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.