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
October 18, 2009
FL- Florida a leader in putting kids in jail for life
July 7, 2009
Should Minors Ever Face Life Without Parole?
7-7-2009 National:
Four years ago the high court decided no minor should face the death penalty. Now it's poised to determine if youths should face life without a chance of parole.
The Supreme Court's 2005 decision in Roper v. Simmons struck down the death penalty for juveniles, citing the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. But that left another possible Eighth Amendment issue on the table: whether sentences of life without parole for juveniles are constitutional.
That question is now being considered on both the judicial and legislative levels. In the term beginning this October, the Supremes will hear two cases — one involving a 13-year-old sex offender, the other a 17-year-old probation violator present when a felony murder occurred — both aiming to challenge life-without-parole sentences for juveniles (known by the unwieldy acronym JLWOP). Concurrently, the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security has been gathering testimony on a bill that would mandate parole hearings for JLWOP prisoners. The bill covers federal cases and gives states a financial incentive to comply with its terms.
"There is so much attention on this issue right now," says Baylor Law School professor Mark Osler, who has testified in favor of the proposed House bill, H.R. 2289. "I think in part it's because you have groups doing a good job advocating on it, and the idea is becoming more and more prevalent — that instead of wholesale change, we are smoothing off the rougher edges of the justice system, and that includes a focus on children."
Opponents to a change suggest that a focus on the prisoners as children, and not offenders, is wrong-headed and ahistorical. In its brief before the Supreme Court in the 13-year-old sex offender case, the State of Florida Attorney General's Office wrote, "Outside the context of the death penalty, this Court has always examined whether a sentence is grossly disproportionate under the Eighth Amendment by examining the sentence in relation to the offender's instant offense and prior offenses, not the individual characteristics of offender, such as age or mental capacity."
But the historical precedence is under assault.
"Juvenile crime has been going down, so people are starting to use that as political cover to raise the issue of why we have these overly punitive juvenile justice policies in place," said Ashley Nellis of the Sentencing Project. "And it's just a good time to be re-examining policies fiscally because incarceration is expensive, and life sentences are the most expensive."
The United States is one of the few countries that hand out JLWOP sentences. A 2005 Amnesty International study found that life without parole for juveniles is theoretically available in a dozen countries, but besides the U.S., only three others actually had teens serving such sentences — Israel with seven, South Africa with four and Tanzania with one.
In contrast, Sentencing Project Executive Director Mark Maurer noted in his testimony before the House subcommittee that 2,500 U.S. teenagers are incarcerated with no hope of release, most of them people of color. A majority of these — as many as 60 percent — are first-time offenders, and more than one quarter were convicted of felony murder, meaning they were participating in a crime when a murder occurred, but didn't do the actual killing.
"That's typical in a juvenile case where they are hanging out with older kids," Nellis says. "They don't realize they will do something bad, someone dies, and they wind up with life without parole."
An example of this is the case of Rebecca Falcon, a Florida 15-year-old who in 1997 hailed a cab with a gun-toting 18-year-old friend. The driver was shot in the head and died. Although it was never established in court who pulled the trigger — the teens accused each other — because Falcon was on the scene, she was sentenced to life without parole.
JLWOP sentences contravene several international treaties, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child (which has been ratified by every country except the U.S. and Somalia), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (which the U.S. has signed) and a 2007 U.N. General Assembly resolution calling on all nations to abolish the juvenile death penalty and JLWOP (the vote was 176-1, the U.S. dissenting).
Despite the international momentum, the U.S. is just beginning to discuss the issue. One reason, says Nellis, is the ongoing fear the public has about so-called "bad seed" children in their midst.
"There was this tough-on-crime perspective that dominated in the '90s," she says, "and you can see this in laws that moved juveniles into the adult system. There was also this public outcry promoted by politicians that there was this super predator, that laws needed to be toughened to deal with this kind of juvenile."
Professor Osler adds that because many of these JLWOP sentences are "concentrated in a few states — California, Pennsylvania, Michigan — and they're not the states you'd expect [meaning places like Texas, with its high adult execution rate] ... my suspicion is that there was a political moment where that seemed like the answer to a problem, whether it was youth violence or gangs."
