Notable new reporting on juve LWOP as we await SCOTUS ruling on Miller retroactivity

As helpful reader alerted me to notable new reporting from The Marshall Project and Mother Jones focused on one particular juvenile offender serving a mandatory LWOP sentence in Louisiana as well as broader juve LWOP realities.  The lengthy main piece, available here via the Marshall Project, is headlined "This Boy’s Life: At 16, Taurus Buchanan threw one deadly punch — and was sent away for life. Will the Supreme Court give him, and hundreds like him, a chance at freedom?".  Here are a couple of paragraphs setting the table for the case-specific tale:

Taurus Buchanan stood trial in the era of the “superpredator,” the label applied to violent juveniles in the mid-1990s, when states and the federal government passed one tough-on-crime law after another. Today, two decades later, a trio of rulings from the US Supreme Court has peeled back some of those laws, recognizing the folly of assigning equal culpability to adults and kids. In October, the court heard arguments in a fourth case, and how that ruling comes down could determine what happens to hundreds of lifers sent to prison when they were kids....

Between 1992 and 1999, 49 states and the District of Columbia made it easier to try juveniles as adults.  Some states removed consideration of youth altogether, replacing discretion with compulsory triggers.  By 2012, there were 28 states across the nation that were handing out mandatory life-without-parole sentences to juveniles.

One was Louisiana, where Taurus exemplified how mandatory sentencing could render a defendant’s youth meaningless.  Once he was charged with second-degree murder, Taurus was automatically tried as an adult because he was over the age of 14.  If convicted, he would automatically be sentenced to life without parole.

By 2015, more than 2,230 people in the United States were serving life without parole for crimes committed as juveniles, according to data compiled by the Phillips Black Project, a nonprofit law practice that collected information on all 50 states.  In 2007, the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit law organization based in Alabama, found that there were 73 cases in which kids were sent away for crimes they committed at age 13 or 14.  One was sentenced to life for kidnapping, another for sexual battery, another for taking part in a robbery in which someone was shot but survived.

The Phillips Black data shows that, with 376, Pennsylvania currently has the most people serving juvenile life sentences.  But Louisiana has a higher number of such inmates per capita than any other state.  Of the 247 inmates in Louisiana, 199 are African American. In East Baton Rouge Parish, where Taurus stood trial, the racial disparity is even starker: Almost half of the parish population is white, but 32 of the 33 serving juvenile life-without-parole sentences are black.

These two companion pieces provide more details on the Phillips Black juve LWOP data and how it was compiled:

• "3 Anger-Inducing Charts About Kids and Prison: Does the justice system think white kids are more redeemable than black kids?"

• "How We Counted the Juveniles Sent to Prison for Life: A law practice finds thousands whose sentences could be affected by Miller v. Alabama"