5-17-2010 Washington DC:
By 6-3 Vote Says, Unless Convicted of Murder, Teenagers Cannot Be Sentenced to Life With No Chance of Parole
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that teenagers may not be locked up in prison for life with no chance of parole if they have not killed anyone.
By a 6-3 vote Monday, the court said the U.S. Constitution requires that young people serving life sentences must at least be considered for release.
The court ruled in the case of Terrance Graham, who was implicated in armed robberies when he was 16 and 17. Graham was on probation for robbery when he broke into a home and committed another robbery just before his 18th birthday. Although he was eligible for a minimum 5-year sentence, the judge sentenced him to the maximum of life, saying he was a threat to society and had made a conscious decision to throw his life away.
Graham, now 22, is in prison in Florida, which holds more than 70 percent of juvenile defendants locked up for life for crimes other than homicide, and where parole had been abolished. [A juvenile sentenced to life in Florida may only be released by an executive order granting clemency.]
"The state has denied him any chance to later demonstrate that he is fit to rejoin society based solely on a non-homicide crime that he committed while he was a child in the eyes of the law," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion. "This the Eighth Amendment does not permit."
Kennedy's opinion estimates that there are currently 129 non-homicide offenders sentenced as juveniles to life without parole in the U.S. Almost two-thirds - 77 - are in Florida. The remaining are in 10 states (California, Delaware, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Virginia) or in federal facilities.
"The Eighth Amendment does not foreclose the possibility that persons convicted of nonhomicide crimes committed before adulthood will remain behind bars for life. It does forbid States from making the judgment at the outset that those offenders never will be fit to reenter society," the court said.
Kennedy said juveniles "lack maturity and have an underdeveloped sense of responsibility," and that for them, a life sentence actually translates into a far harsher sentence than an adult would receive for a comparable crime.
Kennedy wrote that Florida acknowledged at oral arguments that "even a 5-year-old, theoretically, could receive such a sentence under the letter of the law. . . . All would concede this to be unrealistic, but the example underscores that the statutory eligibility of a juvenile offender for life without parole does not indicate that the penalty has been endorsed through deliberate, express, and full legislative consideration."
Today's decision also notes that such life sentences for juveniles have been rejected by every other nation.
Left unanswered, said CBS News legal correspondent Jan Crawford, is the question about life sentences for juveniles who do commit murder.
The Court had already struck down the death penalty for juvenile killers in 2005.
Chief Justice John Roberts agreed with the outcome, but wrote a separate, more narrow opinion, saying he would not necessarily outlaw juvenile life sentences in extreme and brutal cases, such as those involving rape.
Dissenting from today's opinion were Justices Thomas, Scalia and Alito.
On sentencing underage nonhomicide offenders Justice Thomas wrote, "Although the text of the Constitution is silent regarding the permissibility of this sentencing practice, and although it would not have offended the standards that prevailed at the founding, the Court insists that the standards of American society have evolved such that the Constitution now requires its prohibition. The news of this evolution will, I think, come as a surprise to the American people."
Writing that such sentences are allowed by 37 States, the District of Columbia and the federal government, Thomas said the Court's decision amounts to rejecting "the judgments of those legislatures, judges, and juries regarding what the Court describes as the 'moral' question of whether this sentence can ever be 'proportionat[e]' when applied to the category of offenders at issue here.
"I am unwilling to assume that we, as members of this Court, are any more capable of making such moral judgments than our fellow citizens. Nothing in our training as judges qualifies us for that task, and nothing in Article III gives us that authority.
"I agree with Justice Stevens that '[w]e learn, sometimes, from our mistakes.' Perhaps one day the Court will learn from this one," Thomas concluded.
The case, Graham v. Florida, was similar to another argued before the court, Sullivan v. Florida, in which a 13-year-old boy was convicted for taking part in a burglary and sexual assault. Attempts by the prisoner to have his case reheard were scuttled when it was discovered DNA evidence had been destroyed. The court today dismissed the writ of certiorari in Sullivan as improvidently granted. ..Source.. CBS News
May 17, 2010
U.S. Supreme Court Rules on Life Terms for Juveniles
November 8, 2009
DC- Weighing Life in Prison for Youths Who Didn’t Kill
11-7-2009 Washington DC:
by ADAM LIPTAK
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — There are just over 100 people in the world serving sentences of life without the possibility of parole for crimes they committed as juveniles in which no one was killed. All are in the United States. And 77 of them are here in Florida.
On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear appeals from two such juvenile offenders: Joe Sullivan, who raped a woman when he was 13, and Terrance Graham, who committed armed burglary at 16. They claim that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment forbids sentencing them to die in prison for crimes other than homicide.
Outside the context of the death penalty, the Supreme Court has generally allowed states to decide for themselves what punishments fit what crimes. But the court barred the execution of juvenile offenders in 2005 by a vote of 5 to 4, saying that people under 18 are immature, irresponsible, susceptible to peer pressure and often capable of change.
