On Monday, the justices voted 6-3 to extend a ruling from 2012 in Miller v. Alabama that struck down automatic life terms with no chance of parole for juvenile killers.
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Yesterday, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that a previous decision to ban mandatory life sentences for juvenile offenders should be retroactive.
In Monday’s decision, the court offered the states an alternative, telling them they could instead parole those prisoners no longer deemed risky.
Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, “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 of life outside prison walls must be restored”. Under the state “felony murder” rule, Jensen was sentenced to life in prison without the chance of parole.
In 2012, in Miller v. Alabama, the court found juveniles could not be sentenced to mandatory life without parole, although courts still had discretion to order this sentence.
“Henry Montgomery has spent each day of the past 46 years knowing he was condemned to die in prison”, Kennedy wrote, referencing the Louisiana man at the center of the case.
The 2012 ruling did not say whether or not it should be applied retroactively but the latest ruling makes it clear that it applies to those cases. The oldest was sentenced in 1953, when he was 15, she said.
But the Supreme Court didn’t outright rule that life imprisonment without parole is never appropriate for youth offenders.
But the U.S. Supreme Court’s most recent decision paves the way for 48 inmates sentenced between 1991 and 2006 to have their sentences reviewed.
He argues that rather than apply Miller to the facts at hand, the majority rewrites it: “This whole exercise, this whole distortion of Miller, is just a devious way of eliminating life without parole for juvenile offenders”. Based on that, it seems that an amendment of a sentence to life with the possibility of parole would cure the Miller violation, Smith said.
Across the nation, more than 2,000 juvenile killers are serving automatic life terms.
Convening new hearings to re-examine these underlying cases will prove problematic, attorneys general for Texas, South Carolina, Kansas and 13 other states warned in a brief urging the court to reject the claim for retroactivity.
Justice Antonin Scalia, writing a dissent joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, termed the majority decision “nothing short of astonishing”.
Five years later, although the mood of the community was calmer, it took another all white and male jury a mere 90 minutes to convict Henry of first degree murder, after which he was sentenced for an offense committed as a juvenile to mandatory life without parole (JLWOP) and sent to Angola.
Pennsylvania, in particular, had 482 inmates serving life without parole for crimes committed when they were juveniles, according to a legal brief filed past year.
Criminal defense attorney Jeff Rosenzweig has worked on several juvenile homicide and death penalty cases in Arkansas and represented a member of the West Memphis Three.
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Judd Deere, a spokesman for Rutledge, said that petition is still pending at the U.S. Supreme Court.
