Something good happened today:
The high court on Monday threw out Americans’ ability to send children to prison for the rest of their lives with no chance of ever getting out. The 5-4 decision is in line with others the court has made, including ruling out the death penalty for juveniles and life without parole for young people whose crimes did not involve killing.
I’ll let you guess who the five were.
Justice Kagan:
The two 14-year-old offenders in these cases were convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
In neither case did the sentencing authority have any discretion to impose a different punishment. State law mandated that each juvenile die in prison even if a judge or jury would have thought that his youth and its attendant characteristics, along with the nature of his crime, made a lesser sentence (for example, life with the possibility of parole) more appropriate.
Such a scheme prevents those meting out punishment from considering a juvenile’s “lessened culpability” and greater “capacity for change” and runs afoul of our cases’ requirement of individualized sentencing for defendants facing the most serious penalties.
We therefore hold that mandatory life without parole for those under the age of 18 at the time of their crimes violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishments.”
Spaghetti Lee
Scalia: “When I was their age, we went to prison for life and we liked it!”
mathguy
That this was not 9-0 is sickening.
eric
The Conservative Christian justice is an Old Testament justice. The Conservative Christian science is an Old Testament science of myth. So, when they say they want to conserve the past, it is the kill-or-be-killed past of the Middle East of Abraham and David and not the past espoused by their putative God in the Gospels.
rlrr
“I’ve sentenced boys younger than you to the gas chamber. Didn’t want to do it. I felt I owed it to them.”
— Judge
SmailsScaliaSpaghetti Lee
So we’ve had two reasonably good, not-psychopathic decisions from the court today that didn’t kowtow to right-wing lunacy and left the malevolent neanderthal wing of the court muttering under their breath. Call me crazy, but that puts me in a better frame of mind for HCR.
Square Squid
Too bad SCOTUS also reversed the Anti-Citizens United Ruling from Montana. Scotus gots to get that paper.
General Stuck
It is absolutely stunning to me, that such a law was passed in the first place, and that 4 of the nations highest jurists supported it. Barbaric is the term that leaps to mind. With no human mitigation even possible, just throw the brats in prison and throw the key away. I took several post graduate courses in juvenile justice at UK, back in the 80’s, and how far we have moved past the movement to recognize juveniles as having diminished culpability for guilty minds. Fucking Alito and the rest can DIAF.
Baud
Children aren’t corporations, my friend.
Violet
And yet if one of their kids or grandkids did something that got them in this spot, they’d be whining up a storm about how he or she was “just a kid” and “deserves leniency based on his age” etc.
eric
I will let Yates state our current condition:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity
Hunter Gathers
Fat Nino’s tirade against Obama’s ‘DREAM lite’ executive order was fucking priceless.
Violet
@Baud:
No, children are market share.
Chris
@General Stuck:
It’s Alabama.
Baud
@Hunter Gathers: I wonder if he’ll speak at the GOP convention.
Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
@mathguy:
Damned right. I hate the thought of being reflexively disdainful toward any group–it smacks of conservative bigltry to me–but still… I swear, I think conservatives, a lot of them, anyway, just like being mean to people. They seem to like hurting people. I can’t begin to imagine an audience at a Democratic debate booing a soldier or screaming that we should let people without insurance just die. There’s a mean streak in a lot of conservatives; a lot of them just seem to like hurting people, and they resent it when anybody helps someone in need, even if they themselves aren’t paying for it. This might be satire, but it’s dead on.
piratedan
if only they had self incorporated before committing these atrocities, none of this would have been necessary….
Elmo
@Violet:
He gives the kids free samples
Because he knows full well
That today’s young innocent faces
Will be tomorrow’s – clientele …
Downpuppy
The Montana decision is simply bizarre. Have they simply forgotten that a corporation is a creation of state law? do they think everybody else has?
And will that slow them one second from using reserved powers to knife PPACA?
BGinCHI
The minority opinion:
“Since, apparently, there are no workhouses….”
