Colorado inmates serving life will get sentence reviews

The Supreme Court has ruled that people serving life terms for murders they committed as teenagers must have a chance to seek their freedom.

The high court ruled Monday that its 2012 ruling banning mandatory life without parole sentences for juvenile murderers applies to those previously convicted. Now, even those who were convicted long ago must be considered for parole or given a new sentence.

While the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports Missouri courts have granted new sentencing hearings for some with appeals pending in 2012, the state Supreme Court hasn’t yet ruled on a prior case in which appeals were exhausted. Instead, he suggested, states could simply institute parole hearings.

But, Kennedy, concluded, “in light of what this court has said about how children are different from adults in their level of culpability, prisoners like Montgomery must be given the opportunity to show their crime did not reflect irreparable corruption; and if it did not, their hope for some years of life outside prison walls must be restored”.

The ruling came as state lawmakers are again pushing to change Missouri law on juvenile sentencing to come into compliance with the 2012 ruling. In doing so, Kennedy said the court’s decision in Miller v. Alabama made juvenile offenders eligible for parole.

The court’s decision Monday is not expected to affect the case of Austin Myers, who was 19 years old when he was sentenced to death October 16, 2014, in Warren County. These inmates were sentenced to life without parole for homicides committed when they were juveniles. Louisiana is among seven states that had declined to apply the Supreme Court ruling retroactively. An inmate at Graterford state prison, Ligon was convicted of a 1953 murder that occurred when he was 15.

The Supreme Court ruling relates to cases involving people sentenced to life in prison for crimes committed before they were 18 years old, according to legal experts.

Madison County District Attorney Rob Broussard said he understands the reasoning behind the court’s decision regarding juvenile offenders, though he disagrees with it. He said in the cases of Click and Storey, there should be no possibility of parole.

Deborah LaBelle is an Ann Arbor-based attorney and director of the Juvenile Life Without Parole Initiative with the ACLU. But the court did not say at the time if that ruling applied retroactively to Montgomery and other inmates like him, whose convictions are final.

On Monday, Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito dissented the decision. Bannock County Prosecutor Steven Herzog explains, “Life without parole means you’re going to be in prison until you die”.

Convening new hearings to re-examine these underlying cases will prove problematic, attorneys general for Texas, South Carolina, Kansas and 13 other states warned in a brief urging the court to reject the claim for retroactivity.

The dissenters pushed back on the majority’s contention that the Constitution has no “grandfather clause” and point to the principle of finality, under which states are not required to reverse punishments that were constitutional when they were originally imposed.