Justices extend bar on automatic life terms for teenagers

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that people sentenced to life in prison as juveniles should be able to petition for a review and possibly earn parole.

In a 6-3 decision, the justices said these prisoners can take advantage of an earlier ruling that called it cruel and unusual punishment to send a juvenile criminal to life in prison with no chance for parole.

Four years ago, the court in an Alabama case said that even young offenders convicted of homicide should be rarely, if ever, sentenced to a life term with no chance for parole. Montgomery is serving a life sentence for the 1963 murder of East Baton Rouge Parish sheriff’s deputy Charles H. Hurt in Scotlandville.

But Justice Antonin Scalia, wrote in his dissenting opinion, that the majority’s opinion had only one intent. Her lawyers wrote that if the court were to rule in favor of Montgomery, surviving family members of the victims will be forced to “relieve the events that traumatized them in the first instance”.

“This whole exercise, this whole distortion of Miller, is just a devious way of eliminating life without parole for juvenile offenders”, he wroten.

Fourteen state supreme courts have said the ruling must be applied retroactively.

But the court left open the question of whether this standard should be applied to the now-adults serving life sentences for crimes they committed as teenagers.

Chief Justice John Roberts dissented from the 2012 decision barring automatic life sentences for young killers, but he joined the majority on Monday along with Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Kagan. The state courts had granted new sentencing hearings to a handful of defendants who had appeals pending at the time of the Miller ruling.

“Extending parole eligibility to juvenile offenders does not impose an onerous burden on the States, nor does it disturb the finality of state convictions”, Kennedy wrote. There, he wrote, the court held that while “new constitutional rules of criminal procedure are generally not retroactive, it recognized that courts must give retroactive effect to new watershed procedural rules and to substantive rules of constitutional law”.

The outcome in Montgomery’s case is the latest in a line of Supreme Court decisions that have limited states in the way they punish juveniles. In 2010, the justices prohibited sentences of life without parole for juveniles’ crimes short of murder. The story noted that “more than 60 Negroes were detained” in a parish-wide manhunt. The court in his trial was barred by law from considering arguments that his age should matter, “including evidence that as a scared youth, Mr. Montgomery shot in panic as the officer confronted him playing hooky”, his lawyers said. But several states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania and Louisiana, have refused to reopen these old cases.