US Supreme Court Rejects Restrictions On Life Without Parole For Juveniles

[Syt]

I have not much on the matter, but I would be interested to read what our resident law talkers here think of this.

https://www.npr.org/2021/04/22/989822872/supreme-court-rejects-restrictions-on-life-without-parole-for-juveniles

Supreme Court Rejects Restrictions On Life Without Parole For Juveniles

The U.S. Supreme Court's new conservative majority made a U-turn on Thursday, ruling by a 6-3 vote, that a judge need not make a finding of "permanent incorrigibility" before sentencing a juvenile offender to life without parole.

It was the first time in almost two decades that the high court has deviated from rules establishing more leniency for juvenile offenders, even those convicted of murder.

At the center of the case was Brett Jones, now 31, who was 15 when he stabbed his grandfather to death during a fight about Jones' girlfriend. He was convicted of murder, and a judge sentenced him to life without parole.

"In such a case, a discretionary sentencing system is both constitutionally necessary and constitutionally sufficient," the court's conservative justices wrote.

Writing for the majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said: "As this case again demonstrates, any homicide, and particularly a homicide committed by an individual under 18, is a horrific tragedy for all involved and for all affected."

He added: "Determining the proper sentence in such a case raises profound questions of morality and social policy. The States, not the federal courts, make those broad moral and policy judgments in the first instance when enacting their sentencing laws. And state sentencing judges and juries then determine the proper sentence in individual cases in light of the facts and circumstances of the offense, and the background of the offender."

Over the past two decades, the law on juvenile sentencing has changed significantly. The Supreme Court — primed by research that shows the brains of juveniles are not fully developed, and that they are likely to lack impulse control — has issued a half dozen opinions holding that juveniles are less culpable than adults for their acts. And the court has also ruled that some of the harshest punishments for acts committed by children are unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment.

After striking down the death penalty for juvenile offenders, the court, in a series of decisions, limited life without parole sentences to the rarest cases — those juvenile offenders convicted of murder who are so incorrigible that there is no hope for their rehabilitation.

But all of those decisions were issued when the makeup of the court was quite different than it is now. This case was the first time the court has heard arguments in a juvenile sentencing case with three Trump appointees on the bench, including new Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who replaced the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Previously, Justice Anthony Kennedy, who retired in 2018, repeatedly was the deciding vote in cases involving life sentences and other harsh punishments for juvenile offenders. But with Kennedy retired and replaced by Kavanaugh, and with Ginsburg replaced by Barrett, the court in this case indicated that it is not inclined to go the extra mile to protect juvenile offenders from the harshest punishments.

"It's like the wind was blowing one way and now it's blowing in the opposite direction," says Donald Ayer, a former prosecutor and deputy attorney general in Republican administrations. He and other former prosecutors and judges, including two former Republican U.S. Attorneys General, filed a brief siding with Jones in this case.

Jones was originally sentenced to life without parole in 2004, but when the Supreme Court ruled that those, like Jones, who committed crimes when they were minors could not be automatically sentenced to life terms, he had to be resentenced. By then, he had spent a decade in prison, had graduated from high school, and earned a record as a model prisoner.

At his resentencing hearing, the judge did consider Jones' youth at the time of the crime, but again sentenced him to life without parole. The judge did not make any finding that Jones was so incorrigible that he had no hope of rehabilitation.

Jones' lawyer appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, contending that consideration of a defendant's youth is not enough and that Jones, now in his 30s, should have at least a chance at parole because he has shown he is capable of rehabilitation.

Twenty-five states ban life without parole for juveniles entirely. And six more states do not have anyone serving that sentence for a crime committed when a juvenile. But 19 states do allow life without parole for juvenile murderers.

In a withering dissent Thursday, Justice Sonia Sotomayor used language from Justice Kavanaugh's past opinions to write that the court's decision was "an abrupt break from precedent." She accused he majority of using "contortions" and "distortions" to "circumvent" legal precedent. The majority, she said, "is fooling no one."

The court's previous rulings, she wrote, require that most children be spared from punishments that give "no chance for fulfillment outside prison walls" and "no hope." She quoted Jones as saying at his resentencing hearing, "I've pretty much taken every avenue that I could possibly take ... to rehabilitate myself ... I can't change what I've done. I can just try to show ... I've become a grown man."

Thursday's ruling will certainly make it more difficult for juvenile offenders like Jones to show judges they deserve another chance at freedom somewhere down the road, says Cardozo Law School's Kathryn Miller. "It's going to be much harder to convince judges" that evidence of rehabilitation is relevant, she says.

