenson told Justice Antonin Scalia.

Conspicuously absent from the oral arguments, however, was any discussion of race. The one time Stevenson attempted to mention it, as one of the "arbitrary features" of the distribution of life-without-parole sentences -- these prisoners are "disproportionately kids of color," Stevenson said -- he was interrupted by Justice Alito, who questioned the reliability of his statistics. ("What is your response to the State's argument that these statistics are not peer-reviewed?" he asked.)

It can be tricky to pin down exact numbers when it comes to specific prison populations from state to state, particularly given the differences between sentencing statutes across the country. And states have not traditionally kept track of how many juveniles are in their adult prisons. But when it comes to juvenile lifers, there are some figures that have been widely accepted (and not contested by the state of Florida.)

"There are 73 children 14 and younger who have been imprisoned for life without parole," Stevenson told the Court. "...For the age of 13 and younger, there are only nine kids, and that's including both kids convicted of homicide and non-homicide. For non-homicide, there are only two. They are both in Florida and Joe Sullivan is one of them."

What he did not get to say is that of the vast majority of kids who are sentenced to die in prison are black.

This is unfortunate. Racism has been central to the policies that led to the rise in life sentences for juveniles in the first place -- and not just in Florida. The Supreme Court may rely on legal precedents to make their decisions -- but that does not mean it necessarily considers history.

At TownHall.com, Ken Klukowski posts, "Court Should Uphold Life Without Parole for Minors."

The two current cases are the predictable result of the 2005 decision Roper v. Simmons. In Roper, a 5–4 divided Court held that applying the death penalty is unconstitutional if the perpetrator was under 18 when he committed the crime. That case involved a home robbery where the woman victim saw the 17 year-old robber’s face. Realizing he had been seen, he kidnapped the woman, bound her with duct tape, and threw her off a bridge to drown in a river. A Missouri court sentenced the murderer to death, but the Supreme Court struck down that penalty.

The most troubling aspect of Roper, however, was its reliance on foreign law to interpret the meaning of the U.S. Constitution. It cited the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, a treaty that the United States has never ratified. Citing that treaty and the laws in other nations, the Court (in an opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy) reasoned that these foreign sources helped define what is “cruel and unusual” means in our Constitution.

Some are pushing for the Court to consider foreign law again in deciding the current cases.

The second of these Nov. 9 cases, Sullivan, may not be decided on the merits. There is a strong argument that under Florida law the time for making this claim ran out years ago. If so, then there’s no jurisdiction to hear the case, and it could just be dismissed.

But there’s no such obstacle in the Graham case, so the Court is going to have to decide the question of whether the sentence is unconstitutional.

Graham’s argument is summed up in his lawyer’s opening statement, that sentencing life without parole is essentially a death sentence and, “cruelly ignores the inherent qualities of youth and the differences between adolescents and adults.”

Ben Smith posts, "Life in prison at 13," at the Indiana Daily Student.

The United States is, in fact, the only nation in the world that still allows children to be sentenced to life in prison without any hope for parole.

These are, perhaps, the most extreme illustrations of the American criminal justice program’s harsh treatment of juveniles. The crimes in question were violent, and to a certain degree, they deserve a harsh penalty. But even when it comes to more inconsequential crimes, the justice system can be proportionately irrational.

When I was in high school, for example, a friend of mine was arrested for stealing a pack of Mountain Dew off the back of a delivery truck. He spent multiple nights in jail awaiting his court date, despite the fact that his theft amounted to less than $10 in value.

We’ve all heard the warning: Keep your life straight, or else you’ll find yourself trapped within the confines of the “system,” which is relentless and unforgiving. But when the justice system perpetuates criminal behavior with- out working actively to reform or rehabilitate individuals – and in particular, juveniles – it is entirely dysfunctional.

If the Supreme Court rules that sentencing juveniles to life without parole is unconstitutional, then America’s penal system will be made more effective and more humane. But I think we are a far cry from having a program that maintains law and order appropriately.

If our criminal justice system operated more out of motives of compassion and support, which is often what juvenile offenders need, rather than uncompromising punishment, then maybe our justice system would be successful in its endeavors to reform.

Earlier coverage begins with the preceding post.

Editorials on the Juvenile Sentencing Cases

"Cruel and unusual," is the title of the editorial in today's Houston Chronicle.

On Monday, the Supreme Court heard petitioners argue that sentencing people to life in prison without any possibility of parole for crimes they committed as juveniles, where no homicide was committed, violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

There should be little argument over whether the punishment is unusual: The United States is the only country in the world to impose such a draconian sentence on children, with 109 people serving life without parole for non-homicide juvenile offenses. Even here, it is rare to non-existent in all states but Florida, which accounts for 77 of that total, according to a recent Florida State University study.

Seven other states account for 32 of the 109, while 39 states have none, including Texas, which — as of September, 2009 — does not permit life without parole sentences for offenders under 17. (Statistics for three states were not available.)

And:

Four years ago, the Supreme Court faced a similar situation in Roper v. Simmons, when it decided 5-4 that executing a child for crimes committed as a juvenile is a violation of the Eighth Amendment. The same arguments used in that case are equally valid when applied to locking a child up for life — a long-term death sentence.

In the Roper case, Justice Anthony Kennedy, arguing for the majority, called the death penalty “a disproportionate punishment for juveniles,” citing three major areas of differences between them and adults: first, juveniles' lack of maturity and undeveloped sense of responsibility; second, their vulnerability to “negative influences and outside pressures, including peer pressures”; and third, a character not as well formed as an adult's, with personality traits that are “more transitory, less fixed.” To a large extent, noted Stevens, our laws also reflect these differences, barring juveniles from serving on juries, voting or marrying without parental consent.

