Supreme Court Rejects Restrictions On Life Without Parole For Juveniles

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 6-3 vote, ruled Thursday that a judge need not make a finding of "permanent incorrigibility" before sentencing a juvenile offender to life without parole. At the center of the case was Brett Jones who was 15 when he stabbed his grandfather to death during an argument 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 make-up 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 Ginsburg replaced by Barrett, the court in this case indicated that it is far less inclined to go the extra mile to protect juvenile offenders from harsh, or the harshest punishments. Mississippi is one of only a half dozen states that do not require an explicit finding of permanent incorrigibility prior to sentencing a juvenile to life with prison without parole.

The Jones case involved how to apply the prior Supreme Court rulings.

Close to a decade after Jones was sentenced to life without parole, the Supreme Court ruled that those, like Jones, who committed crimes when they were minors could not be automatically sentenced to life terms. Because Jones had been one of those who had received such an automatic life without parole sentence, the Mississippi Supreme Court ordered him to be resentenced. The judge did that, considering 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.

Mississippi is among a handful of states that allows a life without parole sentence for juvenile crimes without requiring a finding of "permanent incorrigibility."

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 — he has earned a high school degree while behind bars and has been a model prisoner.

During arguments last November, Jones' lawyer, Northwestern University law professor David Shapiro, told the court that "Mississippi's courts have denied the permanent incorrigibility rule itself, and the state continues that denial in this Court" by insisting that weighing the defendant's youth against his crime was enough.

But at the time. Mississippi Deputy Solicitor General Krissy Nobile countered that in resentencing Jones, the state court considered the mitigating circumstances of Jones's youth and its attendant characteristics before exercising discretion to impose a life-without-parole sentence. And that, she argued, is all that the U.S. Supreme Court has required.

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 said the court was attempting to "circumvent" legal precedent and "is fooling no one." [Copyright 2021 NPR]