The trouble here is that these sentences send a message that the juvenile, no matter how young, is irredeemable, and that, Osler says, "is the argument you hear over and over, that there's no hope for change based on what we saw them do."
Yet this kind of thinking is contradicted by research, which has found that adolescent brains are undeveloped in areas associated with impulse control, emotional response, risk assessment and moral reasoning. Which means, says Bryan A. Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative, who testified on hearings about H.R. 2289, that "young teens experience widely fluctuating emotions and vulnerability to stress and peer pressure without the adult ability to resist impulses and risk-taking behavior or the adult capacity to control their emotions."
In fact, some social scientists believe full emotional and moral maturity doesn't occur until people are in their 20s, which means an incarcerated teenager, given the proper counseling and rehabilitation (a big if), could conceivably mature into a responsible adult.
This is what H.R. 2289 is trying to take into account. The bill would mandate that every JLWOP prisoner "receives, not less than once during the first 15 years of incarceration, and not less than every three years thereafter, a meaningful opportunity for parole or other form of supervised release." States in noncompliance of this mandate would be penalized by a 10 percent cut in the anticrime funding they would normally receive under the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968.
While a number of high-profile organizations, such as Human Rights Watch and The Center for Law and Global Justice at the University of San Francisco School of Law have produced reports castigating the U.S. for its policies on JLWOP, and PBS's Frontline documentary series produced a 2007 piece, "When Kids Get Life," widely viewed as sympathetic to the cause, opponents of loosening sentences have stood their ground. Critics of the act, which include the National District Attorneys Association, claim it is yet another example of the federal government butting into state issues and lumps all JLWOP offenders into the same eligible-for-parole category no matter how heinous the offense.
"That [last argument] would make a lot more sense if you required a mandatory release date," Osler says. "This bill is just about parole, and a lot of people up for parole never get parole. If you have a kid in for 15 years, and he still has a lot of problems, that kid will not be released."
But as Santa Mateo County, Calif., District Attorney James P. Fox noted in his testimony, the mere fact that a juvenile was prosecuted as an adult suggests he or she already has a lot of problems.
"The unwritten but clear implication of this proposed legislation is that too many juvenile offenders are prosecuted and sentenced as adults in our country," he testified. "The reality is, in fact, quite the opposite. Very few juveniles are prosecuted and sentenced as adults in America, contrary to the unwritten implication of this proposed legislation and a public misperception driven in large part by sensationalistic media coverage of certain high-profile cases. Few jurisdictions in America prosecute more than 1 to 2 percent of juvenile criminal offenders as adults, and in some jurisdictions, this percentage is even lower. In those cases where adult-court prosecution does occur, the simple fact of the matter is that adult-court prosecution is clearly warranted in these instances."
No one knows if H.R. 2289 will become law (it has yet to be voted out of committee), but with the Democratic majority in Congress, it probably has a decent shot. In the meantime, the two cases coming before the Supreme Court will go a long way toward determining how this country deals with its juvenile criminals. Yet because of the significant differences between them, people like Nellis are predicting a split decision.
"My expectation is that they will answer two different questions," she says. "They may talk about juvenile life for very young ages in the Sullivan case [the 13-year-old sex offender], and they might deal with probation violations in the second case. We're hopeful that at the very least life without parole cannot be used in non-homicide cases." ..Source.. by Lewis Beale
May 14, 2009
NJ- High court upholds no-parole sentences
5-14-2009 New Jersey:
The state Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the constitutionality of replacing the death penalty with a sentence of life in prison without parole for a onetime death-row inmate from Middlesex County if a jury can find the necessary qualifying factors.
In a 5-2 decision in the case of Steven R. Fortin, the high court said that the defendant's constitutional rights would not be violated by imposing a sentence of life in prison without parole if a jury found the same factors necessary for imposing the death penalty.
After the state Legislature abolished the death penalty in 2007, two defendants in the Shore area, Richard Toledo in Ocean County and Rosario "Russell" Miraglia in Monmouth County, received sentences of life in prison without parole for convictions in what had once been capital murder cases.
