While most attention on the Supreme Court is around their decision on health care, today the court ruled 5-4 that statutes requiring the mandatory sentencing of youth under the age of 18, even youth who commit a homicide, to life without the opportunity for parole (LWOP) are unconstitutional. The circumstances of the two cases brought before the court involve two youth who committed offenses when they were 14 and raised key issues, including: (1) that it is a violation of the 8th amendment to give a LWOP sentence when the juvenile was a party to a crime involving homicide, not the person who committed the murder; and (2) that children this young clearly should not be held to the same level of culpability that older teens/adults are.
Justice Kagan, writing for the majority, banned mandatory life-without-parole sentences for all children under age 18 at the time of the offense and noted that, “given all that we have said in Roper, Graham, and this decision about children’s diminished culpability, and heightened capacity for change, we think appropriate occasions for sentencing juveniles to this harshest possible penalty will be uncommon.”
In their post, the Equal Justice Initiative, the organization that argued the case before the Supreme Court noted: “Today’s decision requires the lower courts to conduct new sentencing hearings where judges will have to consider children’s individual characters and life circumstances, including age, as well as the circumstances of the crime.”
This decision represents another step forward in understanding the fundamental differences between adults and juveniles who offend in terms of legal culpability and what justice really is. It is a needed step away from the “adult time for an adult crime” that took root in the 1990’s, and as the language of the decision is analyzed may help fashion more rational approaches to dealing with these tragic situations.
You can learn more about these cases in a prior WCCF blog post of March 20 and through the Equal Justice Initiative or the Juvenile Law Center. You can read the full opinion by linking to the Supreme Court opinion site. By Jim Moeser