Professor Ellen Marrus of the University of Houston Law Center told the Chronicle that the juvenile justice system was never intended to treat children as miniature adults: “We have to look beyond the offense and look at children as children,” she said. “We should not be putting them into a system that is going to make them worse instead of helping them.”

Most juveniles grow up to become responsible adults, many of them surviving serious youthful mistakes and terrible choices. To abandon all hope of ever redeeming a young life before that life is fully formed should never be a choice in a civilized society.

Today's Miami Herald editorial is, "Reconsider plight of juvenile 'lifers'."

It is no coincidence that the cases before the court came from Florida, because this state leads the nation in the number of criminals serving life sentences for crimes they committed while juveniles in which no one was killed. Out of 106 such prisoners, 77 are in Florida. This is not something to be proud of.

Instead, argued the attorneys who want the court to ban such sentences, it is something to be ashamed of. The lopsided numbers indicate widespread repudiation of such sentences elsewhere.

Further, they argued, the immature and ``transient'' nature of adolescence makes it impossible to determine at such an early age who should be deemed unredeemably incorrigible and thrown into a jail cell forever.

In support of this view, former U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming filed a brief saying teen criminals deserve a chance of freedom. He was involved in arson and other serious crimes as a teen before making a better life for himself. He may be an exception, but his life would have been wasted in prison without the opportunity provided by parole.

The answer may be to allow for some sort of mandatory parole hearing at a later stage in life. Even Charles Manson, the iconic incarnation of evil, gets a chance to plead his case occasionally, although he's been denied 11 times by the parole board in California.

A parole hearing is not a get-out-of-jail card, but rather an opportunity to show that the prisoner has been rehabilitated. Horrible crimes deserve serious time -- but adolescents deserve a second chance at life beyond prison walls.

Earlier coverage begins with this post, with links to the transcripts and briefing.  Senator Alan Simpson's must-read OpEd is noted here.

News Coverage of the Juvenile Sentencing Cases

As noted yesterday, the transcripts of Sullivan v. Graham and Sullivan v. Florida are available via the Court's website. Scotus Wiki files for Graham v. Florida and Sullivan v. Florida contain all briefing.

Lyle Denniston expanded his initial SCOTUS Blog post, "Analysis: The Chief leads on juvenile sentences?"

The Sullivan case, argued section, brought some of the same exchanges, but was dominated by questions of whether the Court had jurisdiction to hear the case.  Justice Ginsburg commented very early to Joe Sullivan’s lawyer, Bryan Stevenson, that “before you get to the particulars of this case, there is a serious question” about whether Florida law barred the challenge to the no-release sentence.

Several Justices said that, if the Court were to decide that the Roper decision was a death penalty-only case and thus did not apply to life sentences, then Florida’s “procedural bar” did, in fact, prevent Sullivan from making his challenge in 2007 to a sentence he received in 1989.  “You’re out of court” if Roper does not apply, Justice Scalia said.

When Stevenson did get a chance to discuss the merits, he sought to persuade the Court that, whatever line it might draw against life-without-parole for minors, it definitely should rule it out for 13-year-olds.  Once again, though, he encountered the Chief Justice’s apparent agenda.  “If we require consideration of age under the Eighth Amendment,” Roberts commented, “we avoid all these line-drawing problems.”

Makar, making a return appearance in the Sullivan case, had to spend much of his time trying to clear up confusion about how often the life-without-parole sentence is given to juvenile offenders, in Florida and elsewhere.  With Justice Stephen G. Breyer leading the questioning of the state’s lawyer, the difficulties of drawing age lines that would properly reflect the capacity for “moral responsibility” became more evident.

Breyer did draw from Makar the minimal concession that, if the Court were to rule in the Graham case that Roper did apply to no-release sentences, and that were made retroactive, then Sullivan would be allowed — under Florida law — to file a new challenge to his sentence.

"Justices Consider the Role of Age in Life Sentences," is the title of Adam Liptak's report for the New York Times.

A majority of the justices at two Supreme Court arguments on Monday seemed inclined to find a way to take account of the age of young offenders in deciding whether they may be sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

But there was disagreement among the justices about where to draw various lines and, indeed, over whether line-drawing or case-by-case determination was the right approach.

A lawyer for Joe Sullivan, who was sentenced to life without parole for raping a 72-year-old woman when he was 13, asked the court to say that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment forbids such sentences for youths under the age of 14 convicted of any crime, including murder.

“To say to any child of 13 that you are only fit to die in prison is cruel,” said Bryan Stevenson, Mr. Sullivan’s lawyer. “It can’t be reconciled with what we know about the nature of children.”

In a separate argument in a second case, a lawyer for Terrance Graham, sentenced to life for armed burglary at 16 and a probation violation at 17, said the line should be set at 18 but only for crimes that did not involve a killing.

The court has drawn bright lines in its capital jurisprudence, forbidding the execution of offenders under 18 in 2005 in Roper v. Simmons and of people of any age for crimes against individuals other than murder last year in Kennedy v. Louisiana. The question at Monday’s arguments was whether the logic of those decisions should be extended to cases outside the area of the death penalty.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. suggested a compromise approach that did not involve categorical distinctions but would instead require consideration of the offender’s age in deciding whether the sentence was proportional to the crime case by case.