Violet
@Baud: Oh, that would be excellent, if a Supreme Court Justice addressed one of the political party conventions. So much for pretending to be non-partisan. Has a Justice ever done that before?
Baud
@Violet:
Not to my knowledge. But given Scalia’s behavior in the last year, anything is possible.
Spaghetti Lee
@Downpuppy:
What would happen if, say, Montana’s lege amended its state constitution to no longer recognize corporations as legal entities, in order to call SCOTUS’ bluff?
Violet
@Spaghetti Lee: Could they do that? How would corporations in Montana function?
Cluttered Mind
@Violet: I’m pretty sure some of the Republican justices have appeared at events for Americans for Prosperity or some other groups like that, which in this political climate is really no different from appearing at the RNC itself.
KG
just looking over the dissents, curious as to what the thought process was…
Roberts starts off on what I can only call a grammatical argument. Basically: the Eighth Amendment says “cruel and unusual” and this isn’t unusual because a lot of states and the federal government have mandatory sentences; so if it’s not unusual it must stand.
Thomas makes an originalist argument that basically says, “this should be left to the legislature.” Probably the strongest of the dissents, but it ignores the question of what happens when things go too far for our modern society rather than too far for society in 1789.
Alito just bitches that the Court has recognized for almost 50 years that we are evolving as a society and that our standards change.
Spaghetti Lee
@Violet:
I got no fucking idea, I’m just throwing shit out there. It seems like if corporations are a creation of state law, the assumption on the part of the people letting the corporations run wild is that governments would never revoke that legal recognition. Well what if one of them did? Probably safeguards against that in place though.
Walker
@Spaghetti Lee:
What would happen is commerce in Montana would collapse.
Davis X. Machina
@Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.):
Any political party predicated on appeals to the worst in people begins every election cycle half-a-lap ahead.
Take the fundamental depravity of man and the points. It doesn’t always win, but it always covers the spread.
Kay
@General Stuck:
Which is funny, because there’s better research now, and it leads to that same place.
It’s an impossible situation politically, because no state legislator wants to be the person who is out there advocating for lighter sentences for 14 year old murderers in a state race. It just won’t ever happen. They’d get creamed by their opponent as “soft on crime”.
That’s why it’s so important to have a court step in with cooler heads and a less politically/emotionally-driven analysis.
shortstop
@piratedan: Awesome.
sb
@General Stuck: I’ve worked with juveniles and studied their behaviors most of my adult life. I’ve worked alongside others who have done so.
You have echoed their sentiments perfectly, IMO.
scav
Such a confusing wold view. Unions (as groups of individuals) and governments (as groups of individuals) BAD. Corporations (as groups of individuals) GOOD and, in fact, as important as individuals. Decisions made by governments, BAD, decisions made by Same Individuals When In Corporations, GOOD. Unions agitating for Money, GREEDY. BAD. Contracts negotiated by Unions, Freely Broken. Profit Motive when expressed by shareholders and CEOs? The Lynch pin, Key Stone, Very Soul, Pin-striped exterior and Motivating Force of The Holy Free-Market.
Chris
@Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.):
This.
But to me, it makes complete sense. When you spend fifty years running your elections by pandering to the worst of human nature, of course you’re going to end up with a base made up of the worst human beings in the country.
General Stuck
@Chris:
That it is
Violet
@Kay:
Was any of this modern research referenced in this case? I didn’t follow it at all.
Kay
@Violet:
No. What they’re doing is slowly and carefully pushing back against the idea that juveniles are adults, in a series of cases. The country started this lurch to the Right on juveniles, in the 80’s and 90’s, and now we’re going in the other direction. You’ll recall all the boot camps and the scared straight and the political crowing about “get tough!”
For juveniles, now, we’re actually moving to less incarceration, because, quite frankly, it doesn’t work and it’s also really expensive. Not money well spent. There were a series of juvenile detention center scandals in Texas and Illinois and New York that raised awareness of the horror of these places, so that was a factor.
