Limits on life terms for youths are rejected

WASHINGTON » The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that judges need not determine that juvenile offenders are beyond hope of rehabilitation before sentencing them to die in prison. The decision, concerning a teenager who killed his grandfather, appeared to signal the end of a trend that had limited the availability of severe punishments for youths who commit crimes before they turn 18.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the majority in the 6-3 ruling, said it was enough that the sentencing judge exercised discretion rather than automatically imposing a sentence of life without parole.

“In a case involving an individual who was under 18 when he or she committed a homicide,” he wrote, “a state’s discretionary sentencing system is both constitutionally necessary and constitutionally sufficient.”

No specific finding concerning the defendant’s maturity or capacity for change was required, he wrote.

The ruling drew a caustic dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who accused the majority of gutting two major precedents.

Over the past 16 years, the court, often led by Justice Anthony Kennedy, methodically limited the availability of the harshest penalties for crimes committed by juveniles, first by striking down the juvenile death penalty and then by restricting sentences of life without the possibility of parole.

But Kennedy retired in 2018, and the court, now dominated by six conservative members, does not seem to have enthusiasm for continuing his project.

Thursday’s decision, Jones v. Mississippi, No. 18-1259, concerned Brett Jones, who had recently turned 15 in 2004 when his grandfather discovered his girlfriend in his room. The two men argued and fought, and the youth, who had been making a sandwich, stabbed his grandfather eight times, killing him.

In 2005, Jones was convicted of murder and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, then the mandatory penalty under state law. That same year, the Supreme Court ruled in Roper v. Simmons that the death penalty for juvenile offenders was unconstitutional.

In 2012, in Miller v. Alabama, the court extended the logic of the Roper decision to ban mandatory lifewithout-parole sentences like the one imposed on Jones. The decision repeatedly criticized mandatory sentences, suggesting that only ones in which judges could take account of the defendant’s age were permissible.