Inmate key in life-sentence debate freed
BATON ROUGE — Louisiana officials granted parole Wednesday to Henry Montgomery, whose case before the U.S. Supreme Court was instrumental in extending the possibility of freedom to hundreds of people sentenced to life in prison without the opportunity for parole when they were juveniles.
Montgomery, 75, was released from prison shortly after the decision.
He had been convicted in the 1963 killing of East Baton Rouge sheriff’s deputy Charles Hurt, who caught him skipping school. Montgomery was 17 at the time. He was initially sentenced to death, but the state’s Supreme Court threw out his conviction in 1966, saying he didn’t get a fair trial. The case was retried, and Montgomery was convicted again. This time, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He served decades at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.
A three-member board voted unanimously in favor of parole.
Montgomery’s release owes back to two specific Supreme Court cases. In 2012, the Supreme Court ruled in Miller v. Alabama that mandatory sentencing of life without parole for juvenile offenders was “cruel and unusual” punishment. But it didn’t settle the question of whether that decision applied retroactively or only to cases going forward.
In 2016, the Supreme Court settled the matter when it took up Montgomery’s case and extended their decision on such sentences to people already in prison.
Family members of Hurt, the sheriff’s deputy who Montgomery killed, opposed his release as did a prosecutor from the area where the crime occurred.