Noting the distinctive juve sentencing realities to face the Texas school mass murderer

Yet another horrific school shooting, this time by a juvenile offender, provides yet another need to work through modern sentencing realities facing a mass murderers.  This local article reviews the sentencing basics under the headline "The accused Santa Fe shooter will never get the death penalty. Here’s why." Here are excerpts:

The high school junior accused of gunning down 10 students and teachers at a Santa Fe school is facing a capital murder charge - but he’ll never face the death penalty, even in Texas. Some day, he’ll even be eligible for parole.

Though Dimitrios Pagourtzis was charged as an adult and jailed without bond, even if he’s found guilty he can’t be sentenced to death because of a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court ruling. And in the Lone Star State, he can’t be sentenced to life without parole as the result of a 2013 law that banned the practice for minors....

The Santa Fe High School student admitted to the mass shooting that killed 10 and wounded 10 others early Friday, according to court documents. He planted fake explosives and selected his targets so as to spare the students he liked, he later told police.

For an adult, that sort of crime could lead to the death chamber.  Murders involving multiple victims can be charged as capital offenses, and for adults that leaves two options: death or life without parole.

At one time, those options were both on the table for teens, too. But then in 2005, Christopher Simmons, a Missouri killer condemned to die, won a landmark case in the Supreme Court. After surveying practices in death penalty states, the justices decided that the national consensus was against executing minors.  Only a few states — including Texas —  were the outliers still carrying out death sentences for those convicted of crimes committed as minors....

Before the court’s decision, Texas had been the biggest executioner of juvenile offenders, Dunham said.  Across the nation, there were 22 convicts executed for crimes committed as juveniles - and more than half of them were in Texas. After the court eliminated the practice, in June 2005 Gov. Rick Perry commuted a slew of death sentences to life, removing 28 prisoners from death row, including 12 from Harris County.

Then in 2012, the Supreme Court took it one step further when the justices struck down mandatory life without parole sentences for juveniles.  The following year, Texas legislators passed a law making life with parole — instead of life without parole — the only sentencing option for minors charged with capital crimes. For life sentences where parole is an option, Marzullo said, the first chance at release comes after 40 years in prison.

Whether or not he’s ultimately convicted, the accused Santa Fe shooter will be behind bars for the foreseeable future.  During his first court appearance Friday night, a judge opted to hold him without bond. "At the moment he's in solitary confinement," Judge Mark Henry said after the teen's first court appearance Friday evening. "He's going to be here a while."

Because Pagourtzis slaughtered 10 people and injured many more, his case has me wondering about the application of consecutive sentences under Texas laws to potentially extend the period in which a juvenile offender would not be eligible for parole under life sentences. As regular readers know, there is a robust debate in lower courts about whether and how the Supreme Court's announced Eighth Amendment jurisprudence limiting life without parole for juvenile offenders ought to be applied in cases in which a juvenile has committed multiple very serious crimes. That debate may well end up impacting how this latest school shooter gets sentenced.