After Franklin, now 21, was sentenced, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that mandatory life without parole for juvenile killers violated the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
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The California Supreme Court has rejected a constitutional challenge to a criminal sentence of 50 years to life for a juvenile convicted of murder.
The ruling comes in the case of Isaiah Sweet, then 17, of Manchester who pleaded guilty to killing his grandparents, Richard Sweet, 55, and Janet Sweet, 63, in 2012.
In an agrument to the case, Tyris Franklin, the California defendant said, ruling over his fixed 50-year-to-life sentence was dishonored as it was equivalent of life without parole and prevented Judge from viweing mitigating factors.
Justices Brent Appel, David Wiggins, Mark Cady and Daryl Hecht voted in the majority, and ordered a new sentence for Sweet.
The court in its ruling Thursday cited a state law that gives juvenile offenders the right to a parole hearing within 25 years. “The parole board will be better able to discern whether the offender is irreparably corrupt after time has passed”.
The California Supreme Court decided unanimously Thursday to uphold a sentence of 50 years to life for an inmate who was 16 when he fatally shot another teenager in 2011.
Ultimately, the justices found that sentencing courts should not have to make a decision about life sentences without parole because they would be “speculative up-front decisions” without “adequate predictive information” about what could happen.
Justice Edward Mansfield wrote one of two dissents in the case. The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry has said that juveniles should have life sentences reviewed within years because of research showing that brain development stretches on “throughout adolescence and into early adulthood”.
States have been forced to rethink their punishments for juvenile offenders in recent years.
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The ruling came amid heightened scrutiny of sentences for juveniles. “The burden will still be upon the offender to show that they are rehabilitated at some later date”.
