Criminal Procedure — cruel and unusual punishment – juveniles — mandatory life sentences

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Criminal Procedure — cruel and unusual punishment – juveniles — mandatory life sentences

The Eighth Amendment forbids a sentencing scheme that mandates life in prison without possibility of parole for juvenile homicide offenders.

While Graham’s flat ban on life without parole was for nonhomicide crimes, nothing that Graham said about children is crime-specific. Thus, its reasoning implicates any life-without-parole sentence for a juvenile, even as its categorical bar relates only to nonhomicide offenses. Most fundamentally, Graham insists that youth matters in determining the appropriateness of a lifetime of incarceration without the possibility of parole. The mandatory penalty schemes at issue here, however, prevent the sentencer from considering youth and from assessing whether the law’s harshest term of imprisonment proportionately punishes a juvenile offender. This contravenes Graham’s (and also Roper’s) foundational principle: that imposition of a State’s most severe penalties on juvenile offenders cannot proceed as though they were not children.

Graham also likened life-without-parole sentences for juveniles to the death penalty. That decision recognized that life-without-parole sentences “share some characteristics with death sentences that are shared by no other sentences.” 560 U. S., at ___. And it treated life without parole for juveniles like this Court’s cases treat the death penalty, imposing a categorical bar on its imposition for nonhomicide offenses. By likening life-without-parole sentences for juveniles to the death penalty, Graham makes relevant this Court’s cases demanding individualized sentencing in capital cases. In particular, those cases have emphasized that sentencers must be able to consider the mitigating qualities of youth. In light of Graham’s reasoning, these decisions also show the flaws of imposing mandatory life-without-parole sentences on juvenile homicide offenders.
63 So. 3d 676, reversed and remanded.

10-9646 Miller v. Alabama

Kagan, J.; Breyer, J., concurring; Roberts, C.J., dissenting; Thomas, J., dissenting; Alito, J., dissenting.

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