Supreme Court rejects leniency for young killers

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday reversed a recent trend of leniency for minors convicted of serious crimes and said judges need not specifically find “permanent incorrigibility” before sentencing juvenile murderers to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Former President Donald Trump’s three Supreme Court nominees were key to the 6-3 ruling, which was written by one of them, Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

The “argument that the sentencer must make a finding of permanent incorrigibility is inconsistent with the court’s precedents,” Kavanaugh wrote.

The court upheld the sentence of life without parole that a Mississippi court imposed on a 15-year-old who stabbed his grandfather to death in a dispute over the boy’s girlfriend.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor replied in a biting dissent that a finding that a youth was incapable of redemption was the very point of the court’s previous rulings, and that Thursday’s decision undermines those precedents without acknowledging the change.

“Such an abrupt break from precedent demands ‘special justification.’ ” wrote Sotomayor, quoting a Kavanaugh opinion from the past term. Because the majority didn’t provide one, she wrote, “The court is fooling no one.”

The case could be representative of changes the court’s fortified conservative majority will make now that Trump’s nominees have filled seats once held by a moderate and a liberal justice.

Kavanaugh in 2018 replaced moderate Justice Anthony Kennedy, who had played a key role in the rulings on juvenile offenders. The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was in the majority in all of the decisions that granted more leniency, and the liberal icon’s spot on the court has been filled by conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

In 2005, the court ended capital punishment for those whose crimes were committed before age 18. In 2010, it barred life without parole in nonhomicide crimes.

In 2012, it forbade mandatory life without parole sentences even for murder, in Miller v. Alabama. And four years later, in Montgomery v. Louisiana, the court said those sentenced under the old rules could challenge their permanent imprisonment.

That decision said life without parole should be reserved for “the rarest of juvenile offenders, those whose crimes reflect permanent incorrigibility.”

Lawyers for Brett Jones, the Mississippi boy at the center of the case, argued that the 2012 decision meant he deserved a new sentencing hearing for the 2004 murder of his grandfather. But the majority disagreed.