“We know from Roper that death is different, and we know from Roper that juveniles are different,” the chief justice said. “Wouldn’t it make sense to incorporate the consideration of the juvenile status into the proportionality review?”

Outside the context of the death penalty, the court’s Eighth Amendment jurisprudence has not taken the offender’s age into consideration in deciding whether a sentence is proportional to the crime. Requiring sentencing judges to add age to the sentencing calculus would presumably make a difference in some but not all cases.

Bryan S. Gowdy, a lawyer for Mr. Graham, said a case-by-case approach at the time of sentencing cannot work because juveniles are still unformed.

“At that age we cannot make a determination about whether or not the adolescent will or will not reform,” Mr. Gowdy said.

The National Law Journal carries Marcia Coyle's, "Supreme Court Grapples With Constitutionality of Juvenile Sentences."

"The sentence is unequivocal and cruel because it rejects any hope that the adolescent can change," said Graham's counsel, Bryan Gowdy of Mills Creed & Gowdy in Jacksonville, Fla., in Graham v. Florida.

Gowdy urged the justices to announce a per se rule that juveniles under the age of 18 cannot be sentenced to life in prison without parole. In the second argument, Sullivan v. Florida, Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala., sought to draw the line at age 14, but said he fully supported Gowdy's line as well.

Both lawyers relied heavily on the analysis in the Supreme Court's 2005 Roper v. Simmons decision striking down the death penalty for juvenile murderers. The majority in that case found that juveniles younger than 18 lacked the maturity and moral culpability of adults.

But Florida Solicitor General Scott Makar told the justices that "death is different." He warned that a "categorical rule" eliminating life in prison without parole would undermine Florida law. The state, he said, had enacted strong punishments for juvenile crimes in response to a serious problem. He also noted that many states have eliminated parole in their criminal justice systems.

"A categorical rule goes against the national trend and consensus," said Makar.

Several justices clearly had trouble with attempting to pinpoint at what age the punishment would violate the Constitution and at what point a juvenile sentenced to life in prison would become eligible for parole review.

"What makes us more culpable after our 18th birthday?" Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked Gowdy.

"A line has to be drawn somewhere," responded Gowdy, adding that 18 is the age supported by social science studies of juvenile behavior and maturity.

Justice Samuel Alito Jr. told Gowdy, "You're making a per se argument that no matter how horrific the crimes, no matter if no remorse is shown, that person must be made eligible for parole?"

Gowdy said yes. "Life with parole gives some hope that later in time he may be released." Alito asked when parole must be considered if the high court were to ban the life without parole sentence. Gowdy said that should be left to the states.

Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. repeatedly pressed lawyers for the juveniles and the state on whether a better solution would be to declare that the Eighth Amendment required judges to consider the youth's age in sentencing and then whether the sentence was "proportional" for an offender of that age and for the particular crime.

"Why doesn't that seem more sensible?" asked Roberts. "It avoids all of the line-drawing."

But neither the lawyers for Graham and Sullivan nor for the state agreed with Roberts.

Stevenson said proportionality review has not worked well in cases involving children. Gowdy said a judgment cannot be made at sentencing whether a juvenile can be rehabilitated. That judgment must be made later, he said.

Florida's Makar argued that judges now consider the offender's youth in imposing life without parole. "Age does matter," he said.

Robert Barnes writes, "Life prison sentences for minors divide court," for the Washington Post.

Roberts suggested a finding that he said would be somewhere in the middle. Rather than having rigid rules based on age, he said it would be better to require judges to consider the defendant's age when imposing harsh sentences, and then having courts review whether they are disproportionate to the crime.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Roberts's idea would not solve the basic problem: that juveniles are still developing and are not fully culpable for their actions. Decisions about whether they have reformed can be made only later. The question is, "Has this person overcome those youthful disabilities?" she said.

Several justices seemed troubled by the patchwork of laws covering juveniles and an uneven distribution of those juveniles serving life without parole for non-homicides. Of 111 such juveniles nationwide, 77 of them are in Florida, with the rest spread across only six other states.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor pressed Makar on the minimum age at which a child in Florida could be subjected to the circumstances that could lead to a sentence of life without parole. He said there is no minimum.

"So a 5-year-old could be put away for life?" she asked.

"That is, theoretically," Makar answered. "We would hope that the system would not allow that."

Stevenson's client, Sullivan, is now 34, and the court spent much of its time in his case on Florida's argument that he was procedurally barred from bringing his claim so late. Stevenson argued that his challenge could come only after the court's decision in 2005, but even justices sympathetic to Sullivan's case questioned Stevenson on the point.

But if the court were to find for Graham that life without parole is unconstitutional for juveniles, thy agreed that would also give Sullivan a new claim.

"Supreme Court Weighs Life Sentences For Juveniles," is Nina Totenberg's NPR report.

Retribution versus the possibility of redemption were at the core of Supreme Court arguments Monday in two cases testing whether it is unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment to sentence a juvenile to life in prison without parole — for a crime that does not involve a death.

Florida leads the nation in sentencing juveniles to life in prison without parole for non-homicide crimes. Nationally, of 111 such cases, 77 are in the Sunshine State.

So it is fitting that the cases both came from Florida. One involves a 13-year-old convicted of rape; the other, a 16-year-old convicted of armed robbery.

And:

Next up on the juvenile side of the argument was defense lawyer Bryan Stevenson, who contended that while drawing the line at 18 is preferable, drawing it at 14 is imperative.