"A lot of times these judges really want to still focus on the facts of the crime" even though it is years or decades later, she said. "They're not interested in the rehabilitation narrative."

Neither, it seems, is the newly constituted conservative Supreme Court majority.

[The Minsky Moment]

It's a dishonest decision. 

It's like those movie blurbs where the reviewer says something like: "Despite the presence of such comedic talents, Shitty Movie III is a hot confused mess, marred by bad acting, an asinine plot and poor writing that only rarely delivers the laughs promised by the billing." and the blurb turns it into "Such comedic talents .   . delivers the laughs."

A prior Supreme Court decision - Montgomery, which is accepted as precedential, stated, in full context:

Louisiana suggests that Miller cannot have made a constitutional distinction between children whose crimes reflect transient immaturity and those whose crimes reflect irreparable corruption because Miller did not require trial courts to make a finding of fact regarding a child's incorrigibility. That this finding is not required, however, speaks only to the degree of procedure Miller mandated in order to implement its substantive guarantee. When a new substantive rule of constitutional law is established, this Court is careful to limit the scope of any attendant procedural requirement to avoid intruding more than necessary upon the States' sovereign administration of their criminal justice systems.  . . . Fidelity to this important principle of federalism, however, should not be construed to demean the substantive character of the federal right at issue. That Miller did not impose a formal factfinding requirement does not leave States free to sentence a child whose crime reflects transient immaturity to life without parole. To the contrary, Miller established that this punishment is disproportionate under the Eighth Amendment.

Kavanaugh reduces this passage to the following: "a finding of fact regarding a child's incorrigibility . . . is not required," ignoring the rest of the context including the part I bolded. He actually repeats the same mangled blurb SEVEN TIMES in his badly written opinion, as if he thinks the people reading it have severe reading comprehension problems or as if he is trying to make himself heard in a noisy frat party.  But he ignores what the case actually held - which is that while individual states can devise their own procedural mechanisms to ensure that courts take into consideration the relative incorrigibility and susceptibility to rehabilitation of a child before sticking the child behind bars for life without any hope of release, they have to do something.   The court in this case didn't do that. But Kavanaugh gets around that by ripping the heart out of Montgomery, ignoring what the case actually said and did and reducing it to 11 words broken up by an ellipsis.

That level of dissimulation was too much for Clarence Thomas who at least had the courage to call out what was happening -  Montgomery was being cast aside, and made the honest if still wrong argument that the case should be overruled.

The lesson is more of what we already knew - this is going to be a very activist court - as hard right as the Warren Court was left at its height - and we are just getting started in terms of its reconstruction of the Constitution and demolition of precedent.

[Oexmelin]

Whiny former frat boy/abuser want other teens' mistakes to haunt them forever.

[Eddie Teach]

That doesn't explain the other 5 votes.

[The Brain]

Whiny Swedish Languish poster wants cake.

[The Minsky Moment]

That doesn't explain the other 5 votes.

Roberts and Alito both dissented in the earlier case; they believed in the unfettered rights of states to lock up kids for life and presumably still do. Given a choice between Kavanaugh's mangling of precedent and Thomas' overruling, they preferred to take the safer if less courageous stance.  And they've a carried the new folks with them.

[grumbler]

That doesn't explain the other 5 votes.

What doesn't explain the other five votes?

The hard right has been packing the court for two decades.  That explains the other five votes.

And, Minsky, states have powers, not rights.

[The Minsky Moment]

And, Minsky, states have powers, not rights.

Sure I know that.  Now you just need to convince 6 supreme court justices of the fact.

[grumbler]

That doesn't explain the other 5 votes.

Roberts and Alito both dissented in the earlier case; they believed in the unfettered rights of states to lock up kids for life and presumably still do. Given a choice between Kavanaugh's mangling of precedent and Thomas' overruling, they preferred to take the safer if less courageous stance.  And they've a carried the new folks with them.

Roberts flip-flopped.  He was in the majority in both Montgomery and Jones, which reached diametrically opposite conclusions.  That's really disheartening.

[The Minsky Moment]

He authored a dissenting opinion in Miller v Alabama: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/10-9646.pdf

The reasoning was that even if the punishment might be cruel it wasn't unusual.

He did join the majority in Montgomery - I got that wrong.

[Eddie Teach]

That doesn't explain the other 5 votes.

What doesn't explain the other five votes?

Oex's comment, directly above.

[grumbler]

That doesn't explain the other 5 votes.

What doesn't explain the other five votes?

Oex's comment, directly above.

Why does he have to explain all the votes when he is writing about the opinion itself?