"Montgomery's Messy Trifecta"

A few weeks ago, I finally found a bit of extra time to dig into the doctrinal particulars of the Supreme Court's important ruling in Montgomery v. Louisiana, which finally clarified that its 2012 ruling in Miller v. Alabama was to be applied retroactively. Because I was pleased with the substantive outcome in Montgomery, at the time of the decision I did not give too much attention or thought to just how the Justices got to that outcome. But once I found time to focus on the doctrine developed in Montgomery, I decided I was not too impressed. Indeed, troubled by the Montgomery doctrinal particulars, I got motivated to write this little commentary which carries the same title as the title of this post. And, via SSRN, here is the abstract for my short commentary about Montgomery:

Montgomery v. Louisiana arrived at the Supreme Court at the intersection of three conceptually challenging and jurisprudentially opaque areas of law.  First, Montgomery came to the Court as an Eighth Amendment case requiring the Justices to struggle yet again with the counter-majoritarian question of what limits the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause puts on government powers to impose certain sentences on certain defendants for certain crimes. Second, Montgomery came to the Court as a retroactivity case requiring the Justices to struggle with the practical question of how new constitutional rules are to apply to old and seemingly settled criminal judgments.  Third, Montgomery became a federalism case because the Justices, when granting certiorari review, added the jurisdictional question of whether the Court even had authority to review how Louisiana had implemented the Supreme Court’s prior decisions on Eighth Amendment and retroactivity issues.

In this short essay, I briefly discuss the doctrinal puzzles of Montgomery in each of these three areas of law --- Eighth Amendment limits on sentences, retroactivity of new constitutional rules, and federal review of state criminal adjudications.  Specifically, I explain how the Montgomery opinion achieved a messy trifecta: through one relatively short opinion, the Supreme Court managed to make each of these areas of law significantly more conceptually challenging and jurisprudentially opaque than they already were.