This is a good piece. It was written before the decision, but it gives you a feel for what’s been happening, over time, beginning with the death penalty case.
Todd
Write in a new provision into corporate creation statutes. Make all political expenditures be counted as dividends.
Violet
@Kay:
Yes, I remember those. It really is awful. I used to teach kids that age and there’s no question they’re not adults. I know modern brain development research backs that up. Their brains aren’t developed enough to act in the way adults do. They’re a lot more impulsive, think less about the future and the consequences of actions, and a lot of that is their brain.
Nylund
@Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.):
Did you see that “New Rules” segment by Bill Maher on the 14 year old conservative talk radio host? His point was that if a child can do it, your platform is a bit juvenile. At one point he summed up what it takes to be a conservative talk radio host as, “Step 1: Be a dick. Step 2: There is no step 2.”
I too dislike generalized hatred of conservatives in the sense that it can often come off as sounding like blanket bigotry, but it really is quite surprising how so much evidence seems to suggest that “being a jerk” is just a central pillar of modern conservatism. I used to be one of those people who really thought so much of conservative ideology could be summed up by, “I got mine, screw you,” but increasingly, it seems to simply be, “screw you” for no real reason that well, screw you.
chopper
@Spaghetti Lee:
the old decision making corporations ‘people’ was followed by a decision under the 14th applying it to the states, a few years later.
natthedem
@mathguy: Agreed.
Chris
@Kay:
Everything I’ve ever read about American prisons points to them being a horror in general. Even those that are just for adults.
Nylund
@Kay:
Why bother sending children to jail when you can just turn school into jail?
sb
@piratedan: Winner of the thread.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@eric: Who is this “Yates” of whom you speak?
Kay
@Violet:
They really are different. They suffer so in “solitary”. IMO they mourn without lots of human interaction. We don’t have solitary for juveniles here, but they are put in isolation for “observation” and it can amount to the same thing.
New York had a situation where they were shipping kids so far from the city that relatives could not get out to see them. It’s a big state, NY. We’re talking about hours and hours, and it’s poor people. That’s a common sense problem that should have been anticipated. The newer thinking is to keep them close in to family, if they have to be detained.
David Koch
This was Great News for McCain!
General Stuck
Lemonade Tycoons
Downpuppy
@Violet: You forgot Pennsylvania! The one where judges were getting kickbacks for sending kids to private prisons was like Holes in real life.
Violet
@Kay: It comes down to what the mindset is for detaining/imprisoning the kids. If it’s punishment, then who cares where they go. If it’s to change behavior, then those sorts of conditions come into play. Republicans are far more into punishment than changing behavior.
burnspbesq
@KG:
This is the same conversation the two wings of the Court have been having on Eighth Amendment issues for the better part of 20 years. The two sides are talking past each other, although Kagan stuck the knife into Roberts for ignoring his own concurrence in one of the earlier cases.
From SCOTUSblog:
Violet
@Downpuppy: Yeah, that was the absolute worst one by far. That judge went to prison himself, right? Eventually, I mean.
Chris
@Violet:
Yep. Chalk another one down for “they like making people suffer.”
Kay
@Violet:
It’s such a bad idea to go to no discretion. I feel as if it’s this Right wing radio thing that went mainstream, that they were all getting a “slap on the wrist” from bleeding heart judges, so the grandstanding “grownups” in the legislature had to step in with cookie cutter draconian measures that everyone hates and knows don’t work.
burnspbesq
@Violet:
From the majority opinion (p.5):
I agree with the Court’s decision. That said, I’m not sure it’s unreasonable to conclude that rehabilitation of someone who thinks like that is at best a long shot. If, on remand, the trial court decides to sentence Miller to life without parole after giving appropriate consideration to all relevant factors including his age, you won’t hear any argument from me.
MikeJ
This doesn’t seem to be true. It looks as if they ruled that it couldn’t be a mandatory sentence. They could still be given life without parole, but somebody somewhere along the way has to have the ability to lessen the sentence, but they don’t have to do so.