Roberts observed that while the death penalty is reserved for the worst of the worst, life without parole is not reserved for the worst of the worst.

Lawyer Stevenson replied, "We think that with regard to non-homicides, life without parole occupies the same end-of-the-line status that the death penalty does with homicide."

Defending life in prison without parole in both cases Monday was Florida Solicitor General Makar. He argued that the court should not do anything to contradict what he called the national trend for tougher juvenile sentences and abolition of parole.

Roberts: "You're arguing for a categorical rule of your own that age should not be considered in sentencing."

Kennedy: "What is the state's interest in keeping the defendant in custody for the rest of his life if he has been rehabilitated at some point and there's no longer a real danger?"

Roberts wondered, "Which of these cases is worse?"

After some hemming and hawing, the state's lawyer said the rape was worse than the armed robbery.

Sotomayor then pointed to statistics showing that nationally, the median sentence for rape is 10 years. In light of that, she wondered why this rape by a 13-year-old justifies life in prison without parole.

Justice Stephen Breyer seemed to sum up the court's dilemma: "As a general matter, human beings are uncertain about how much moral responsibility to assign to individuals in a particular category. Is it appropriate to sentence someone to life in prison without parole at the age of 10? No. 11? No. 17? Yeah, maybe. We are in an area of ambiguity, what justifies taking a person's whole life away."

The Christian Science Monitor carries Warren Richey's, "At Supreme Court, no accord over life sentences for juveniles."

Colorado and Texas have rewritten their juvenile sentencing laws to end life-without-parole punishment for those under 18. Instead, the maximum juvenile sentence in both states is now 40 years in prison followed by an assessment for potential parole.

Earlier coverage begins with this post.

Transcripts Available in Juvenile Cases

The transcripts of oral arguments in Graham v. Florida and Sullivan v. Florida are now available through the Court's website.

Lyle Denniston posts an initial version of, "Analysis: The Chief leads on juvenile sentences?"  A more complete version will be posted later today. 

Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., made a strong — and repeated — effort on Monday to recruit a majority of the Supreme Court in favor of giving juveniles more chance to use their age to challenge life-without-parole prison terms, as an alternative to a flat constitutional bar against ever imposing that sentence.  With a number of Justices wondering where to draw an age line if the categorical approach were used, the Chief Justice’s initiative seemed to have a good chance of gaining adherents as the Court heard Graham v. Florida (08-7412) and Sullivan v. Florida (08-7621).

Lawyers for the two youths, who committed non-homicide crimes at age 16 and 13, sought to persuade the Court that the only way to deal constitutionally with no-release sentences for minor offenders was to declare all such sentences forbidden.  While there was much sympathy evident among some — not all — of the Justices for treating juveniles differently, it did not appear that there was a clearcut majority for taking away altogether the life-without-parole option even in cases where the victim of a youth’s crime did not die.

The Chief Justice’s alternative would apparently be a declaration that the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment required judges to take the offender’s youth into account in setting any sentence for a term of years, then judge whether that sentence was “proportional” both for an offender of that age and for the particular crime.  The question on how attractive that option might be — say, to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy — was whether that would be a meaningful inquiry that would in reality give youths’ some chance of avoiding having the state give up on them entirely.

The AP coverage is "High court looks at life sentences for juveniles," written by Mark Sherman, via Google News.

A seemingly divided Supreme Court wrestled Monday with whether teenagers can be locked away forever for their crimes. The question arose in two cases involving Florida men who are serving life prison terms with no chance of parole for crimes they committed as teenagers. Their lawyers argue that the sentences for people so young are cruel and unusual, in violation of the Constitution, because young people have greater capacity to change.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the Supreme Court opinion four years ago that ruled out the death penalty for people under 18, judging them less responsible than adults. So most eyes were on him Monday as the court considered whether to extend that rationale to life without parole sentences.

But Kennedy offered little hint of his position, at one point suggesting it might be difficult to distinguish between juveniles and adults in cases that do not involve the death penalty.

"Why does a juvenile have a constitutional right to hope, but an adult does not?" he asked.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg provided a possible answer, wondering whether teenagers can be accurately evaluated at the time they are sentenced. It may be possible that only after some years have passed that the state can determine, "Has this person overcome those youthful disabilities?" she said.

On the other side of the issue, Justice Samuel Alito questioned whether every last juvenile offender had to be given a second chance. "Some of the actual cases in which this sentence has been imposed in Florida involve factual situations that are so horrible that I couldn't have imagined them if I hadn't actually seen them," Alito said, recounting two that involved the rape of children.

And:

Graham, now 22, and Sullivan, now 34, are in Florida prisons, which hold more than 70 percent of juvenile defendants locked up for life for crimes other than homicide.

The justices could distinguish between the two based on the difference in their ages at the time of the crimes: It could rule that someone as young as Sullivan was must eventually be considered for parole without granting Graham any relief from his sentence.

Sullivan's lawyer, Bryan Stevenson, stated his basic argument simply: "To say to any child of 13 that you are only fit to die in prison is cruel." Sullivan would be resentenced to 40 years in prison if he were to win his case at the high court, he said.

Kennedy's opinion in 2005 was rooted in two principles - that death is different from other punishments and that children are less culpable than adults.

Following that ruling, Stevenson noted that juveniles on death row in Florida - all convicted of murder - "got a better sentence than Joe Sullivan," life prison terms with the possibility of parole.

Earlier coverage begins with this post.  I'll have a full roundup of coverage in the morning.

