Justices Bar Life Terms for Youths Who Haven’t Killed

By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: May 17, 2010
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that juveniles who commit crimes in which no one is killed may not be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The ruling expanded a principle the court has never endorsed outside the death penalty — that an entire class of offenders may be immune from a given form of punishment.
Five justices, in an opinion by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, agreed that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment forbids sentences of life without parole as a categorical matter for juvenile offenders who do not participate in homicides.
“A state need not guarantee the offender eventual release,” Justice Kennedy wrote, “but if it imposes the sentence of life, it must provide him or her with some realistic opportunity to obtain release before the end of that term.”
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr . endorsed only a case-by-case approach, but he voted with the majority in saying that the particular inmate in question had received a sentence so harsh that it violated the Constitution.
The case involved Terrance Graham, who in 2003, at age 16, helped rob a Jacksonville restaurant, during which an accomplice beat the manager with a steel bar. Mr. Graham was sentenced to a year in jail and three years’ probation for that crime.
The next year, at 17, Mr. Graham and two 20-year-old accomplices committed a home invasion robbery. In 2005, a judge sentenced Mr. Graham to life for violating his probation.
In the context of capital punishment, the Supreme Court has carved out categories of offenders and crimes that are not subject to the death penalty, including juvenile offenders and those who do not take a life. Monday’s decision applied those two decisions in Venn diagram fashion to life-without-parole sentences.
Justice Kennedy, who was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, said both national and international consensuses supported the court’s ruling.
Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito Jr., said the majority was wrong about the facts in both cases and wrong as a matter of principle to take account of the international opinion.
Thirty-seven states, the District of Columbia and the federal government have laws allowing life-without-parole sentences for juveniles convicted of nonhomicide offenses. That represents, Justice Thomas said, a super-majority of states in favor of the punishment.
Justice Kennedy responded that a study relied on by Mr. Graham and supplemented by the court’s own research located only 129 juvenile offenders convicted under such laws. Seventy-seven were in Florida, the rest in 10 other states. Those numbers, Justice Kennedy said, make the sentence “exceedingly rare” and demonstrate that “a national consensus has developed against it.”
Justice Kennedy added that the sentences at issue had been “rejected the world over.” (Indeed, only the United States and perhaps Israel, he said, impose the punishment even for homicides committed by juveniles.)
“The judgment of the world’s nations that a particular sentencing practice is inconsistent with basic principles of decency,” Justice Kennedy wrote, “demonstrates that the court’s rationale has respected reasoning to support it.”
Justice Thomas disputed Justice Kennedy’s math, saying 11 nations seem to allow the punishment in theory. More important, he said, “foreign laws and sentencing practices” are “irrelevant to the meaning of our Constitution.”
He added that most democracies around the world remain free to adopt the punishment should they wish to. “Starting today,” Justice Thomas wrote, “ours can count itself among the few in which judicial decree prevents voters from making that choice.”
Although the majority limited its decision to nonhomicide offenses, advocates may try to apply its logic more broadly to the some 2,000 inmates serving life-without-parole sentences for participating in killings at 17 or younger.
Justice Kennedy noted, for instance, that juveniles serving life will typically spend more years and a greater percentage of their lives in prison than people who commit the same crime later in life.
The case decided Monday, Graham v. Florida, No. 08-7412, was argued in November along with a companion case, Sullivan v Florida, No. 08-7621. The court declined to decide the second case, which involved Joe Sullivan, who raped a woman when he was 13.
Instead, the court dismissed the case as improvidently granted, probably because it was beset with procedural difficulties. Mr. Sullivan’s lawyer, Bryan Stevenson, said his client and everyone else in his situation would be entitled to challenge their sentences under the Graham decision.
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