It’s a step in the right direction.
Violet
@burnspbesq: As I said above, I didn’t follow the specifics of the case at all. I was speaking in a general sense about the development of teenager’s brains and how that impacts their decision making. As well as the general tendency for Republicans to want to punish vs rehabilitate. I’m sure there are specific instances where rehabilitation is an impossibility.
Kay
@MikeJ:
Judicial discretion in juvenile cases is really important. Ohio adopted the federal sex offender scheme and applied it to juveniles, with all the mandatory classifications. That was challenged under sep of powers, and judges won some discretion back. The judge needs to look at the case before branding a 15 year old with the sex offender label and reporting requirements for decades.
David Koch
remember when Kagan was nominated and our progressive betters savaged her, saying she was unqualified and a moron like Harriet Miers.
Good Times!
Mnemosyne
@burnspbesq:
It’s really hard to say, though. Current research shows that it’s pretty common for young offenders to score high on measures of sociopathy/psychopathy, but it’s also common for them to “recover” naturally once they’re older and a reasonably large percentage of them end up scoring in the normal range as adults.
Essentially, it seems that sociopathy is a common condition of being an adolescent, but most people (even people with criminal records) are able to get past it and grow up. NPR’s This American Life did a really interesting piece on the psychopath test and its limitations.
Heliopause
Well, sort of. It’s still possible to throw children in jail for life in the “Land of the Free” but now there’s a little more discretion in the process.
Somebody please explain the logic to me; if a 15 year old voluntarily performs fellatio on a 17 year old the 15 year old is a victim and the 17 year old goes to jail for ten years. If a 14 year old is present at the scene of a murder, though not the shooter, he is an adult and throw him in jail for life.
This is a psychotic country.
burnspbesq
@Mnemosyne:
That may all be true, but it’s worth remembering that rehabilitation is not the only relevant consideration here. Regardless of whether it actually works or not, we still consider deterrence to be a legitimate goal in determining criminal sanctions, and punishment qua punishment (put another way, an expression of society’s moral outrage at the criminal’s act) is also a legitimate goal. That last point is what keeps me from saying that the views expressed in Roberts’ dissent are out of bounds.
Lot of moving parts here, and lots of room for reasoned disagreement.
shortstop
@burnspbesq: How is any of this compromised by discretion in sentencing? The points you make aren’t reliant upon mandatory life.
Argive
From Alito’s dissent:
Perhaps Justice Alito (or whatever clerk wrote this dissent) should read Roper v. Simmons again. Christopher Simmons committed that crime. Donald Roper was the superintendent of the correctional facility where Simmons was detained when the case was filed.
Mnemosyne
@burnspbesq:
Except that, by nature of their brain structure, teenagers (or younger kids) are not going to be deterred from committing a crime by the thought of lifetime punishment. They literally cannot comprehend that possibility.
The criteria should be whether or not the young person can be usefully rehabilitated. If society considers the crime to be so heinous that the punishment needs to be lifetime regardless of rehabilitation, we should probably consider whether some of these people who have been otherwise rehabilitated can be moved to medium-security or lower facilities rather than being stuck living with dangerous felons for the rest of their lives.
ETA: Since I’ve only just come up with this idea, I’m still working it through. But it does seem weird to insist that people who pose no risk to their fellow inmates or prison personnel should be kept in supermax for the rest of their lives as punishment for their crimes when it would be more humane (and probably cheaper) to put them in lower-security facilities.
And that’s not even addressing the people who probably ought to be in secure mental health facilities rather than prisons, but that’s a whole different issue.
rikyrah
5/4 works for me
Argive
@Mnemosyne:
Yup. The science on that matter is pretty clear and has been for some time. Many of the amicus briefs filed in recent juvenile justice cases (J.D.B. v. North Carolina, Graham v. Florida, Roper v. Simmons, etc) make heavy use of neurological studies showing diminished capacity amongst juvenile defendants.