A ruling extending that reasoning beyond capital cases “could be the Brown v. Board of Education of juvenile law,” said Paolo G. Annino, the director of the Children’s Advocacy Clinic at Florida State University’s law school. Judges, legislators and prosecutors in Florida agree that the state takes an exceptionally tough line on juvenile crime.
But they are deeply divided about when sentences of life without the possibility of release are warranted.
“Sometimes a 15-year-old has a tremendous appreciation for right and wrong,” said State Representative William D. Snyder, a Republican who is chairman of the House’s Criminal and Civil Justice Policy Council. “I think it would be wrong for the Supreme Court to say that it was patently illegal or improper to send a youthful offender to life without parole. At a certain point, juveniles cross the line, and they have to be treated as adults and punished as adults.”
A retired Florida appeals court judge, John R. Blue, did not see it that way. “To lock them up forever seems a little barbaric to me,” Judge Blue said. “You ought to leave them some hope.”
Several factors in combination — some legal, some historical, some cultural — help account for the disproportionate number of juvenile lifers in Florida.
The state’s attorney general, Bill McCollum, explained the roots of the state’s approach in the first paragraph of his brief in Mr. Graham’s case.
“By the 1990s, violent juvenile crime rates had reached unprecedented high levels throughout the nation,” Mr. McCollum wrote. “Florida’s problem was particularly dire, compromising the safety of residents, visitors and international tourists, and threatening the state’s bedrock tourism industry.” Nine foreign tourists were killed over 11 months in 1992 and 1993, one by a 14-year-old.
Mr. Snyder, the state legislator, put it this way: “Instead of the Sunshine State, it was the Gun-shine State.”
In response, the state moved more juveniles into adult courts, increased sentences and eliminated parole for capital crimes.
Thomas K. Petersen, a semi-retired judge in Miami who spent a decade hearing cases in juvenile court, said that the state’s reaction was out of proportion and that it has lately failed to take account of changed circumstances.
“Back in the 1990s, there were dire predictions about teenage super-predators, particularly in Florida,” Judge Petersen said. “Florida, probably more than other places because of that rash of crimes, overreacted. It was a hysterical reaction.”
“People still go around saying things have never been worse,” he added. “But violent juvenile crime has gone down even as the juvenile population has grown.”
The state’s brief in Mr. Graham’s case said juvenile crime fell 30 percent in the decade ended in 2004. It attributed the drop to its tough approach.
Shay Bilchik, who served as a state prosecutor in Miami from 1977 to 1993 and is now the director of the Center for Juvenile Justice Reform at Georgetown, said the state took a wrong turn. “We were pretty aggressive in those years in transferring kids into criminal court,” he said.
He said later research convinced him that his office’s approach was much too aggressive and had not served to deter crime. “My biggest regret,” he said, “is that during the time I was in the prosecutor’s office, we were under the false impression that we were insuring greater public safety when we were not.”
Mr. Sullivan, 34, had committed a string of crimes by the time he was charged with raping a 72-year-old woman after a burglary in 1989 in Pensacola. Mr. Graham, 22, was sentenced to a year in jail and three years’ probation for a 2003 robbery of a Jacksonville restaurant, during which an accomplice beat the manager with a steel bar. Mr. Graham was sentenced to life in 2005 for violating probation by committing a home invasion robbery when he was 17.
Concern about tourism continues to drive crime policy in the state, said Kathleen M. Heide, a professor of criminology at the University of South Florida. “We’re at the more extreme level,” she said, “because our economy is so tied up with people coming here on vacation and feeling safe. And older people want to live out their retirements here and be safe.”
Florida is one of eight states with juvenile offenders serving life sentences without the possibility of parole for nonhomicide crimes, according to a report prepared by Professor Annino and two colleagues at Florida State. Louisiana has 17 such prisoners; California, Delaware, Iowa, Mississippi, Nebraska and South Carolina have the rest.
The number of such sentences in Florida was greater in the decade that ended in 2008 than in the decade before. The state sentenced nine juvenile offenders for nonhomicide crimes to life without parole in 2005 alone. “We’re just so far out from everyone else,” Professor Annino said.
Mr. Snyder said finding the right balance in addressing juvenile crime was difficult but should be left to the states. “People do things at 16 and 17 that they wouldn’t do at 37, but they spend a lifetime paying for it,” he said. “But we have to create an environment where our children are safe and our elderly are safe.” ..Source..
DC- U.S. Supreme Court to Examine Life in Prison for Juveniles
The cases are Sullivan v. Florida, 08-7621, and Graham v. Florida, 08-7412.
11-8-2009 Washington DC:
The Supreme Court is being asked to say that locking up juveniles and throwing away the key is cruel and unusual -- and thus, unconstitutional.
Joe Sullivan was sent away for life for raping an elderly woman and judged incorrigible though he was only 13 at the time of the attack.
Terrance Graham, implicated in armed robberies when he was 16 and 17, was given a life sentence by a judge who told the teenager he threw his life away.
They didn't kill anyone, but they effectively were sentenced to die in prison.
Life sentences with no chance of parole are rare and harsh for juveniles tried as adults and convicted of crimes less serious than killing. Just over 100 prison inmates in the United States are serving those terms, according to data compiled by opponents of the sentences.
