SCOTUS: Juveniles sentenced to life without parole must receive new hearing

The ruling, which overturns a Michigan Supreme Court decision in 2014, means that almost 350 Michigan inmates charged and sentenced to life without parole for committing a murder before their 17th birthday will have a chance to argue for parole. Justice Kennedy concluded that Miller represented such a dramatic change in the Court’s precedent on juvenile sentencing that retroactivity was warranted. The court’s 2012 decision barring automatic life terms for juvenile murderers, he said, is the kind of rare new constitutional rule that must be applied not just prospectively by the states but retroactively, too.

In 2010, the court extended that reasoning to bar life- without-parole sentences for youths convicted of a crime other than murder.

“Henry Montgomery has spent each day of the past 46 years knowing he was condemned to die in prison”, Kennedy wrote.

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy said a life sentence without parole violates the 8th Amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment for offenders who were juveniles at the time of their crime.

The heart of Miller is that a judge may not sentence a juvenile offender to life without parole without considering “how children are different, and how those differences counsel against irrevocably sentencing them to a lifetime in prison”.

But the Supreme Court agreed Monday with Montgomery in the 6-3 decision. He had asked the justices to take a case decided four years ago called Miller v. Alabama and apply it to his case, even though he committed his crime well before that ruling.

Justice Antonin Scalia dissented from the ruling along with fellow conservatives Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

Six years before the U.S. Supreme Court found automatic life sentences for juveniles to be unconstitutional, Colorado legislators passed a law eliminating life sentences for juveniles. Now, half of them can be granted with it as the other half were granted with parole already.

In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Ninham’s petition for sentence reduction, but his most recent appeal is pending in Brown County Circuit Court.

The disparities tie into the broader trend that a black teenager arrested for homicide is twice as likely to be sentenced to life in prison without parole than if he were white.

Louisiana, for its part, argued that Miller was only a procedural decision “because it did not place any punishment beyond the State’s power to impose”. He was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s liberal bloc. Offering parole hearings to the inmates does not guarantee that they will be released. This is the latest in a series of truly irresponsible rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court which collectively undermine the rule of law and directly attack the rights of murder victims.

EJI filed an amicus brief in support of Montgomery last summer citing the cases of three people sentenced to life without parole as juveniles, including Damien Jenkins, given life without parole in connection with a drive-by shooting.