Ruling against mandatory juvenile life sentences applies retroactively

But on Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court held that a 2012 decision barring mandatory life without parole for child offenders applies retroactively.

Five years later, in Graham v. Florida, the Supreme Court ruled juveniles could not be sentenced to “to life without the possibility of parole for a non-homicidal crime”.

Montgomery v. Louisiana was brought forth by a Louisiana man named Henry Montgomery, who fatally shot a Sheriff’s deputy as a 17-year-old in 1963.

Although the court in 2012 had not altogether barred mandatory life without parole sentences, it was reserved for crimes reflecting “irreparable corruption”, Kennedy said.

Human Rights Watch estimates there are at least 2,225 people serving life sentences without parole for crimes committed before they were 18. The justices, in their ruling on Monday, said that decision must be applied retroactively to inmates convicted before that ruling was issued.

Monday’s opinion was written by Justice Anthony Kennedy and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s four liberals, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. But the state Supreme Court had not yet ruled on a prior case that had exhausted the appeals process.

On Monday, the Supreme Court made a huge decision that could allow thousands of juvenile offenders to be let out of prison much earlier than expected. Now, half of them can be granted with it as the other half were granted with parole already.

Kennedy emphasized that “children who commit even heinous crimes are capable of change”.

Some states individually chose to adjust the sentences of convicted juveniles following the Supreme Court’s 2012 ruling.

A booking photo for Erik Jensen, sentenced to life without parole at age seventeen for his role in a 1998 murder.

Kennedy noted that Henry Montgomery spent each of the last 46 years knowing that he was condemned to die in prison. “And if it did not, their hope for some years of life outside prison walls must be restored”. But several states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania and Louisiana, have refused to reopen these old cases.

The Louisiana Supreme Court denied Montgomery’s plea for reconsideration of his sentence, consistent with its ruling in another prisoner’s case that the Miller decision was procedural rather than substantive in nature. “You have to give them a second chance”, said Dan Korobkin, an attorney with the ACLU of MI. They can also offer parole hearings for those who fall under the ruling. Justice Antonin Scalia writing for the three dissenters mocked that alternative. An inmate at Graterford state prison, Ligon was convicted of a 1953 murder that occurred when he was 15. “If a defendant is given a new sentence less than life, he will be eligible for consideration by the parole board at some point, depending on the length of the new sentence”.