Now the Supreme Court is being asked to say that locking up juveniles and throwing away the key is cruel and unusual -- and thus, unconstitutional. Other than in death penalty cases, the justices never before have found that a penalty crossed the cruel and unusual line. They will hear arguments Monday.
Graham, now 22, and Sullivan, now 33, are in Florida prisons, which hold more than 70 percent of juvenile defendants locked up for life for nonhomicide crimes. Although their lawyers deny their clients are guilty, the court will consider only whether the sentences are permitted by the Constitution.
The Supreme Court's latest look at how to punish young criminals flows directly from its 4-year-old decision to rule out the death penalty for anyone younger than 18.
In that 2005 case decided by a 5-4 vote, Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion talked about "the lesser culpability of the juvenile offender."
"From a moral standpoint it would be misguided to equate the failings of a minor with those of an adult, for a greater possibility exists that a minor's character deficiencies will be reformed," Kennedy said.
Yet Kennedy also acknowledged the possibility that for the worst crimes and the worst offenders, "the punishment of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole is itself a severe sanction, in particular for a young person."
Both sides point to the same basic facts -- the rare imposition of Draconian prison terms on people so young -- to make their point.
The state of Florida, backed by 19 other states, argues it should retain flexibility in sentencing so that "particularly heinous acts that stop short of causing death" can be punished vigorously.
Life without parole "is appropriately rare and reserved only for the worst of the worst offenders," crime victims' groups said in court papers.
Most victims of juvenile violence also are young, the victims groups said, citing Justice Department statistics. "Softening sentences for juvenile offenders puts actual children in harm's way -- innocent ones, not those who have committed violent crimes," the victims' groups said.
Opponents of such sentences said, however, that most states have in practice rejected life terms for juveniles when no one was killed. The 109 juveniles serving terms of life without parole are in Florida and seven other states -- California, Delaware, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska and South Carolina -- according to a Florida State University study. More than 2,000 other juveniles are serving life without parole for killing someone.
Only 9 people in the country are serving life sentences for crimes committed when they were 13. The number rises to 73 when 14-year-olds are added in.
No other country allows life sentences for young offenders, opponents say.
Beyond the infrequency of such punishment, lawyers for Graham and Sullivan argue that it is a bad idea to render a final judgment about people so young.
"They are unfinished products, works-in-progress," said Bryan Stevenson, who will argue Sullivan's case at the high court.
Actor Charles Dutton, former U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson and others who committed crimes as teenagers have weighed in against life without parole sentences. Corrections officials, psychologists, educators and even some victims also have taken Graham's and Sullivan's side.
"The crimes that these guys committed were grotesque," Simpson said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. "I'm sure people will say Simpson's gone soft in the head."
The Wyoming Republican served 18 years in the Senate, but as a teenager, he pleaded guilty to setting fire to an abandoned building on federal property and later spent a night in jail for slugging a police officer.
Simpson said he sees no good argument for refusing even to review their sentences after the passage of time.
"When they get to be 30 or 40 and they been in the clink for 20 years or 30 or 40 and they have learned how to read and how to do things, why not?"
If a prisoner shows he is not fit to be released, "throw him back in," he said. "That's better than saying 'Sorry, we can't look at that file because you were sent here for life."'
As their cases come to the court, Sullivan's and Graham's interests are not strictly aligned. The justices could, for example, decide that life sentences may be inappropriate for 13-year-olds, but allow them for older teenagers.
Such a decision could help Sullivan and another Florida inmate, Ian Manuel, who wounded a woman in a shooting when he was 13. But it could leave Graham with his sentence unchanged.
The cases are Sullivan v. Florida, 08-7621, and Graham v. Florida, 08-7412. ..Source..
November 7, 2009
Cruel life in prison
11-7-2009 National:
Editorial by LA Times
Juvenile offenders should not receive a sentence that offers no hope for eventual release.
The U.S. Supreme Court recognized in 2005 that it is unconstitutionally cruel to execute people for crimes committed before they were 18, because youths lack the sense of responsibility that society requires of adults. Their personalities are not yet fixed; they are more susceptible to the negative influences of other people or events. Society's understandable demand for retribution is necessarily blunted when the perpetrator of a crime is a juvenile. Likewise, the threat of a stiff penalty cannot have the same deterrent effect on a youth as it does on an adult; young people have too little experience to fully grasp the consequences of their actions.
The court on Monday will hear arguments in the cases of two Floridians sentenced, in effect, to eventually die in prison because they lack even the slightest chance of release on parole. The same reasoning that bars execution for crimes committed in youth should also block such sentences of life without hope for young people, at the very least for those whose crimes fall short of murder.
Terrance Jamar Graham was 16 when he joined two others in a failed attempt to rob a restaurant; a year later, he was on probation when he participated in a home invasion robbery. His crimes were brutal; he was a repeat offender; and he deserved to be punished, to be imprisoned, and even, perhaps, to be sentenced to life. But not without a chance, in the future, for a court or parole board to review his growth and development and consider another chance at parole.
