Supreme Court Opens Door To Parole For Juveniles Given Life Sentences

If I had to name a single U.S. Supreme Court case that effectively highlights the entrenched problems of the American criminal justice system, it would be Montgomery v. Louisiana: from the 1963 murder of Charles Hurt Jr., a white deputy sheriff in East Baton Rouge, to the conviction of Henry Montgomery, a developmentally disabled African-American teenager, to the ensuing half-century during which Montgomery has been warehoused at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola.

This does not guarantee they will get shorter sentences, just that they get a chance to prove they are working toward rehabilitation.

Writing for the court’s six-justice majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy said that a life-without-parole sentence is always unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment for a juvenile offender, unless the defendant is found to be “irreparably corrupt” and “permanently incorrigible”. Louisiana’s courts concluded Henry Montgomery wasn’t entitled to a new sentencing more than 50 years after his arrest – a stance also taken by a handful of other states, including Pennsylvania.

Thanks to an opinion handed down Monday by the U.S. Supreme Court, some 350 MI prison inmates woke up today with a new view on life.

In California, where some 300 prisoners are serving life sentences without the possibility of parole for crimes they committed before they turned 18, a law signed by Gov. Brown in 2012 allows such prisoners to submit a petition for “recall and resentencing” to a court.

Lehigh County has six cases, Berks has eight, Montgomery has six and Monroe has one, according to state Department of Corrections. “[But] 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”.

LaBelle tells us Monday’s decision builds upon a few years of Supreme Court rulings concerning how to sentence juveniles.

Monday’s decision does not expressly foreclose judges from sentencing teenagers to a lifetime in prison.

The Arkansas Supreme Court ruled in June in a challenge by inmate Ulonzo Gordon that the sentencing ban should be applied retroactively.

Joining Scalia’s dissent were Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

In 2012, in Miller v. Alabama, the court found juveniles could not be sentenced to mandatory life without parole, although courts still had discretion to order this sentence.

How the Supreme Court decision may effect Erik’s case. In this discussion, Justice Kennedy clarified potential ambiguities from Teague, and forcefully wrote that no court can uphold a conviction or sentence that violates a substantive rule of constitutional law, regardless of when the conviction became final or when the rule was announced.

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.

“The case leaves open to the states precisely how they want to deal with the procedure of the issue”, Bookman said.

In Ohio, life without parole is the most severe sentence for juveniles.

Montgomery’s case brings about more questions than answers.