The U.S. Supreme Court Monday extended the reach of one of its most important criminal justice rulings of the past few years, ensuring new sentencing or parole hearings for thousands of men and women now serving mandatory life sentences for murders committed as juveniles.
By a 6-3 vote in a decision authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the justices made retroactive their 2012 decision in Miller v. Alabama, which held as unconstitutional all automatic life-without-parole sentences for teenage murderers1.
Along the same vein, the Court ruled in 2010’s Graham v. Florida that trial judges could not sentence juveniles to life without parole for non-homicide crimes.
Monday’s ruling in Montgomery v. Louisiana focused on the thorny issue of when a new rule announced by the Court can be considered “substantive” enough to direct the lower courts to look back on past sentences and not just apply it to new ones. Justice Kennedy concluded that Miller represented such a dramatic change in the Court’s precedent on juvenile sentencing that retroactivity was warranted. Three of his conservative colleagues, Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, disagreed. Justice Scalia wrote a scathing dissent.
A photo from a Baton Rouge, La., newspaper shows Henry Montgomery, center, being escorted to court before his conviction for the 1963 murder of sheriff’s deputy Charles Hurt. Courtesy Juvenile Justice Information Exchange
Montgomery reiterates the proposition, first expressed in Miller, that juvenile offenders must be given a sentencing evaluation that takes into account their youth and their potential for rehabilitation as they get older and more mature. Only those teenagers who show no remorse or regret, and who are patently unlikely to develop, should be given life sentences without parole opportunities. The court acknowledged that such opportunities now may come either from state or federal judges depending on the particulars each case.
Source: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/01/25/the-supreme-court-may-have-just-granted-thousands-of-prisoners-a-chance-of-freedom?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sprout&utm_source=facebook#.410dT5KDB
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