There are, to be sure, youths who mature earlier than others, just as there are adults who never fully mature. But there must be a line, and age 18 is the point at which society determines people are ready to sign contracts, marry without parental consent, serve on juries and be drafted into the military.
Society can and should countenance a hopeless existence in prison for adult perpetrators. But not for juveniles. The U.S. is, for now, the only nation that has not banned life in prison without parole for juvenile offenders, and more than 2,000 are serving such terms behind bars.
But there are, fortunately, few in the position of Joe Sullivan, sentenced in Florida to life without parole for a crime he committed when he was only 13. That kind of sentence for a crime committed at such an early age shocks the conscience and cannot be seen as anything but unconstitutionally unusual -- as well as cruel. ..Source..
October 23, 2009
Adult Time for Adult Crimes
10-23-2009 National:
Is life without parole unconstitutional for juveniles?
"As any parent knows,” children are different. So said U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy more than four years ago in Roper v. Simmons. There, a deeply divided court ruled 5-4 that executing those who committed murder as juveniles violated the Eighth Amendment’s proscription against cruel and unusual punishment. Part of the reason, the court said, was that juveniles were less culpable, less mature and less responsible than adults.
“The reality that juveniles still struggle to define their identity means it is less supportable to conclude that even a heinous crime committed by a juvenile is evidence of irretrievably depraved character,” Kennedy wrote for the majority.
“From a moral standpoint,” he added, “it would be misguided to equate the failings of a minor with those of an adult, for a greater possibility exists that a minor’s character deficiencies will be reformed.”
This month the court returns to the subject of juvenile justice by examining what has been termed the penultimate punishment for juveniles, life without parole.
In a pair of cases from Florida, Graham v. Florida and Sullivan v. Florida, the court must determine whether Roper’s reasoning—that juvenile defendants are fundamentally different from adult defendants—extends from the death penalty to life without parole. Arguments are scheduled for Nov. 9.
“Life without parole can be considered as death in prison and the penultimate sanction,” says Florida State University law professor Wayne A. Logan, who has written on juvenile life without parole. “The court granting cert in two cases signals its concern about juvenile justice, which is a welcome development. Life without parole has become a live issue in the wake of the Roper case.”
Invalidating life sentences for juveniles would be “one more step in the direction of making a clear delineation between children and adults when it comes to criminal justice,” says Ashley Nellis, research analyst for the Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C.-based group that has filed an amicus brief in support of the juvenile defendants.
“Striking down juvenile LWOP sentences is a natural evolution from the Roper decision,” Nellis says. “It hopefully would reverse some of the policies over the last few decades that were overly punitive with respect to juvenile defendants.”
On the heels of fear about rising juvenile crime and reports of juvenile “super predators,” legislatures across the country enacted “adult crime, adult time” statutes, including automatic waiver laws that provide for the transfer of more youths from juvenile court into adult criminal court. The statutes also meant increased time and even life without parole for juvenile defendants who commit violent felonies.
In two separate cases, defendants Joe Harris Sullivan and Terrance Jamar Graham were sentenced to LWOP for nonhomicide crimes at ages 13 and 17, respectively. Sullivan was arrested in 1989 for allegedly committing sexual battery on an elderly victim whom he and two older co-defendants had burglarized. An older co-defendant fingered Sullivan for the crime. Years later, Sullivan filed a motion for post-conviction relief, arguing that Roper made his life sentence without parole unconstitutional. The reviewing Florida court rejected that argument, reasoning that previous cases in the state had rejected the application of Roper to non-death-penalty defendants.
Graham pleaded guilty to burglary and armed robbery charges in 2003 at age 16. He received three years’ probation with one year in a county jail. However, the next year Graham was arrested for a home invasion robbery and the state charged him with probation violations. A judge sentenced him to life in prison, telling Graham: “Given your escalating pattern of criminal conduct, it is apparent to the court that you have decided that this is the way you are going to live your life and that the only thing I can do now is to try to protect the community from your actions.”
DIFFERENT AGES, DIFFERENT OUTCOMES?
Both cases represent attractive vehicles to challenge the constitutionality of life without parole because neither defendant committed a homicide. A key aspect of the court’s Eighth Amendment jurisprudence is the disproportionality principle, that a sentence should not be grossly disproportionate to the underlying criminal offenses.
But some experts wonder why the Supreme Court decided to take two cases instead of one. Some say the justices could create a dividing line between younger and older juveniles. “They could reach different results [in the two cases],” says Nellis. “They could separate it by age.”
The Equal Justice Initiative—a nonprofit law organization in Montgomery, Ala., whose director, Bryan A. Stevenson, will argue for Sullivan before the Supreme Court—says Sullivan is one of only two people nationwide to have been sentenced to life without parole for a nonhomicide defense at age 13.
In his brief for Sullivan, Stevenson stresses the rarity of life-without-parole sentences for juveniles younger than 14, writing that there is “a nationwide total of only 73 such sentences having been imposed in a quarter of a million cases where they could have been.” He notes that “13- and 14-year-olds as a class are much less mature than 17-year-olds.”
Sullivan, now 33 years old and confined to a wheelchair, has maintained that an older co-defendant actually committed the sexual battery on the elderly woman they robbed.
