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.”