The Patriot Post® · Judicial Benchmarks: SCOTUS on Juvenile Life Without Parole

One month before his 18th birthday, Terence Graham committed a home invasion robbery, holding the victim at gunpoint and barricading him in a closet. Based on Graham’s prior record, he received a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole (LWOP). Last week, the Supreme Court held that the Eighth Amendment precludes sentencing minors to LWOP for non-homicide crimes.

Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion rejected both Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion that the U.S. Constitution does not preclude such sentences, and Chief Justice John Roberts’s concurrence, which rejected the instant sentence, but would have permitted LWOP for more extreme criminal conduct, such as raping an 8-year-old girl and leaving her to die under 200 pounds of rock.

Two lines of doctrine collided in this case. On the one hand, the Court had essentially limited Eighth Amendment challenges to capital punishment (“death is different”). On the other, the Court has held that “teenagers are different,” less culpable due to their immaturity. The reasoning underlying the triumph of the second doctrine suggests further restrictions on sentencing may lie ahead.

The Court formerly had used the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause to outlaw truly unusual sentences, outside the “national consensus.” However, the Court admitted that 37 states and the federal government authorized LWOP for juveniles’ non-homicide crimes. The decision thus reflected the distaste of five judges for such punishment, not that of the American people.

The majority opinion conceded that some juveniles might well be incorrigible enough to justify LWOP, but held that judges may be unable to distinguish them from those who could be reformed. As Justice Roberts observed in response, judges will surely lack perfect discernment, but this is also true when they sentence adults, or juveniles who commit murder. The Court’s “no overpunishment” policy augurs poorly for other strict sentencing laws.

Finally, as it did five years ago in Roper v. Simmons, which barred the death penalty for juveniles, the Court observed that other nations don’t impose LWOP on juveniles for non-homicide crimes. However, those nations (which may not provide the procedural protections available in America such as jury trial and the exclusionary rule) also reject LWOP for juveniles when they commit murder, or the death penalty for adults who do so. If the United States is to be a world follower rather than leader, there will be more such decisions from the Court in coming years.