PROSPECTS KEPT OPEN
Numerous amicus briefs have been filed on behalf of Sullivan and Graham seeking to persuade the court to extinguish LWOP sentences for juveniles. One of the more compelling comes from a group of former juvenile offenders who later achieved success, including actor Charles S. Dutton and former U.S. Sen. Alan K. Simpson. Dutton stabbed a person to death in a street fight at age 17, while Simpson committed arson on federal property, punched a cop and—in his own words—“was a monster.”
“We tried to present the views of several individuals who had been involved in criminal offenses when they were juveniles—some of whom may have been eligible for LWOP under particular state laws—and to explain what that kind of severe sentence would have meant for them,” says Washington, D.C.-based attorney David W. DeBruin, who filed the brief. “The individuals described in our brief had hope because they had the prospect of release. Knowing that they had a chance, they used the time in prison to resolve to do things differently and to obtain skills—and eventually they made outstanding contributions to society.”
In 1991, the Supreme Court rejected an Eighth Amendment challenge to an LWOP sentence imposed on an adult defendant charged with possessing large amounts of cocaine in Harmelin v. Michigan. “In its Eighth Amendment analysis, the court looks at the nature of the crime and the nature of the offender,” says Logan. “In these cases [Sullivan and Graham], the victims didn’t die but they were personal crimes unlike in Harmelin. A key question is whether the court will be amenable to imposing another categorical limitation with respect to punishments as it has done in the death penalty context with Roper and a handful of other cases.”
The court has emphasized that sentencing for criminal offenses is a legislative function entitled to great deference. Justice Kennedy stressed this point in his concurring opinion in Harmelin.
“Roper was wrongly decided, but it is manageable if contained on the death penalty side of the firebreak,” says Kent S. Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, the Sacramento, Calif., group that supports crime victims.
But, he adds, Roper “should not be extended at all. These are sentencing policy decisions to be made by the people of the several states through the democratic process. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the decision, it is the people’s to make. Nothing in the Constitution assigns that decision to the federal judiciary.”
But experts agree on the importance of the cases. “There is a tremendous amount at stake in these cases when you consider that life imprisonment without the possibility of parole is almost equivalent to a death sentence and gives the offender no chance of relief or release or hope,” DeBruin says.
“Death is different,” Nellis says, “but the larger message is that children are different.” ..Source.. by David L. Hudson Jr.
October 18, 2009
FL- Florida a leader in putting kids in jail for life
This opinion is based on two juvenile cases to be heard in the U.S. Supreme court this term: Terrance Graham v. State of Florida (08-7412) and Joe Sullivan v. State of Florida (08-7621).
10-18-2009 Florida:
The latest measure of Florida's medieval mind set comes in at 77.
Juxtapose that number against the 109 juveniles in all of the United States who have been consigned to prison until death for crimes not involving murder or attempted murder.
Of the 109, 77 are locked up in Florida prisons, according to a study by the Public Interest Law Center at Florida State University.
Florida may skimp on educating children, but when it comes to perpetual incarceration for kiddies, we're like no place else.
``We've far exceeded what goes on in the rest of the nation,'' said Paolo Annino, the center's supervising attorney.
The 50-state study found that 39 states have no juvenile convicts in non-homicide cases serving life without parole. After Florida, with 77, Louisiana is the next-most-draconian state on the law center's list with 17.
ALONE AMONG NATIONS
If Florida stands alone amid the states in its fervor to lock up juveniles for life, even for nonlethal crimes, then we're also set off from the rest of the world. Amnesty International, in a brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court, stated: ``Every other country in the world has rejected the practice of giving this sentence to offenders who were under 18 at the time they committed a crime.''
The Supreme Court, during this fall's term, will hear arguments over whether life sentences for kids convicted of crimes like armed robbery, rape and burglary so violates civilized norms that it constitutes cruel and usual punishment.
In 2005, the court tossed out the death penalty for juveniles, citing ``evolving standards of decency.''
Florida, of course, would be the last place to recognize evolving standards of decency in criminal justice. (An evolving standard of decency, in more-civilized locales, would not contemplate the state stashing sex offenders into a homeless camp under the Julia Tuttle Causeway.)
Both of the juvenile life-without-parole appeals up before the court (to be heard simultaneously) are Florida cases: a 13-year-old given life for rape in 1989 and a 16-year-old armed robber sent off for life in 2005.
NOT INTENDED
What is it about Florida? ``I don't think this was intended,'' said Professor Annino. ``It wasn't as if Florida lawmakers decided, OK, let's put all these kids in prison, life without parole, for non-murders. It wasn't planned or intended as social policy,'' he said. ``It was more of an accident.''
Back in the early 1990s, several deadly attacks on international tourists in Florida added a sense of urgency to a get-tough-on-juvenile-crime attitude in the Legislature. Juvenile offenders ``were threatening the state's bedrock tourism industry,'' the state's lawyers explained in their Supreme Court brief. Annino said the Legislature streamlined the process to try kids as adults, with adult sentences, with little consideration of the unintended consequences.
