The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision banning mandatory life without parole for juvenile criminals gave inmates like Christine Lockheart a glimmer of hope.
In response to the Court’s ruling, the Iowa Court of Appeals earlier this month overturned Lockheart’s mandatory life sentence for a murder committed when she was 17 and ordered a judge to hold a new sentencing hearing.
But less than a week later, Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad commuted the sentences of all state prisoners serving mandatory life terms for crimes committed as juveniles, and instead gave them life with the possibility of parole after 60 years.
Lockheart’s lawyer says he plans to challenge Branstad’s order in court, arguing that it violates the Supreme Court’s decision in Miller v. Alabama. That ruling said that sentencing judges should consider the individual circumstances of crimes committed by juveniles, including “how children are different, and how those differences counsel against irrevocably sentencing them to a lifetime in prison.”
Lockheart’s case is among the first of what criminal justice experts say will be numerous and lengthy legal battles as courts and state legislatures across the country determine how to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling — and what to do with the estimated more than 2,000 prisoners currently serving mandatory life sentences for crimes committed when they were under the age of 18.
“This is very clean at the wholesale level and very messy at the retail level,” said Mark Osler, a professor at the University of St.Thomas Law School, in Saint Paul, Minn. “It’s very clear from 10,000 feet that children are different.”
Osler, who specializes in sentencing law, added: “But with these 2,000 cases, it’s going to be pretty messy with a lot of different outcomes.”
Left Unanswered
Though the Court barred mandatory life sentences for juveniles, experts said it left unanswered a host of legal issues that could impact who is eligible for a new sentence and what rights they have.
It remains unclear whether the Court’s ruling is retroactive, whether prisoners who petition for a new sentence are entitled to a lawyer, and what standards should be used in handing down sentences for juveniles.
“I expect this will be bounced back up to the Supreme Court multiple times because all those questions have to be answered,” said Frank Bowman, a professor at the University of Missouri and a former federal prosecutor and special counsel to the U.S. Sentencing Commission. “We will be litigating this for years.”
Alabama Solicitor General John Neiman: PHOTO: PBS
Twenty-eight states and the federal government mandate life without parole for some juveniles convicted of murder, according to briefs filed before the Supreme Court. At least one state, Alabama, asserts that the ruling is not retroactive and does not apply to most of the state’s current inmates, said John Neiman, Alabama’s Solicitor General, who presented his state’s arguments in Miller v Alabama before the Court, in an interview with The Crime Report.
Other state prosecutor’s offices are still considering the issue, which is sure to be contested in court.
Public interest attorneys in several states, including Arkansas and Florida, are just beginning an effort to find all the inmates who may be eligible for a new sentence and assign them lawyers.
Petitions for Resentencing
Prisoners in several states, including Iowa and Pennsylvania, have already filed petitions for resentencing. The two cases heard by the Supreme Court— Kuntrell Jackson in Arkansas, and Evan Miller in Alabama — also were sent back to the state courts for resentencing.
Evan Miller. PHOTO: Equal Justice initiative
But, in some states, there may be little courts can do until the legislature acts.
Many state statutes do not provide judges with a clear alternative sentence if mandatory life without parole is no longer available, making it unclear what sentences judges are legally able to impose, according to Marsha Levick, a co-founder of the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia.
Other states that have done away with parole also may have to revise their laws, Osler said.
Scott Burns, the executive director of the National District Attorneys Association, which is advising states on how to comply with the decision, said legislators in all 28 states will consider alternative sentencing laws.
Resentencing could also involve lengthy reinvestigations of crimes, some of which are decades old, and the psychological and family histories of criminals.
Tyrone Jones, who was 16 in 1973 when he was arrested for the murder of Henry Harrison in Philadelphia, is among the first prisoners to petition for a new sentencing hearing. Jones, who also claims he is innocent, was given a mandatory life sentence in 1975; he has been in prison for 37 years, his entire adult life.
In court papers filed in Philadelphia earlier this month, Jones’s lawyer asked for a new sentencing hearing and for access to prosecution records regarding Jones’s level of culpability and participation in the murder.
Jones’s behavior when he was 16 and his subsequent prison record could impact his sentence, said his attorney, Hayes Hunt. Jones initially confessed to shooting an unidentified boy while with a friend, Michael Long. But Jones was arrested with a gun that did not match the murder weapon, according to court documents filed by his lawyers.
Kuntrell Jackson, PHOTO: Arkansas Department of Corrections
The charges against Long were dropped; and Long has since said Jones was not involved in the murder, according to the documents.
‘Forgotten Soul’
“We have this forgotten soul who’s been in prison for decades,” Hunt said. “I have to reconstruct this man’s history and try to figure out who he was the day he was arrested in 1973 as a 16 year old.”
A spokeswoman for the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office declined to comment on Jones’s case, but said that resentencing should be available only for cases where the issue was raised on direct appeal, meaning it would not apply to the majority of the state’s inmates.
The Supreme Court did not bar all life without parole sentences for juveniles. Rather, it said that judges must take into account the individual circumstances of each case, and consider that children are less responsible for their actions and more capable of reform.
Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the Court, said life without parole should be “uncommon.”
“We say very glibly that kids are different, but the Court has gotten that message, and conveyed that message, loud and clear,” said Levick of the Juvenile Law Center. “I hope courts will take that language the way it’s meant: kids should not be treated as if they were adults, because they’re not.”
Still, prosecutors and defense lawyers said they expect many current inmates will still receive a life sentence even if they get a new sentencing hearing. Many judges, lawyers said, may not want to reduce the sentence of anyone convicted of a brutal murder.
In both of the cases heard by the Supreme Court, the defendants were 14 years old when they were arrested. Kuntrell Jackson was convicted of murder for participating in a robbery of a video store in Arkansas during which an accomplice shot and killed the store clerk, Laurie Troup.
