"No Hope: Re-Examining Lifetime Sentences for Juvenile Offenders"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new research report released today by Phillips Black, a nonprofit, public interest law office. The report, authored by John Mills, Anna Dorn, and Amelia Hritz, is timely with the Supreme Court due in three weeks to hear oral argument in Montgomery v. Louisiana concerning the retroactivity of its 2012 Miller juve LWOP ruling.  In addition, I think this report (and related material assembled here) merits extra attention because it gives extra attention to racial realities that surround juve LWOP sentencing. Here is the report's executive summary:

In a handful of U.S. counties, teenagers are still being sentenced to a lifetime in prison with no chance of release. This harsh and increasingly isolated practice falls disproportionately on black and Hispanic youth and is a remnant of an earlier period of punitiveness based on an unfounded prediction of a new class of superpredators that never actually materialized.

While the use of this sentence has dramatically declined in recent years, it continues to be practiced in a relatively small number of jurisdictions. The Supreme Court now has the opportunity to declare juvenile life without parole a cruel and unusual punishment, far outside our standards of decency in the twenty-first century.

In Miller v. Alabama, the Court took the first step by forbidding mandatory sentences of life without parole for homicide offenses committed by juveniles ( JLWOP). The opinion, however, left open the question of whether the Eighth Amendment prohibits the imposition of life without parole upon juveniles entirely.

That question, the constitutionality of life without parole sentences for juvenile offenders, is being presented to the Court in two cases. In one case to be argued in October, the Court will consider whether its earlier rulings on this subject apply to past cases and not just cases going forward. A brief offered by the Charles Hamilton Institute for Race and Justice urges the Court to tackle the constitutional question of whether the punishment should stand at all. In another case, an inmate serving a JLWOP sentence has directly presented the question: “Does the Eighth Amendment prohibit sentencing a child to life without possibility of parole?”

This report examines the key evidence for answering the question of whether there is now a national consensus against juvenile life without parole. To make this assessment, the Court generally examines legislative enactments and actual sentencing practices. This report catalogs the rapid abandonment of JLWOP, both legislatively and in terms of actual use.

Although JLWOP dramatically expanded between 1992 and 1999—an era of hysteria over juvenile superpredators—since Miller states have rapidly abandoned JLWOP in law and practice.

Nine states have abolished JLWOP after Miller, bringing the current number of jurisdictions completely banning the sentence to fifteen. California and Florida, two of the most frequent users of the sentence, have dramatically limited the reach of JLWOP by restricting its application to a narrow set of circumstances. Moreover, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Washington have abolished JLWOP for a category of offenders. This pace of abolition far outstrips those that occurred in the years prior to the high Court’s rulings that the executions of juveniles and the intellectually disabled are unconstitutional. This report provides an in-depth analysis of state and county JLWOP sentencing practices. At the state level, just nine states account for over eighty percent of all JLWOP sentences. A single county, Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, is responsible for nearly ten percent of all JLWOP sentences nationwide. Orleans Parish, Louisiana, has tenfold the number of JLWOP sentences as its population would suggest. Five counties account for more than one fifth of all JLWOP sentences. JLWOP, in practice, is isolated in a handful of outlier jurisdictions.

Finally, state sentencing practices also show marked racial disparities in JLWOP’s administration. Starting in 1992, the beginning of the superpredator era, a black juvenile offender would be twice as likely to receive a JLWOP sentence as his white counterpart. The disproportionate application of the punishment on juveniles of color is stark. All of Texas’s JLWOP sentences were imposed on persons of color. Pennsylvania has imposed it eighty percent of the time on persons of color.

There is now a growing consensus against JLWOP, calling into question its constitutionality. The policy’s suspect origins and disparate implementation require rigorous examination to determine whether it serves any legitimate penological purpose.