Lawmakers surely didn't envision 13-year-old non-killers trucked off to prison for life, although Florida has two such cases among the 77 prisoners.
But undoing get-tough legislation, no matter how crazy, requires the kind of leadership missing lately among Florida's risk-averse politicians. So we have kids sent to prison for life and sex offenders living under the Tuttle causeway, all to honor politically intractable laws that no serious criminologists find rational.
It's what sets Florida apart from the civilized universe. ..Editorial.. by Fred Grimm
August 19, 2009
Supreme Court Considers Constitutionality of Juvenile Life Without Parole
8-19-2009 National:
This coming term, the Supreme Court will consider the important companion cases of Sullivan v. Florida and Graham v. Florida. Together, they raise the question whether a sentence of life imprisonment without parole for a non-homicide offense committed by a juvenile offender violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments.
As a policy matter, I am sympathetic with the ultimate objective of reducing the severity of punishments in the U.S. However, as a legal matter, I will argue in this column that the Eighth Amendment case against juvenile life without parole is quite weak – given the Court’s precedents as well as the nature of the flaws inherent in harsh sentencing more generally.
The Policy Case Against Long Prison Sentences
To avoid my being misunderstood as a proponent of long sentences, let me emphasize here that I am not. In 1998, I interviewed recidivist child-molester Leroy Hendricks at his civil confinement program for sexually violent predators. One of the things he said that struck me as very insightful was that once a person has spent ten years inside a prison, he is extremely unlikely to be able, successfully, to re-integrate himself into free society. Life, as he put it, will have already passed that person by, the world having changed too much for him to catch up. This statement, if true, provides a pragmatic argument against long sentences for people who will someday have to rejoin the outside world. And what about sentences of life-imprisonment?
If someone will spend the rest of his life behind bars, we do not need to worry about re-entry difficulties. But we do, then, need to ask ourselves what the purpose of that confinement is. It is plainly retributive – a person who has committed a serious offense will, by design, suffer greatly by being deprived of both freedom and most contact with the outside world for the rest of his life. But is the desire to make the person suffer for his actions a sufficient basis for removing him from society for his entire life?
The answer would depend, it seems, on whether we believe that people change over time. If we think that a person who commits a murder at Time 1 remains precisely the same murderer-deserving-of-serious-punishment ten, twenty, and thirty years later, then it is sensible to have his punishment last for the entirety of his life. But if, on the other hand, we believe that people change over time – into different, perhaps more passive, reflective, or gentle people – then ruling out re-entry into society for them could be a mistake. It could prevent them from doing what it takes to redeem themselves after the injuries they previously inflicted and from growing into different sorts of people. It rules out the possibility of rehabilitation.
In addition to rejecting the rehabilitative role of punishment, a sentence of life imprisonment also imposes great costs on society generally, and on specific communities and families in particular. I still recall from when I lived in Manhattan that once a week, a few blocks from my apartment building, women and children – mostly members of minority groups – would line up for a long bus ride that had as its destination the penitentiary. These faithful family members of prisoners never gave up on their loved ones and though they themselves were innocent, they too suffered along with the people sentenced to serve time. An individual is not an island, and it is rarely possible to take one person out of commission without generating spillover effects on innocent others.
One answer to these concerns is to note that violent criminals may require incapacitation. That is, prison serves not only to punish and (in theory) to rehabilitate offenders, but also to prevent them from harming others. This objective of imprisonment is an important one. To the extent that we can predict future antisocial conduct, one important indicator is past behavior. A person who commits a violent crime has thus evidenced that he cannot be trusted with freedom.
This answer, however, ignores the fact that people do change over time. A man who is violent at the age of 25 is likely to slow down by the time he reaches 40. And it is difficult to imagine that, unless he belongs to the world of organized crime, he will continue to pose a threat to those around him when he reaches 60 or 65. One might even note that with the decline in testosterone over the male lifespan, the odds that such a man will behave violently diminish substantially, even when he begins in a very bad place. To rest sentences of life imprisonment on an incapacitation theory is therefore, in most cases, to ignore the realities of the human life cycle.
Life Imprisonment for Youthful Offenders
Though I have made clear above that I oppose long sentences in general and life imprisonment in particular, as a policy matter, I am nevertheless left strangely unconvinced by the arguments that have been marshaled to support the claim that juvenile life imprisonment violates the Eighth Amendment.
A principal argument, and perhaps the most powerful, made in fascinating detail in an amicus brief filed in the Sullivan and Graham cases by the AMA (American Medical Association) and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, has to do with brain development. As most of us probably suspected all along, adolescent brains are different from adult brains, and the result is that adolescents have a more difficult time controlling their impulses and regulating their own emotional states. They are also more vulnerable to the temptations of risk-taking behavior, the rewards of peer approval, and other potential triggers of anti-social conduct. As a result, the argument goes, adolescents who commit violent crimes are generally not as culpable (because they are not as capable of restraining themselves under a given set of circumstances) as adults who commit serious crimes. They are, moreover, more likely to evolve into better people later and therefore need not be incapacitated indefinitely.