Juvenile Cases Being Heard Now - The Argument Previews

Oral arguments in Sullivan v. Florida will be ending shortly in the U.S. Supreme Court.  Graham v. Florida was heard earlier this morning.  Transcripts of the oral arguments will be available here, later today.

We have preview from some of the best, most experienced Court watchers.  I'd urge readers interested in the case to read each preview in full.

We'll start with the Dean of Supreme Court reporters, Lyle Denniston, who posted, "Inquiring into the juvenile mind," for SCOTUS Blog.

Four years after ending the death penalty for any minor who commits murder, the Supreme Court now is ready to analyze the next most severe penalty for a juvenile: life in prison without any chance of release, for a crime in which the victim is not killed.  The issue will be examined in cases involving teenagers who were 13 and 17 at the time of their crimes — the 13-year-old convicted of sexual battery, the other youth convicted at age 17 of probation violation following a felony robbery when he was 16.   Once again, the Court is inquiring into the degree of moral responsibility of minors, as well as into current moral standards, as factors in punishing youthful offenders.

The Supreme Court has said repeatedly, as it decided death-penalty cases (often putting limits on such sentences, or ruling them out altogether in some situations, that “death is different.”  That perception has led to a complex jurisprudence of capital punishment, including a flat ban on that penalty for some specific crimes (rape, for example) and some individuals in a specific group (minors and mentally impaired individuals).

The Court, however, has not yet constructed a full constitutional guidebook for long prison sentences, although it has settled on one principle: a sentence for a term of years in prison will be struck down if it is “grossly dispoportionate” to the crime, judged on a case-by-case, rather than across-the-board, basis.  Applying that test, the Court looks at how serious the crime was, how harsh the penalty was, and how a sentence compares to that for other criminals in the same area, and in other areas, for the same crime.

Florida’s First District Court of Appeal has taken that principle to mean that each case must be judged on its own facts, so that a blanket rule is not to be adopted– either for a category of crimes, or a specific group  of criminals.  Thus, for juvenile offenders, it said in one of the cases now before the Supreme Court: “This court declines to implement a per se ban on the sentencing of juveniles to life imprisonment.”  And, in that case, it found that the sentence of life without possibility of parole was not “grossly disproportionate” to the crime.

In reaching that conclusion, the state court started with the proposition that “death is different.”  And that, in brief, provides the test for the Supreme Court as it examines a life prison sentence, with no chance  of release, for a youth who committed a non-homicide crime while still a minor.  But the Court also is being asked to reinforce the cultural notion that “being young is different,” for criminal responsibility.

The Court already has given some indication that it will at least begin its analysis by looking at different scenarios.  Instead of granting review of a single case involving a life term for a minor whose victim was not killed, the Court simultaneously accepted two cases, did not join them for review, and set them for hearing separately. At least at the outset, it appears that two rulings, not one, are likely to emerge.

There are several differences between the two cases: each youth’s age at the time of the crime — one was 13 when he actually received the life term, the other was 17 at the time of the crime and 19 when sentenced; one youth committed multiple crimes as a younger teenager, the older youth had several crimes on his record when given the life sentence after getting lenient treatment after his first crime; one case brought a full review in the lower court of the sentencing issue, the other did not; one is clearly within the Court’s authority to hear the constittional issue, the other has some procedural doubt about it.

No one outside the Court can know which of those differences may have persuaded the Court to grant both cases.  However, that may begin to become clear when the Court hears oral argument.

"Weighing Life in Prison for Youths Who Didn’t Kill," is Adam Liptak's preview from the Sunday New York Times.

Outside the context of the death penalty, the Supreme Court has generally allowed states to decide for themselves what punishments fit what crimes. But the court barred the execution of juvenile offenders in 2005 by a vote of 5 to 4, saying that people under 18 are immature, irresponsible, susceptible to peer pressure and often capable of change.

A ruling extending that reasoning beyond capital cases “could be the Brown v. Board of Education of juvenile law,” said Paolo G. Annino, the director of the Children’s Advocacy Clinic at Florida State University’s law school. Judges, legislators and prosecutors in Florida agree that the state takes an exceptionally tough line on juvenile crime.

But they are deeply divided about when sentences of life without the possibility of release are warranted.

“Sometimes a 15-year-old has a tremendous appreciation for right and wrong,” said State Representative William D. Snyder, a Republican who is chairman of the House’s Criminal and Civil Justice Policy Council. “I think it would be wrong for the Supreme Court to say that it was patently illegal or improper to send a youthful offender to life without parole. At a certain point, juveniles cross the line, and they have to be treated as adults and punished as adults.”

A retired Florida appeals court judge, John R. Blue, did not see it that way. “To lock them up forever seems a little barbaric to me,” Judge Blue said. “You ought to leave them some hope.”

Several factors in combination — some legal, some historical, some cultural — help account for the disproportionate number of juvenile lifers in Florida.

Nina Totenberg files, "High Court Weighs Life Terms For Minors," for NPR.

Joe Sullivan was 13 years old when he was convicted of raping a 72-year-old woman. Two older defendants who had broken into the woman's house with Joe fingered their younger accomplice for the rape, and they got lesser sentences. Joe had a long record of misdemeanors, from stealing a bike to burglary. This, however, was his first felony, and the judge, declaring that the boy before him was "beyond help," sentenced him to life in prison without parole.