But Ronald F. DeLigny, first assistant Ocean County prosecutor, and Peter Warshaw, first assistant prosecutor in Monmouth County, said the Fortin decision has no impact on them.
That is because those defendants committed the murders for which they are serving life in prison without parole after 2000, when the state Legislature enacted a law allowing for those sentences in certain capital cases.
The murder Fortin was convicted of was committed on Aug. 11, 1994.
In 2001, Fortin, now 44, of Carteret was tried and convicted of capital murder in the death of Melissa Padilla, a 25-year-old mother of four from Woodbridge who was attacked while walking home from a grocery store. She was sexually assaulted, beaten, strangled and left in a drain pipe.
Fortin was sentenced to death, but the state Supreme Court in 2005 overturned his conviction and sentence, citing mistakes at trial.
Fortin was retried in 2007 and again convicted, but before the penalty phase of the trial could begin, the Legislature abolished the death penalty and replaced it with life in prison without parole. Prosecutors applied to have Fortin sentenced under the amended law to life in prison without parole, but the trial judge denied the application, and the prosecution appealed.
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Attorneys with the state Public Defender's Office argued that a sentence of life in prison without parole would subject Fortin unfairly to a punishment not available when he committed the crime and one that is more severe than life in prison with a 30-year period of parole ineligibility, which was on the books at the time.
Attorneys with the Middlesex County Prosecutor's Office argued that the death penalty was more severe than life without parole, so imposing life without parole would not violate Fortin's rights.
RELATED
Summary of ruling on life sentences without parole
Chief Justice Stuart Rabner and Justices Jaynee LaVecchia, Roberto A. Rivera-Soto and Helen E. Hoens joined in an opinion written by Justice John E. Wallace saying that Fortin's constitutional rights would not be violated so long as a jury weighs the aggravating and mitigating factors before making a determination if he qualifies for life in prison without parole, using the same process it would have to decide if he qualified for a death sentence.
Justices Barry T. Albin and Virginia Long wrote a dissenting opinion saying that retroactively applying the law would violate Fortin's rights and is inconsistent with the high court's prior opinions in the case.
Toledo and Miraglia were both facing capital charges when the Legislature abolished the death penalty.
Toledo, 24, pleaded guilty in Ocean County last year to the Jan. 19, 2006, clawhammer murders of two Stafford brothers, Karlo Gonzalez, 14, and Zabdiel Gonzalez, 7, and to kidnapping the boys' mother, Wanda Gonzalez. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole for the murder of the younger boy, life in prison with 63 3/4 years without parole for the murder of the older boy, and 30 years in prison for the kidnapping.
Miraglia, 36, was tried in Monmouth County last year and convicted of the murders of his grandmother, Julia Miraglia, 88, and ex-girlfriend, Leigh Martinez, 31, who were both beheaded and dismembered in their Ocean Township home on June 8, 2004. Miraglia was sentenced to two consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole.
Attorneys with the state Public Defender's Office argued that a sentence of life in prison without parole would subject Fortin unfairly to a punishment not available when he committed the crime and one that is more severe than life in prison with a 30-year period of parole ineligibility, which was on the books at the time.
Attorneys with the Middlesex County Prosecutor's Office argued that the death penalty was more severe than life without parole, so imposing life without parole would not violate Fortin's rights.
Chief Justice Stuart Rabner and Justices Jaynee LaVecchia, Roberto A. Rivera-Soto and Helen E. Hoens joined in an opinion written by Justice John E. Wallace saying that Fortin's constitutional rights would not be violated so long as a jury weighs the aggravating and mitigating factors before making a determination if he qualifies for life in prison without parole, using the same process it would have to decide if he qualified for a death sentence.
Justices Barry T. Albin and Virginia Long wrote a dissenting opinion saying that retroactively applying the law would violate Fortin's rights and is inconsistent with the high court's prior opinions in the case.
Toledo and Miraglia were both facing capital charges when the Legislature abolished the death penalty.