One problem with this argument is that it proves too much. If the adolescent brain is functionally “impaired,” in an important sense, compared with the adult brain, then the Eighth Amendment should ban far more than life imprisonment for non-homicide offenses for juveniles: It should ban that punishment for all offenses committed by juveniles.
The distinction between homicide and non-homicide offenses becomes immaterial if the problem with sentencing juveniles to life imprisonment is their diminished capacity. A homicidal adolescent is no more able to control his impulses than a raping adolescent is to control his; the distinction between one crime and the other will likely have more to do with opportunity and surrounding circumstance than with capacity and thus culpability.
Thus, an argument against life imprisonment for juvenile non-homicide offenders is no less convincing as an argument against life imprisonment for juvenile murderers. Accordingly, it is unsurprising that the movement against life imprisonment of juveniles generally opposes both.
The specific selection of non-homicide offenses to limit the argument thus seems more of a marketing tool than a principled decision – and if the Eighth Amendment argument prevails in these cases, the next step would seem almost inevitable: advocates will claim that the Eighth Amendment necessarily bars life without parole for all juvenile offenders.
In addition, if juvenile offenders suffer from a diminished capacity to control their behavior, then sentences that fall far short of life imprisonment, too, could qualify as unduly harsh and unconstitutionally disproportionate under the Eighth Amendment. For example, any prison sentence for any offense by an adolescent that approaches the sentence for a parallel adult offender might appear to be disproportionate, given the likely disparity in relative capacity. Once again, the argument about juvenile capacity has no obvious stopping point at either non-homicide offenses or at life imprisonment itself.
A second problem with the argument about juvenile capacity is that it fails to capture what we know about adult offenders: Though youth is a corollary of crime, the adults who do commit anti-social acts appear to have much in common with adolescents. To put the point differently, though adults in general are different from adolescents, the adults who commit violent crimes may share far more with violent adolescents than they do with mature, well-adjusted adults. Violent crime frequently reflects a failure of impulse control, combined with an overly optimistic assessment of the likelihood of escaping ill consequences – traits that define adolescence. The sort of incapacity that plagues many youthful offenders is, for that reason, not likely to be unique to such offenders in the prison population.
To underline this second problem, we learn from a study published this year in the American Journal of Public Health that a quarter of prison inmates have a history of chronic mental illness that preceded their arrest. Adults who suffer from chronic mental illness presumably lack the capacity to exercise the self-control of a healthy and normal adult. The same may be true for the mentally retarded, though their prevalence in the prison population is lower. It is accordingly misleading to suggest that actual, incarcerated adult offenders could have readily exercised self-control in a manner unavailable to youthful offenders. Many people convicted of serious crimes could make a persuasive argument that their capacity to regulate their own behavior and to assess costs and benefits accurately is impaired. Yet such people routinely receive long and unforgiving prison sentences.
A third problem for the argument about minors’ diminished capacity is evident in noting the nature of the incapacity: According to the amicus brief referenced above (filed by the AMA and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry), “[t]he difference between adolescent and adult behavior … is not a function of adolescents’ inability to distinguish right from wrong … but rather from psychosocial limitations in their ability to consistently and reliably control their behavior.” (emphasis added).
Since Congress passed the Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984, however, the prevailing approach to incapacity has centered on cognition – the ability to distinguish between right and wrong – and not on control. This is in part because it is difficult to distinguish in a reliable way between a person who could not control herself and a person who simply did not control herself. The diminished capacity of juveniles, then, is of the sort that has fallen out of favor as a basis for mitigating and excusing anti-social conduct (at least outside the death penalty context).
A fourth problem with the argument might seem, at first glance, to recommend it. By contrast to other sorts of offenders, minors who commit crimes may not, since Roper v. Simmons, be sentenced to death. This categorical exclusion of minors, like the categorical exclusion of the mentally retarded in Atkins v. Virginia, represents an acceptance of the idea that there are categories of people who simply cannot be sufficiently culpable to deserve the ultimate penalty of death. The Court’s embrace of this idea might appear to open the way for similar arguments about life imprisonment.
What makes this appearance deceptive, however, is that the Court’s ruling in Atkins rests firmly on the “death is different” idea, which treats life imprisonment as not simply distinct in degree from execution, but different in kind. Therefore, if youths and mentally retarded people fall short – even to a minor degree – of the capacities that adults of normal intelligence have, this is reason enough to rule out execution, in particular, for them. But one of the things that has allowed the Court to rule out execution for such people is the very availability of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
That is, to the extent that execution is meant to serve the function of incapacitating irredeemably violent people forever, the availability of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole provides a roughly equivalent substitute for that. Without this substitute, the inability to execute youthful offenders – in at least some cases – might appear far more threatening.
Death is Different
One possible response to the last point is that execution has long been unavailable for non-homicide crimes (with the possible exception of treason), and this helps account for why this case focuses on life for non-homicides (where one cannot claim the need for a functional substitute for execution).
Or, to make this argument more affirmatively, one could argue that because the most severe penalty available for offenses committed by a juvenile is life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, this penalty should be reserved for homicide, just as – in the case of adults – the death penalty is reserved for homicide.
