LITTLE ROCK – A U.S. Supreme Court ruling issued Monday will allow more than 50 Arkansas inmates serving life sentences without parole for murders they committed as juveniles a chance to one day be free, but how that will happen is still in question.
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If I had to name a single U.S. Supreme Court case that effectively highlights the entrenched problems of the American criminal justice system, it would be Montgomery v. Louisiana: from the 1963 murder of Charles Hurt Jr., a white deputy sheriff in East Baton Rouge, to the conviction of Henry Montgomery, a developmentally disabled African-American teenager, to the ensuing half-century during which Montgomery has been warehoused at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola.
Many states either have no inmates like Montgomery or have given them new prison sentences or parole hearings.
Jeff Rosenzweig, an attorney representing some of the inmates who have appealed their sentences, said the next step will be for the courts to resume hearing the petitions of those inmates.
In classic form, Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, contends not only that the court lacks jurisdiction to decide the case (meaning that the rule of Miller was procedural and not substantive), but that “the decision it arrives at is wrong”. Instead, the states can offer parole hearings with no guarantee of release. Montgomery’s lawyers argued that the Louisiana court erred; in fact, they argued, the standard set in Miller passes both prongs of the test established in Teague.
“Children are constitutionally different from adults in their level of culpability”, and “prisoners like Montgomery must be given the opportunity to show their crime did not reflect irreparable corruption, and if it did not, their hope for some years outside prison walls must be restored”, Kennedy said.
However, another point is that the ruling does not give any clemency for those who are undertaking life sentences. A 2010 ruling had declared life sentences for juveniles unconstitutional for all other convictions. But how Pennsylvania will address the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling remains unclear.
But the Supreme Court didn’t outright rule that life imprisonment without parole is never appropriate for youth offenders. The Court accepted Montgomery’s appeal, but oral arguments largely focused on whether or not the Justices even had the authority to hear the case.
Writing for the court’s six-justice majority today, Justice Anthony Kennedy said that a life-without-parole sentence is always unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment unless the juvenile defendant is found to be irreparably corrupt and permanently incorrigible.
The inmates who were automatically sentenced had to request resentencing, he said.
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Hutto’s client, Charles Lowe-Kelley, is serving two consecutive life terms for the 2008 shooting deaths of two people in Maury County. The justices also have barred life without parole sentences for people convicted of crimes other than murder that were committed before they turned 18. Avoid all the utterly impossible nonsense we’ve required for sentencing juvenile homicide offenders by simply considering them for parole.