Evan Miller of Alabama and a friend robbed and killed Miller’s neighbor, 52-year-old Cole Cannon. Miller repeatedly hit Cannon with a baseball bat, according to court records, at one point placing a sheet over Cannon’s head and saying, "`I am God, I've come to take your life.'"
He and a friend later set fire to Cannon’s trailer.
‘He Should Never Get Out’
“He should never get out,” Candy Cheatham, Cannon’s daughter, told The Crime Report. “The rest of the world should worry if someone like Evan Miller ever has a chance to get out. It would be a great injustice for him not to receive the same sentence.”
But the Supreme Court suggested that Miller’s background may warrant a lighter sentence.
“If ever a pathological background might have contributed to a 14-year-old’s commission of a crime, it is here,” the Court wrote. “Miller’s stepfather abused him; his alcoholic and drug-addicted mother neglected him; he had been in and out of foster care as a result; and he had tried to kill himself four times, the first when he should have been in kindergarten.”
Though the Court’s decision was limited, it reflects a broader change in how the legal system deals with underage criminals.
In a series of cases beginning in 2005, the Supreme Court has barred the death penalty for juveniles, banned life in prison for juveniles convicted of crimes other than homicide, and now banned mandatory life without parole sentences for juveniles.
“It is beginning to emerge that children have a constitutional right to be treated differently,” said Stephen Harper, a public defender in Miami.
The decision also opens up the possibility that the Court may consider cases challenging other types of mandatory minimum sentences and non-mandatory life without parole sentences for juveniles, lawyers said.
“We’re just at the beginning of where this is going to go,” said Levick.
Scott Michels is a New York City-based lawyer and a freelance writer for The Crime Report, the nation’s most comprehensive source of criminal justice news and resources. This story was jointly commissioned by The Crime Report and the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange. Michels welcomes comments from readers.
PHOTO: Richard Ross
The way that I read the SCOTUS decision, it would appear that any kid railroaded into an adult court and sentenced as an adult after trial on mandatory laws has the right to be re-tried, either in a juvenile court perhaps with an extended sentencing capability, or at the minimum where the trial judge absolutely must take into account the defendant’s age and that effect on culpability, and a sentence of LWOP is no longer a possible sentence. Moreover, the high court banned the practice of keeping such convicted juveniles in adult prisons too, so a question does arise as to how to treat youthful offenders that have been brutalized in adult prisons prior to the decision. And what do you bet that the SCOTUS absolutely meant their decision to be retroactive too.
I could see maybe a sentence of 5-15 years for a kid of 13, 14, or 15 convicted of murder, and a sentence of 7-20 years for a 16 or 17 year old as a maximum, all of it served separate from adult offenders in such a place where personal privacy rights, rehabilitation, rebuilding lost or non-existent self-esteem, and even vocational training was the focus of such a program.
I can also see a pattern of ongoing child abuse to be a heavily mitigating factor in sentencing such an underage victim too. After all, why is an adult rape victim made a folk hero when she manages to kill or injure her rapist, and yet, a teenager who has been raped almost every night for years is deemed too dangerous to give another chance to when they finally can’t take any more abuse? Heck, I am even in favor of rehabilitative sentencing for first-time young adult offenders too, say up to the age of 22 or 23, a maximum sentence of 10-25 years, as we all have a substantial investment in all of our young people too.
Just as Mr. Sanford above says, the US is guilty of being one of the world’s worst human rights violators when it comes to juvenile criminal trials and sentencing. We are only one of three major nations that has not ratified a UN mandate on the subject, and our foreign policy and our standing and respect around the world has been severely compromised by our addiction to revenge against kids. There is not one country in Europe where a 15 year old who kills would get more than a 10-15 year sentence, and in most of those countries the sentence might be half that or less.
Obviously we are not a terribly religious country either because the Bible says to turn the other cheek, and any conservative that thinks that we made some kind of a “promise” to the victim’s family with the outrageous sentences given to kids, and that we are forced to carry-out that promise even if it is determined to be illegal and a serious human rights violation by the highest court in the land doesn’t need to be in office, period.
Come on Governor Branstad, how about resentencing all such offenders according to the SCOTUS directive, after each of them has had the facts of their case reheard by a minimum of a juvenile judge, an adult judge, and a child psychologist too. What are you afraid of, that maybe some of these young offenders might be able to live fairly normal adult lives after your prison system brutalized them, as it turns out illegally? You can do a whole lot better, my man. How about pulling all of these offenders out into a separate much-friendlier system and re-sentencing all of them according to the above guidelines? Why not take the lead in trying to follow the high road rather than the low road here, and restore to these youthful offenders their human rights that your State previously stripped them of???
I applaud the Supreme Court’s decision but actually wish it had outlawed JLWOP sentences all together and spared the states and counties all these legal headaches.
The U.S. is the only country in the world that sentences children to die in prison with no hope of parole. If serial killers Charles Manson and David Berkowitz are eligible for parole review, why not a 14 or 15 yr old child? Many of these kids were not even the trigger person.
A chance at an eventual parole review would bring us in line with the rest of the world, which by the way has a much lower incarceration rate AND crime rate, which kinda proves these sentences are not necessary or effective.
Parole review would weed out those who are truly remorseful and can safely return to society and exempt those who are a threat to public safety.
People CAN change, especially children. Proof of that is a former convicted murderer, Edwin Desamour who now heads up an organization called Mimic which mentors at-risk kids in Philadelphia. At 16 he was convicted of murder—today he has dedicated his life to helping prevent crime.
I say we give those who are remorseful and prove that by their conduct behind bars a chance to give back to society.