Terrance Graham was 16 when he pleaded guilty to attempted robbery of a restaurant in which one of his accomplices hit the restaurant manager over the head with a steel pipe. Graham served one year in jail, then was released on probation. Six months later he was arrested fleeing the scene of an armed home invasion robbery.

The judge revoked his probation, but rejected the four-year prison sentence recommended by the Department of Corrections and instead sentenced Graham, by then 17, to life in prison without parole. "If I can't do anything to help you," said the judge, "then I have to . . . protect the community from your actions."

Both cases are from Florida, which is fitting: Of the 109 juveniles serving life terms for non-homicide offenses across the country, 70 percent are in the Sunshine State.

Four years ago, when the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty for juveniles, the justices said that offenders younger than 18 are "substantially less culpable" because of their "youth and immaturity." The court said juveniles are far more subject to peer pressure, have less impulse control and less ability to see the consequences of their actions. But the court also said that death is different from any other penalty because it is permanent.

Bryan Stevenson, who represents Joe Sullivan, concedes that there is a difference between the death penalty and life without parole. But he says that a life term is different from other prison sentences because it denies the prisoner any hope for a future. "They're just two different kinds of death sentences," he contends. "One is death by execution, the other death by incarceration."

Stevenson notes that the law generally treats 13- and 14- year-olds as so immature that they are not allowed to drive, to marry and even in some states, to get a tattoo.

And he says that juveniles are particularly unable to defend themselves. His client, who maintained his innocence, was represented by a lawyer who filed no appeals and was later disbarred.

Intellectually impaired since his childhood, the then 13-year-old Sullivan tried to help police replicate the tone of voice that the victim said the rapist used, and the victim, who did not see her assailant, said it was "similar."

Although Florida officials refused to comment for this story, 19 states, led by Louisiana, have filed a brief supporting life sentences without parole for juveniles in non-homicide cases. "I disagree that the juvenile crimes are any less culpable than the adult crimes," says Louisiana Attorney General James "Buddy" Caldwell. "These are young criminals. That's what they are, and the ones who are getting these sentences are the worst of those."

Warren Richey wrotes, "Supreme Court case: juvenile offenders serving life in prison," for the Christian Science Monitor.

Life without parole for a juvenile is similar to the imposition of a death sentence, says Sullivan's lawyer, Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala. In both cases, the punishment is disproportionate to the moral culpability of the offender, he says.

"A child's character is still in flux," Mr. Stevenson writes in his brief. "They are unfinished products, human works-in-progress.... Their potential for growth and change is enormous. Almost all of them will outgrow criminal behavior."

"Juveniles are more malleable and capable of reform than adults," writes Graham's lawyer, Bryan Gowdy, in his brief. "It is cruel to simply give up on them."

Only two individuals in the United States are serving life prison terms for nonhomicide crimes committed at age 13. Both are in Florida. In addition to Florida, five states have sentenced juveniles to life in prison for nonhomicide crimes: Louisiana, Iowa, California, Nebraska, and South Carolina.

Nationwide, an estimated 2,500 inmates are serving life without parole for crimes committed as juveniles; 109 of those sentences were handed down for nonhomicide crimes.

No national consensus has emerged against the imposition of life-without-parole sentences for juveniles, says Florida Solicitor General Scott Makar. Forty-two states permit such sentences, and 38 of them allow it for nonhomicides, Florida, Graham v. Florida, incarceration, Jonathon Todres, juvenile, life sentence, life without parole, OpEd, Paul Farmer, sentencing, Smith v. Florida, Supreme Court he says.

Mr. Makar acknowledges social science and medical research show that juveniles are developmentally different from adults and thus less culpable for their crimes. But, he says, state lawmakers were aware of these findings when they adopted sentencing laws that include age as a factor.

The AP preview, "High court to look at life in prison for juveniles," is by Mark Sherman.

Joe Sullivan was sent away for life for raping an elderly woman and judged incorrigible though he was only 13 at the time of the attack.

Terrance Graham, implicated in armed robberies when he was 16 and 17, was given a life sentence by a judge who told the teenager he threw his life away.

They didn't kill anyone, but they effectively were sentenced to die in prison.

Life sentences with no chance of parole are rare and harsh for juveniles tried as adults and convicted of crimes less serious than killing. Just over 100 prison inmates in the United States are serving those terms, according to data compiled by opponents of the sentences.

Now the Supreme Court is being asked to say that locking up juveniles and throwing away the key is cruel and unusual — and thus, unconstitutional. Other than in death penalty cases, the justices never before have found that a penalty crossed the cruel-and-unusual line. They will hear arguments Monday.

Graham, now 22, and Sullivan, now 33, are in Florida prisons, which hold more than 70 percent of juvenile defendants locked up for life for nonhomicide crimes. Although their lawyers deny their clients are guilty, the court will consider only whether the sentences are permitted by the Constitution.

The Supreme Court's latest look at how to punish young criminals flows directly from its 4-year-old decision to rule out the death penalty for anyone younger than 18.

In that 2005 case decided by a 5-4 vote, Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion talked about "the lesser culpability of the juvenile offender."

"From a moral standpoint it would be misguided to equate the failings of a minor with those of an adult, for a greater possibility exists that a minor's character deficiencies will be reformed," Kennedy said.

Yet Kennedy also acknowledged the possibility that for the worst crimes and the worst offenders, "the punishment of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole is itself a severe sanction, in particular for a young person."

Both sides point to the same basic facts — the rare imposition of Draconian prison terms on people so young — to make their point.

"US Supreme Court to examine life behind bars for juveniles," is the AFP filing by Lucile Malandain.

