SCOTUS rules against juvenile sentenced to life without parole
The Supreme Court on Thursday reversed its recent movement toward leniency for minors convicted of serious crimes and instead said judges need not specifically find a juvenile murderer beyond rehabilitation before sentencing him to a lifetime in prison.
Former president Donald Trump’s three Supreme Court nominees were key to the 6-to-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 life-without-parole sentence a Mississippi court imposed on a 15-yearold who stabbed his grandfather to death in a dispute over the boy’s girlfriend.
All that is constitutionally required is for the judge to have discretion and consider the defendant’s youth, Kavanaugh wrote.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor replied in a biting dissent that the decision will mean “far too many juvenile offenders will be sentenced to die in prison.”
Limiting that punishment only to those beyond redemption was the very point of the court’s previous rulings, she wrote, arguing the majority undermined those decisions without acknowledging the change.
“Such an abrupt break from precedent demands ‘special justification,’ ” Sotomayor wrote, taking the words from a Kavanaugh opinion written last term. Because the majority did not 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 fill seats once held by a moderate and a liberal justice.
Kavanaugh in 2018 replaced Justice Anthony Kennedy, who had played a key role in the rulings on juvenile offenders. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was in the majority in all of the decisions that granted more leniency, and her spot on the court has been filled by conservative Amy Coney
Barrett.
In those previous decisions, when it contemplated how the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment applies to juveniles, the court’s movement had been in one direction.
In 2005, the court ended capital punishment for those whose crimes were committed before age 18. In 2010, it barred life without parole in non-homicide 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.”
In Michigan, county prosecutors have been filing notices for resentencing in accordance with the Hill v. Whitmer class action settlement (2016), which gave prosecutors a deadline of earlier this year to review the “juvenile lifer” sentences and commit to a timeline for resentencing hearings for eligible individuals. The State’s settlement was made in accordance with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2012 decision in Miller v. Alabama, a ruling that retroactively banned sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole for juvenile offenders, but one that still allows for such sentences only in the most extreme cases.
“The Supreme Court’s opinion in Jones v Mississippi should not impact the Hill v Whitmer class action filings,” said Assistant Defender/Juvenile Lifer Unit Manager Tina Olson, of the State Appellate Defender Office. “While Jones holds that sentencing courts are not required to make a separate factual finding of permanent incorrigibility for a juvenile facing a possible life without parole sentence, the decision leaves in place the Miller and Montgomery cases which preceded Jones. We expect Michigan’s juvenile lifer resentencings to continue under our current statutory scheme.”