When a Teen Gets a Life Sentence

In 2005, the United States Supreme Court, with a very narrow 5-4 majority in Ropers vs. Simmons, held that imposing the death penalty on juvenile offenders (those under 18; the law since 1988 had protected those under 16) violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The case involved a 17-year-old involved in a plot to break, enter and murder a victim; their methodology was unspeakably cruel. They took their victim, Shirley Crook, bound and gagged to a state park, where they threw her off a bridge. In 2010, the court expanded the notion of cruel and unusual punishment to another case, Graham vs. Florida, in which a 16-year-old was convicted, as an adult of armed robbery with assault and battery in an incident at a local restaurant. The sentence was harsh: life without the possibility of parole. Once again, the court ruled that life without parole for a person under 18 was cruel and unusual punishment, but the case was clearly limited to situations where a killing was not involved. 130 defendants immediately had their sentences reviewed.

Indeed children, particularly teens, commit some of the most heinous crimes in America. While their hormones may be raging and while they may be more susceptible to peer pressure, for most of these perpetrators, they most certainly know the evil nature of their actions and have the ability to make reasoned moral choices. That a difference of a year, from 17 to 18, can have such a shatteringly different result in punishment is clearly difficult to justify – much more difficult than comparing a “life without parole” or death sentence of someone in their 40s, who have lived free for many years before their convictions, to that of a juvenile. And no matter what your feelings about the death penalty in general, it is clear that the extra expense to execute a defendant and the slight risk of killing a wrongfully convicted inmate weigh heavily in that moral consideration.

Today, there are approximately 2,500 inmates convicted of crimes involving a killing committed when they were juveniles who have been sentenced to life without parole; there are 70 who committed these crimes at ages 13 or 14. Lower courts have been unwilling to expand the decision in Graham to all juvenile offenses, including those involving a death, even where the convicted child was not the main perpetrator (and may have been a co-conspirator, along for the ride). Petitions have been filed with the Supreme Court in several cases, including ones involving that13-14 year-old category.

The April 20^th New York Times explains the facts behind three of the above cases: “More than a decade ago, a 14-year-old boy killed his stepbrother in a scuffle that escalated from goofing around with a blowgun to an angry threat with a bow and arrow to the fatal thrust of a hunting knife. The boy, Quantel Lotts, had spent part of the morning playing with Pokémon cards. He was in seventh grade and not yet five feet tall… Mr. Lotts is 25 now, and he is in the maximum-security prison here, serving a sentence of life without the possibility of parole for murder…

“[Another case] concerns Kuntrell Jackson, an Arkansas man who was 14 when he and two older youths tried to rob a video store in 1999. One of the other youths shot and killed a store clerk… The second case involves Evan Miller, an Alabama prisoner who was 14 in 2003 when he and an older youth beat a 52-year-old neighbor and set fire to his home after the three had spent the evening smoking pot and playing drinking games. The neighbor died of smoke inhalation.” That severe punishment is merited is not the question; it is the extent of the punishment that must be scrutinized. Indeed as some countries refuse to impose sentences beyond 25 years, the United States tends to impose longer and harsher sentences that most of the rest of the world. We have 5% of the earth’s population a nd 25% of her incarcerated prisoners. We need to determine exactly what the societal interests might be in keeping these individuals in prison for the rest of their lives.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while these cases seem so distant to our daily lives, how we treat those who have been convicted of a crime goes to the core of who we are.