The US Supreme Court will Monday wrestle with the merits of convicting juveniles who have not committed murder to life in prison without the possibility of parole -- a fate shared by 109 US prisoners, almost all of whom are non-white.

The nine justices will consider two separate cases to determine whether handing out sentences that effectively leave a juvenile to die in prison violates the US Constitution's Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.

CBS News Legal Analyst Andrew Cohen writes, "Young Lives, Long Sentences," for Court Watch.

It costs a minimum of $20,000 per year to incarcerate someone in America these days. In Sullivan's case, if he lives to be 75, he will have been in prison for 60 years. That's at least $1.2 million Florida will have spent on him by the time he dies an old man in a jail cell. Multiply that by 75 (roughly the number of other juveniles so sentenced in Florida) and the cost for these prisoners alone over their lifetime would be over $100 million.

And don't forget — these 77 juvenile offenders are just a small percentage of the state's overall prison population.

It's unlikely that the economic case against automatic life sentences will garner much time or attention during oral argument in these two cases. The Justices may or may not countermand Florida's sentencing scheme on Eighth Amendment grounds, but they certainly won't meddle with the state's financial commitment to its prison system absent a showing that prisoners there are being denied basic human rights due to overcrowding. That's happened in California — but so far not in Florida.

No, in Florida, the question again is whether young people have constitutional protections against punishment which adults do not.

"Kids Locked Up for Life," is Vince Beiser's post at the Atlantic.

Life without parole for juveniles caught on during the hysteria over crack and youth gangs in the 1980s, part of a wave of tough-on-crime legislation that has quadrupled America's prison population to a record-shattering 2.3 million inmates. Almost every state as well as the federal government permits it. But now, with crime rates far lower, that punishment is coming under fire from a growing number of lawmakers, jurists, activists and even crime victims. Today the debate reaches a head as the Supreme Court takes up Graham's case and another, involving Joe Sullivan, who was convicted of burglary and rape at age 13.

Earlier coverage begins with the preceding post.

Juvenile Cases Being Heard Now - The OpEds

"A 2d chance at freedom for juvenile offenders," is the title of Paul Farmer's OpEd in today's Boston Globe.  Farmer, a medical doctor, is a professor of social medicine in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical Schoo.   He is the author of Pathologies of Power.

As I have seen in Haiti, in Rwanda, and in the other countries where I have lived - and in the prisons, squatter settlements, and cities, rich and poor, in which I’ve worked - people share certain innate human values. One of them is that children should be afforded greater care, protection, and forgiveness.

And when I return to the United States, I am reminded that a group of our children - some of them as young as 13 - are separated from their families and communities for the rest of their lives, even if they are later rehabilitated and no longer deemed to pose a threat to others.

Article 37 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states that children must not be subjected to torture, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishments, including capital punishment or life imprisonment without the possibility of release. Only two nations in the world have not ratified this convention: Somalia and the United States. It is noteworthy that sentences of life without parole for juveniles were uncommon in the United States before the 1990s, a period of fear about a potential rise in juvenile crime that was based on data later proven false.

The United States stands apart from its European allies in perpetuating this violation of human rights. In Italy, the maximum sentence for a person under 18 for any crime is 24 years. In Germany, it is 10 years. In England and Wales, judges must impose a sentence that is roughly half the term that an adult would be given in the same circumstances. The English law is particularly instructive, given the historic ties between the two countries and the fact that American law is largely derived from England’s. In fact, the Eighth Amendment traces its roots to the Magna Carta.

There are those who argue that international laws and norms should have no bearing on how the United States decides to dispense justice. But having treated thousands of children all over the world, I can say with confidence that American children are not more vicious, less human, or less deserving of mercy and compassion than children in any other country. Every other nation in the world finds ways to hold young people accountable for their actions without sentencing them to languish in prison until they die. The United States must do the same for its children.

Jonathon Todres wrote the OpEd, "Is there no redemption for children?," for the Friday edition of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.  Todres teaches law at Georgia State University.

What is striking about these cases, Sullivan v. Florida and Graham v. Florida, is they entail the permanent denial of freedom for juveniles who, though they committed serious crimes, did not commit homicides. Such sentences for juveniles express more than just the view that these children are beyond rehabilitation.

In effect, they are a societal admission that we do not believe we are capable of teaching children to do better.

When we sentence a 13-year-old or 17-year-old to life in prison without any chance of parole, we not only convey our views on the child’s actions, we also make a powerful statement about ourselves.

Such a penalty, when given to a child, says we do not believe that child can ever change. And because it is our job as adults to mentor children, we are conceding that we don’t have confidence as a society that we will provide the necessary guidance to ensure that child becomes a productive member of society.

Why do we have such little faith in ourselves, and our children?

Children today face high expectations. For example, zero tolerance policies permit no mistakes.

Yet neuroscience and psychological research tells us what parents and teachers already know from their day-to-day care of children — that is, children’s brains are wired differently and sometimes they make poor choices.

The choices made by Sullivan and Graham were terrible ones, for which there must be consequences. But have we lost all faith in our ability to steer kids in the right direction?

Currently, our punishment framework is a discouraging one-way ratchet. Even when children do not break the law, we do not allow them to participate fully in society.

No matter how well a child behaves, how mature and thoughtful his or her decision-making, we do not allow them to vote, enter into contracts, serve on juries, drink alcohol, drive a car below a certain age or do any number of other things adults can do. We do that because we do not believe they have reached maturity.