The main problem with this argument has less to do with logic than with Court precedent. In carving out special rules for the death penalty, including the rule establishing its unconstitutionality with respect to crimes less serious than murder, the Court has consistently relied on the idea that death is qualitatively different from any term of imprisonment. When litigants have attempted to move the Eighth Amendment proportionality principle from the death penalty context to that of incarceration, the Court has generally rejected the move in application.
In Rummel v. Estelle, for example, the Court in 1980 upheld a life sentence in a recidivist statute for a defendant convicted of three nonviolent property crimes (netting less than $300 total). The Court did strike down a life-without-parole sentence (for a recidivist offender convicted of writing a bad check) in Solem v. Helm a few years later, giving some hope that the Eighth Amendment could become a vehicle for invalidating long sentences. However, in 1991, in Harmelin v. Michigan, the Court upheld a mandatory sentence of life without parole for the possession of over 650 grams of cocaine, even as three Justices in the majority agreed with the dissent that some sentences might be so long relative to the seriousness of a crime that they would violate the Eighth Amendment. Finally, in Ewing v. California., the Court upheld the California “three strikes” law under which the petitioner was sentenced to 25-years-to-life for stealing three golf clubs worth $399 each.
None of these cases rules out the possibility that life imprisonment for a juvenile offender’s non-homicide crime violates the Eighth Amendment. Nonetheless, it seems counterintuitive for the Court to maintain that life imprisonment is constitutionally excessive punishment for a juvenile rapist, but constitutionally unobjectionable for an adult nonviolent property or drug possession offender. On the other hand, of course, the Supreme Court did grant certiorari in two cases of juvenile life-without-parole sentences in which the government won below, so it may – not for the first time – decide to take a counterintuitive approach in this instance.
My Hope
Despite what I have said here, I hope that the Supreme Court says that life imprisonment without the possibility of parole is unconstitutional for non-homicide offenses committed by juvenile offenders. The reason for my hope is several-fold. First, it is high time that the Court actively embraced the principle that a prison sentence can be disproportionately lengthy, whether the measure of disproportion is capacity or whether it is the seriousness of an offense.
Second, life imprisonment without the possibility for parole is almost always a mistake, given the fact that people – both children and adults – change over time; the impact of such sentences on society, communities, and families; and the possibility of redemption. If the Court does strike down the sentences of the two offenders who brought their appeals, moreover, I predict that the Court will soon be willing to reconsider harsh sentences across the board. This is precisely because the arguments for distinguishing juvenile non-homicides as a special case are, indeed, as unpersuasive as I have argued that they are in this column. ..Source.. by SHERRY F. COLB
May 2, 2009
CA- California's juvenile injustice system
The editorial blow was from 4-29-09 and speaks about the unjust juvenile justice system. One day after the editorial was published one person ( ANTONIO DE JESUS NUÑEZ ) mentioned received a court opinion declaring that the system is unconstitutional.
5-2-2009 California:
The state sentences children as young as 14 to life without parole. A state Senate bill would bring some sanity to the situation.
Children, even really bad ones, are different from adults. That basic truth is the foundation of our juvenile justice system, which seeks to protect society from violent youth while recognizing that they haven't yet developed an adult's brainpower, resistance to peer pressure, judgment and thus moral capacity. It's the underpinning of the U.S. Supreme Court's 2005 ruling in Roper vs. Simmons, which banned execution of inmates for crimes they committed as children.
That doesn't stop California from locking up children as young as 14 for life without even the most remote possibility of parole. There are more than 200 such offenders living out their lives in prison here, with no chance -- despite any maturing, any repentance, any burgeoning awareness of the wrongness of their actions -- of asking for parole, even decades into adulthood. That's costly, cruel and foolish.
Knowing they will live and die in prison, people who acted in the rashness of youth have no hope of returning to society, and therefore no reason to learn, or grow, or mature, or reform. But surely their example will dissuade other youth from crime? Nonsense. Kids who can't imagine next year can't imagine life in prison and can't be expected to make decisions based on something as obscure to them as parole.
Consider, as well, cases such as Antonio Nunez of South Los Angeles, who at 14 was in a car with two adults when someone in the vehicle fired at police. No one was injured, but the boy was sentenced to life in prison forever. It's not an unusual story in this city, where adult gang members recruit teens to help them out and take the fall. Dickens would have a field day.
SB 399, by state Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco), would give a few of California's youth imprisoned without parole some very narrow hope of a future. It would permit a judge, at least a decade after the sentencing, to consider substituting a sentence of 25 years to life. The inmate would still have to serve a quarter of a century before even being eligible to ask for parole.
Even this modest, sane and humane reform could fail in Sacramento on the specious assertion that the state would be unable to bear the cost of an occasional additional parole hearing; we will instead continue to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for a lifetime of imprisonment because of the actions of a teenager. No wonder California can't manage a prison system or balance a budget.
Of all the nations of the world, only the United States permits life without parole for children. Even here, a growing number of states have banned the practice. California should too, but in the meantime, Yee's bill is a sane start. ..Editorial Source.. by Los Angeles Times
