C4CLP

A project of the Center for Children, Law & Policy at the University of Houston Law Center

Nov 2, 2009

The Supreme Court and LWOP for Juveniles

By: Therin Jones | Other Posts by Therin Jones
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On Monday, November 9, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether life without parole (LWOP) constitutes cruel and unusual punishment when applied to juveniles. Two cases, Graham v. Florida and Sullivan v. Florida, hope to build on the Court’s 2004 decision in the pivotal case Roper v. Simmons. In Roper, the Court held that the Eighth Amendment forbids the imposition of the death penalty on juvenile offenders. The Court’s decision affirmed a lower court’s ruling to set aside the death sentence for the respondent, who had committed a murder at 17.

In the majority decision, the Court reviewed the enactments of state legislatures to piece together “America’s perspective” on the death penalty as applied to juveniles. In 2004, thirty states had prohibited the juvenile death penalty (twelve of which prohibited the death penalty altogether). In the remaining states, furthermore, the Court found the practice sufficiently infrequent to consider juveniles “categorically less culpable”. It reasoned that juveniles are less mature and more susceptible to peer pressure than their adult counterparts – and that juveniles generally have underdeveloped senses of both responsibility and character.

Last year, the Court denied cert to Pittman v. South Carolina, the first post-Roper case dealing with long-term sentencing for juveniles. In Pittman, the crime’s victim had been killed. Some analyses of the denial speculate that the Court was unprepared to apply Roper to a case in which the juvenile’s long-term sentence was for homicide.

In Graham and Sullivan, however, both minors have been given life sentences for non-homicides. (Sullivan committed sexual battery at the age of thirteen, and, at seventeen, Graham violated his probation after an earlier guilty plea on an armed robbery charge.) The interpretation of the Eighth Amendment on which Roper relied holds not only that individuals have the right not to be subjected to “excessive sanctions” generally, but that evolving social standards of decency guide us in categorizing some punishments as so “disproportionate” as to be “cruel and unusual”.

The Court commonly consolidates cases treating similar issues for the purpose of joint rulings, but Sullivan’s attorneys have fashioned his argument very specifically: it deals with life without parole for youths 13 or younger. Another issue unique to Sullivan is whether the petitioner may raise an Eighth Amendment challenge twenty years after his conviction. On Monday, the Court will refine its position on these issues as well as the central issue of whether or not juveniles are so fundamentally different from adults that adult crimes cannot always be punished with adult time, if justice is to be served.

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2 Responses

  1. Natalie says:
    November 4, 2009 at 10:49 am

    I don’t know how likely the court will go beyond the limited issue based on the specific facts of Sullivan and Graham’s cases i.e. Is a sentence to LWOP for juveniles in non-homicide cases cruel and unusual under the 8th Amendment. Considering that the majority of juveniles given LWOP sentences were most likely convicted of homicide offenses, the Court may want to apply its ruling to homicide cases rather than dealing with the issue down the road. Then again, the Court did deny cert in Pittman as you mentioned only last year.

  2. Luke Gilman says:
    November 4, 2009 at 11:35 am

    My impression is that the current court would consider LWOP for homicide clearly outside the prohibition of the 8th Amendment, but maybe they’ll surprise me.

    It’s likely telling that the Court chose to hear both cases together. Consider Lyle Denniston’s analysis from the SCOTUSwiki

    Eventually, the Court considered the two cases together, examined them several times then granted them — separately — on Monday. It is quite common for the Court, when it has two or more cases raising the same issue, to pick only one for review, or to consolidate them for a joint ruling. It took neither option this time, setting the stage for two rulings, perhaps with different potential outcomes.

    Sullivan’s case, as his lawyers fashioned it, is directly very specifically at life without parole for youths who are only 13 years old (or younger). Their petition contends that these younger children are more fully shielded by the Eighth Amendment than older teenagers — such as, presumably, a 17-year-old like Graham.

    But the Sullivan petition raises a separate issue: is he entitled to a ruling on his Eighth Amendment challenge years after his conviction — he was sentenced nearly 20 years ago, and now is unable or very unlikely to be able to get any lower court to review his claim, yet, his lawyers say, the Court’s more recent Eighth Amendment rulings suggest that he should be able to test his sentence even now.

    The Court will hear both issues, and thus there is at least a chance that Sullivan might not be allowed to raise his constitutional argument, because it could be found to have come too late.

    The Graham case only involves the specific issue of an Eighth Amendment violation in a life without parole sentence for a minor. Thus, the Court may have wanted a second case before it in case it should find that Sullivan did not present that claim properly.

    Another difference between the two, of course, is the youths’ relative age. The Court, if it reached the life sentence issue in Sullivan, might be more sympathetic to a youth of his age getting a life term for a sexual crime that left the victim injured, but not dead. The Court last Term ruled out a death sentence for such a crime (in Kennedy v. Louisiana, involving a child victim who was not killed).

    Graham, by contrast, is four years older, and was given a life prison term after returning to criminal activity after being spared a long prison term for an earlier episode. Some members of the Court may have found him a less sympathetic figure, and wanted to have that case on the docket to perhaps limit the scope of any ruling that went against life terms for teenagers.

    Indeed, it might be speculated that the Court spent most of a month looking at these two cases as it tried to sort out just what it wanted before it, and the grant of both cases might well have been a compromise between the Court’s two ideological wings. The Court has been split deeply in its most recent rulings limiting the scope of the death penalty, and there is no reason to anticipate a more unified bench on this new controversy involving life without parole — a severe sentence for a minor.

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