Yet when children make bad decisions and commit bad acts, we insist they were mature enough that they should suffer adult consequences. The message is clear to children: There are no rewards for good behavior, but there are serious punishments for bad behavior.

We need to rethink this unbalanced stance.

The preceding post contained editorials and a link to earlier coverage; next, the oral argument previews.

Juvenile Cases Being Heard Now - The Editorials

The Court has heard Graham v. Florida earlier this morning, and it is hearing Sullivan v. Florida at this time.  I'll break out coverage into three posts.  This one will contain editorials, the next post OpEds, and the third post will contain oral argument previews.  Transcripts of the oral arguments will be available here, later today.

"Imprisoning a Child for Life," is the title of an editorial in today's New York Times.

The United States could be the only nation in the world where a 13-year-old child can be sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole, even for crimes that do not include murder. This grim distinction should trouble Americans deeply, as should all of the barbaric sentencing policies for children that this country embraces but that most of the world has abandoned.

The Supreme Court must keep the international standard in mind when it hears arguments on Monday in Graham v. Florida and Sullivan v. Florida. The petitioners in both argue that sentencing children to life without the possibility of parole for a nonhomicide violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

The court came down on the right side of this issue in 2005 when it ruled that children who commit crimes before the age of 18 should not be subject to the death penalty. The decision correctly pointed out that juveniles were less culpable because they lacked maturity, were vulnerable to peer pressure and had personalities that were still being formed.

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy said the practice of executing 16- and 17-year-olds violated the Eighth Amendment, conflicted with “evolving standards of decency” and isolated the United States from the rest of the world.

The Roper decision took scores of juveniles off death row. It also threw a spotlight onto state policies under which young juveniles were increasingly being tried in adult courts and sentenced to adult jails, often for nonviolent crimes.

The practice is even more troubling because it is arbitrary. Children who commit nonviolent crimes like theft and burglary are just as likely to be shipped off to adult courts as children who commit serious violent crimes. And the process is racially freighted, with black and Latino children more likely to be sent to adult courts than white children who commit comparable crimes.

"The editorial, "Locked away forever," appears in today's Washington Post.

Only 106 prisoners -- 77 of them in Florida -- have been given life without parole for offenses that did not involve a homicide or attempted homicide. Only two people -- including Mr. Sullivan -- have been handed this guaranteed life sentence for a non-homicide committed at age 13.

Most states have not consciously sanctioned imposition of mandatory life terms for juveniles. Instead, these sentences are the warped confluence of an increasing number of prosecutions in which juveniles are charged as adults and the increasing number of crimes that carry sentences of life without parole. The punishments fail to take into account the neurological, psychological and developmental differences that distinguish juveniles from mature adults.

Mr. Sullivan's lawyers make a compelling case that the frequent rejection of such draconian sentences by lawmakers, juries and judges shows "the country's radical repudiation of life without parole for children of this age." The Supreme Court cited similar trends and statistics in a 2007 case in which it ruled that the death penalty was unconstitutional in juvenile cases.

A brief filed in support of Mr. Sullivan by, among others, actor-director Charles S. Dutton and former Wyoming senator Alan K. Simpson, a Republican, makes a powerful case for giving juveniles at least a shot at freedom. Both of these men experienced serious trouble with the law in their early years: Mr. Dutton, who grew up in a housing project in Baltimore, spent time in juvenile facilities and later years in prison for stabbing a man to death and for assaulting a prison guard. Mr. Simpson recalls taking part in arson and other crimes. These men's ascents to the tops of their professions could not have been predicted by their often violent childhoods.

Juveniles who commit serious offenses should face serious penalties. A life sentence in some circumstances may be appropriate. But that sentence should carry with it the opportunity for a second chance.

On Saturday, the Los Angeles Times ran the editorial, "Cruel life in prison."

The U.S. Supreme Court recognized in 2005 that it is unconstitutionally cruel to execute people for crimes committed before they were 18, because youths lack the sense of responsibility that society requires of adults. Their personalities are not yet fixed; they are more susceptible to the negative influences of other people or events. Society's understandable demand for retribution is necessarily blunted when the perpetrator of a crime is a juvenile. Likewise, the threat of a stiff penalty cannot have the same deterrent effect on a youth as it does on an adult; young people have too little experience to fully grasp the consequences of their actions.

The court on Monday will hear arguments in the cases of two Floridians sentenced, in effect, to eventually die in prison because they lack even the slightest chance of release on parole. The same reasoning that bars execution for crimes committed in youth should also block such sentences of life without hope for young people, at the very least for those whose crimes fall short of murder.

Terrance Jamar Graham was 16 when he joined two others in a failed attempt to rob a restaurant; a year later, he was on probation when he participated in a home invasion robbery. His crimes were brutal; he was a repeat offender; and he deserved to be punished, to be imprisoned, and even, perhaps, to be sentenced to life. But not without a chance, in the future, for a court or parole board to review his growth and development and consider another chance at parole.

There are, to be sure, youths who mature earlier than others, just as there are adults who never fully mature. But there must be a line, and age 18 is the point at which society determines people are ready to sign contracts, marry without parental consent, serve on juries and be drafted into the military.

Society can and should countenance a hopeless existence in prison for adult perpetrators. But not for juveniles. The U.S. is, for now, the only nation that has not banned life in prison without parole for juvenile offenders, and more than 2,000 are serving such terms behind bars.

Earlier coverage of the issue begins with this post; next, the OpEd.