Toledo, 24, pleaded guilty in Ocean County last year to the Jan. 19, 2006, clawhammer murders of two Stafford brothers, Karlo Gonzalez, 14, and Zabdiel Gonzalez, 7, and to kidnapping the boys' mother, Wanda Gonzalez. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole for the murder of the younger boy, life in prison with 63 3/4 years without parole for the murder of the older boy, and 30 years in prison for the kidnapping.
Miraglia, 36, was tried in Monmouth County last year and convicted of the murders of his grandmother, Julia Miraglia, 88, and ex-girlfriend, Leigh Martinez, 31, who were both beheaded and dismembered in their Ocean Township home on June 8, 2004. Miraglia was sentenced to two consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole. ..News Source.. by Kathleen Hopkins, STAFF WRITER
January 28, 2009
MI- Under new law, child molester Aaron Michael Snyder gets life in prison
1-28-2009 Michigan:
MUSKEGON COUNTY — For the first time in modern Muskegon County history, a nonmurderer has gotten the toughest sentence Michigan has to give: mandatory life in prison without chance of parole.
That sentence was handed down Tuesday to repeat child molester Aaron Michael Snyder, 34, of 1547 Auble. Snyder pleaded guilty as charged Jan. 12 to first-degree criminal sexual conduct with a person younger than 13.
Muskegon County 14th Circuit Judge James M. Graves Jr. handed down the sentence. But it wasn't Graves' call: under a 2006 state law, applied here for the first time, the prison-until-death sentence wasn't optional.
Because Snyder has a prior child-sex conviction -- a 1993 Newaygo County conviction of second-degree criminal sexual conduct with a child younger than 13 -- the life-without-parole sentence was mandatory.
Snyder's guilty plea was conditional. At the time he made it, he reserved the right to appeal his sentence and the validity of the state law.
In Snyder's case, sentencing guidelines in the absence of the "mandatory life" law called for a minimum prison term of somewhere between 6 3/4 and 14 years, Graves said in court. But, he noted, those guidelines were "academic" in Snyder's case.
In court Tuesday, Snyder did not address the sentence itself. He said he had already apologized to the victim's family, his own family and added an apology to the judge.
Snyder also asked Graves to recommend sex offender counseling for him while in prison -- which the judge did -- and to order him held in a Muskegon County prison, which the judge said he has no authority to do.
Snyder, already a registered sex offender, was charged last July. The offense involved an 8-year-old boy at Snyder's Laketon Township home, according to Muskegon County Prosecutor Tony Tague. Tague said in addition to the Newaygo County conviction, Snyder later molested a young person while living at a Teen Challenge facility in Missouri. ..News Source.. by John S. Hausman | The Muskegon Chronicle
February 26, 2008
GA- State Supreme Court throws out life-without-parole sentence for convicted rapist
2-26-2008 Georgia:
State prosecutors cannot obtain a sentence of life in prison without parole against someone who rapes a child unless they are seeking the death penalty, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled Monday.
In a 4-3 opinion, the court said a Grady County judge lacked the authority to sentence Rodolfo Lopez Velazquez to life without parole for the June 2005 rape of a 7-year-old girl. Velazquez, who must now be resentenced, faces a sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole.
case because were barred from doing so in a case involving rape when the victim is not murdered.
But Justice Harris Hines, writing for the majority, said that the U.S. Supreme Court in 1977 ruled the death penalty unconstitutional only for the rape of an adult woman. Neither the U.S. Supreme Court nor the Georgia Supreme Court "has yet addressed whether the death penalty is unconstitutionally disproportionate for the crime of raping a child," Hines wrote.
The U.S. Supreme Court could decide the issue this year. In January, it agreed to hear an appeal of a Louisiana man who was sentenced to death in 2004 for raping an 8-year-old girl.
In Georgia, if the death penalty is sought, the defendant can be sentenced to life with parole, life without parole or death. Even though the Legislature in 1999 passed an amendment allowing life-without-parole for the crime of rape, the state Supreme Court's own precedent in a 1996 decision handed does not allow it —unless death is sought by the prosecution, Hines wrote.
Justice George Carley, joined by Justices Carol Hunstein and Harold Melton, dissented. "If the majority were correct, the Legislature accomplished nothing" by amending the law in 1999, Carley said. ..more.. by BILL RANKIN, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
