The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to consider whether the reasoning that led it to strike down the death penalty for juvenile offenders four years ago should also apply to sentences of life without the possibility of parole.
The court accepted two cases on the issue, both from Florida and neither involving a killing. In one, Joe Sullivan was sentenced to life without the possibility of release for raping a 72-year-old woman in 1989, when he was 13. In the other, Terrance Graham received the same sentence for participating in a home invasion robbery in 2004, when he was 17 and on probation for other crimes.
In the majority opinion in the death penalty case, Roper v. Simmons, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that teenagers were immature, unformed, irresponsible and susceptible to negative influences, including peer pressure.
“Even a heinous crime committed by a juvenile,” Kennedy concluded, is not “evidence of irretrievably depraved character.”
Outside the context of the death penalty, however, the Supreme Court has not shown much interest in cases from prisoners claiming that the sentences they received were too harsh. But Douglas Berman, an authority on sentencing law at Ohio State University, said the factors cited by Kennedy concerning juveniles might well apply in noncapital cases.
“The principles driving Roper,” Berman said, “would seem to suggest that its impact does not stop at the execution chamber.”
The US is alone in the world in making routine use of life-without-parole sentences for juvenile offenders. Human rights groups say more than 2,000 prisoners in the US are serving such sentences for crimes they committed when they were 17 or younger. A vast majority of those crimes involved a killing by the defendant or an accomplice.
At the argument of the Roper case in 2004, Justice Antonin Scalia said the rationales offered against the juvenile death penalty applied just as forcefully to sentences of life without the possibility of parole.
“I don’t see where there’s a logical line,” said Scalia, who voted in dissent to retain the juvenile death penalty.
But Kennedy wrote that life sentences would continue to deter young criminals after the death penalty became unavailable.
“The punishment of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole,” Kennedy wrote, “is itself a severe sanction, in particular for a young person.”
Lawyers for the two Florida inmates cited international law, including the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which prohibits sentences of life without parole for juveniles. Kennedy’s invoking foreign and international law in the Roper decision was controversial, and the new cases will reopen the question of how much attention the Supreme Court should pay to international law.
Bryan Gowdy, a lawyer for Graham, said his client had never been convicted of the robbery that sent him to prison for the rest of his life. Though evidence was presented concerning the robbery, the trial judge found only that Graham had violated the terms of his probation after an earlier conviction for armed burglary and attempted armed robbery when he was 16.
STEPPING UP: Diminished US polar science presence mean opportunities for the UK and other countries, although China or Russia might also fill that gap, a researcher said The UK’s flagship polar research vessel is to head to Antarctica next week to help advance dozens of climate change-linked science projects, as Western nations spearhead studies there while the US withdraws. The RRS Sir David Attenborough, a state-of-the-art ship named after the renowned British naturalist, would aid research on everything from “hunting underwater tsunamis” to tracking glacier melt and whale populations. Operated by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the country’s polar research institute, the 15,000-tonne icebreaker — boasting a helipad, and various laboratories and gadgetry — is pivotal to the UK’s efforts to assess climate change’s impact there. “The saying goes
Floods on Sunday trapped people in vehicles and homes in Spain as torrential rain drenched the northeastern Catalonia region, a day after downpours unleashed travel chaos on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza. Local media shared videos of roaring torrents of brown water tearing through streets and submerging vehicles. National weather agency AEMET decreed the highest red alert in the province of Tarragona, warning of 180mm of rain in 12 hours in the Ebro River delta. Catalan fire service spokesman Oriol Corbella told reporters people had been caught by surprise, with people trapped “inside vehicles, in buildings, on ground floors.” Santa Barbara Mayor Josep Lluis
Police in China detained dozens of pastors of one of its largest underground churches over the weekend, a church spokesperson and relatives said, in the biggest crackdown on Christians since 2018. The detentions, which come amid renewed China-US tensions after Beijing dramatically expanded rare earth export controls last week, drew condemnation from US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who on Sunday called for the immediate release of the pastors. Pastor Jin Mingri (金明日), founder of Zion Church, an unofficial “house church” not sanctioned by the Chinese government, was detained at his home in the southern city of Beihai on Friday evening, said
TICKING CLOCK: A path to a budget agreement was still possible, the president’s office said, as a debate on reversing an increase of the pension age carries on French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday was racing to find a new prime minister within a two-day deadline after the resignation of outgoing French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu tipped the country deeper into political crisis. The presidency late on Wednesday said that Macron would name a new prime minister within 48 hours, indicating that the appointment would come by this evening at the latest. Lecornu told French television in an interview that he expected a new prime minister to be named — rather than early legislative elections or Macron’s resignation — to resolve the crisis. The developments were the latest twists in three tumultuous
RSS