Juvenile Delinquency

profiledabigmftci
Millerv.Alabama.docx

Miller v. Alabama  567 U.S. ——— (2012)

Decided: Jun. 25, 2012

Vote:  

( Kennedy Ginsburg Breyer Sotomayor Kagan )

( Roberts, J Scalia Thomas Alito )

Opinion of the Court: Kagan Concurring Opinion: Breyer (Sotomayor) Dissenting Opinion: Roberts, J (Scalia, Thomas, Alito) Dissenting Opinion: Thomas (Scalia) Dissenting Opinion: Alito (Scalia) Oral Arguments:  Transcript  |  Audio

Miller v. Alabama , decided by a 5–4 vote, June 25, 2012; Kagan wrote the opinion; Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito dissented.

The Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment forbids sentencing schemes that mandate life in prison without possibility of parole for juvenile murderers.

The ruling set aside life-without-parole sentences imposed in separate murder cases in Alabama and Arkansas against defendants fourteen years of age at the time of the offenses. Evan Miller was convicted in an Alabama state court of murder in the course of an arson and murder in the course of a robbery for his part in the fire-related death of a neighbor, Cole Cannon, on July 15, 2003. Miller and a teenaged friend robbed Cannon of $300, beat him with a baseball bat and fists, and started a fire to cover up evidence of the beating; after they left the scene, Cannon died of smoke inhalation. Kuntrell Jackson was convicted of capital felony murder for his part in the November 18, 1999, shotgun killing of a video store clerk in Blytheville, Arkansas, during a botched robbery attempt. Jackson was not the shooter but knew his friend had a weapon and was in the store when the shooting occurred. Both states had permitted the death penalty for juvenile murderers, but the Supreme Court’s decision in Roper v. Simmons (2005) eliminated that option and left a mandatory life-without-parole sentence as the only option for the specific murder counts at issue.

The Supreme Court in Graham v. Florida (2010) prohibited life-without-parole for juvenile offenders in nonhomicide cases as cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth and Fourteenth amendments. Miller on direct appeal and Jackson in a state habeas corpus proceeding cited Graham to argue that their sentences also violated the Eighth Amendment. The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals rejected Miller’s appeal, and the Alabama Supreme Court declined to review the decision. The Arkansas Supreme Court rejected Jackson’s petition; two justices dissented on the ground that the prosecution had failed to show an intent to kill on Jackson’s part. The U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari in both cases and scheduled them for argument in tandem.

In a 5–4 decision, the Court held that Arkansas and Alabama’s mandatory sentencing schemes were unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment and that a judge or jury must have the opportunity to consider mitigating circumstances before imposing life without parole on juveniles in murder cases. Writing for the majority, Kagan said Roper and Graham led to the conclusion that “mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles violate the Eighth Amendment.” Citing Graham, Kagan said that children are “constitutionally different from adults” for purposes of sentencing because of their lack of maturity and underdeveloped sense of responsibility. Kagan found that the mandatory penalty schemes improperly ignored the role of age in determining the appropriateness of a lifetime of incarceration without parole. “By removing youth from the balance,” she wrote, “these laws prohibit a sentencing authority from assessing whether the law’s harshest term of imprisonment proportionately punishes a juvenile offender.” The mandatory provisions also ran afoul of the Court’s decisions requiring individualized sentencing in capital cases, Kagan reasoned. “Graham and Roper and our individualized sentencing cases alike teach that in imposing a State’s harshest penalties, a sentencer misses too much if he treats every child as an adult,” she wrote. Kagan rejected the argument for a categorical ban on life without parole for juveniles but suggested that “appropriate occasions” for the penalty would be “uncommon.”

The ruling reversed the state courts’ judgments and sent the cases back for further proceedings. Four justices joined Kagan’s opinion: Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor. In a concurring opinion, Breyer specified that Jackson should not be subject to life without parole unless the state proves an intent to kill. “Given Graham’s reasoning,” Breyer wrote, “the kinds of homicide that can subject a juvenile offender to life without parole must exclude instances where the juvenile himself neither kills nor intends to kill the victim.” Sotomayor joined his opinion.

In three separate opinions, the four justices who had dissented in Graham all rejected the ruling on the general ground that the Constitution left it up to legislatures, not the Court, to determine whether to allow life without parole for juvenile murderers. “Neither the text of the Constitution nor our precedent prohibits legislatures from requiring that juvenile murderers be sentenced to life without parole,” Roberts wrote in the longest of the three opinions and the only one joined by the other dissenters: Scalia, Thomas, and Alito.

In his opinion, Roberts insisted that he was not questioning the Court’s prior rulings. In his opinion, however, Thomas repeated his earlier criticism of the Eighth Amendment and individualized sentencing precedents and called the new ruling “even less legitimate than the foundation on which it is built.” Scalia joined his opinion.

In the shortest of the dissents, Alito vigorously criticized the effect of the decision and emphasized his disagreement by reading portions of his opinion from the bench. “Even a 17-1/2-year-old who sets off a bomb in a crowded mall or guns down a dozen students and teachers is a ‘child’ and must be given a chance to persuade a judge to permit his release into society,” Alito wrote. “Nothing in the Constitution supports this arrogation of legislative authority.”