Montgomery, who was tried twice in the murder in East Baton Rouge Parish and eventually sentenced to life, contends he has evolved from a troubled youth to being a productive member of the community at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, serving as a mentor to other inmates. The case centers on Henry Montgomery, 69, who was convicted as a 17-year-old of shooting and fatally wounding a police officer in Louisiana. Further, the goal of the clarification decision, as detailed by Kennedy, is to give these specific cases further consideration given that the prisoners were sentenced when they were young.
Advertisement
Monday’s decision establishes again that “children who come into contact with the law can’t be treated as adults, and have a unique capacity for rehabilitation”, said Lavy.
The Supreme Court resolved today that it did indeed have jurisdiction to review this case and that its previous ruling was substantial enough that it should apply retroactively. Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented from Monday’s ruling.
“This decision represents an opportunity for the United States to chart a bold new direction toward reform in juvenile justice, and for the US criminal justice system as a whole”, Heiss said. The oldest was sentenced in 1953, when he was 15, she said.
Parrish said he can see “positives” to either letting the inmates go through the courts or by involving the Arkansas Legislature to make the offenders eligible for parole hearings.
The lower courts upheld the mandatory term, concluding among other things that the high court’s decision was not retroactive.
The court ruled 6-3 to allow prisoners convicted of a crime they committed while they were juveniles to have their life without parole sentences reconsidered.
The court did not issue a total ban on life sentences for juveniles, but indicated in previous rulings that such sentences for juveniles should be rare – for those whose crimes reflected “irreparable corruption”. In Miller, the court held that mandatory sentences of life without parole for juvenile homicide offenders violate the Constitution.
In 2005, the Supreme Court banned capital punishment for those under 18 at the time of their crimes.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote the majority opinion (PDF), joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
Advertisement
The remainder, the study concluded, were imprisoned in states that have already applied the ruling retroactively. Writing for the group, Scalia called the ruling “just a devious way of eliminating life without parole for juvenile offenders”. “They should be punished for their crimes, but they also need to be given an opportunity at some point in their lives to demonstrate that they no longer pose a danger to society”. The decision was referring to laws in states where if an individual is found guilty of a certain crime, the sentence must be life imprisonment without exception.
