The War on Kids Post #4

In my last post, I discussed the Miller trilogy and states’ attempts to implement those Supreme Court decisions. Today I want to focus on one especially challenging implementation issue: parole.

When the Supreme Court held Miller retroactive in Montgomery v. Louisiana, it suggested that states could comply with the Miller mandate by employing parole procedures, evidently in an attempt to head off potential state concerns of finality and efficiency. As the Court explained: “Giving Miller retroactive effect. . . does not require States to relitigate sentences, let alone convictions, in every case where a juvenile offender received mandatory life without parole. A State may remedy a Miller violation by permitting juvenile homicide offenders to be considered for parole, rather than by resentencing them.” However, parole post-Miller has proven to be problematic in several respects.

First, typically parole applicants enjoy very few procedural rights because the Supreme Court has treated parole as a privilege – a proceeding in which the prisoner has no liberty interest. Even when the Supreme Court has construed a state’s parole statute to create some liberty interest for prisoners, it has not gone so far as to hold that prisoners are entitled to the aid of counsel. As a result, in 35 states a prisoner has no right to counsel at a parole hearing. In contrast, when a state employs parole as a method for remedying a now-unconstitutional sentence, the prisoner does have a liberty interest at stake, as some lower courts have recognized. At the same time, because juvenile lifers are entitled to a “meaningful opportunity to obtain release,” parole boards across the country are now tasked with examining factors deemed relevant in Miller, including childhood environment and efforts at rehabilitation. Thus, youth offenders seeking parole may be entitled to procedural safeguards, including the right to counsel, never before seen in the parole context.

Second, while parole largely disappeared from the criminal justice landscape in the late 20^th century, it has been making a comeback as part of the smart on crime movement – only modern parole is new and different. While discretion and instinct are still relevant, modern parole is largely dependent upon actuarial assessments of prisoners’ risks if released. These risk assessment tools rely upon statistical relationships between both static (e.g. age at date of conviction) and dynamic (e.g. level of education obtained during incarceration) factors. Almost all states employ these risk assessment tools in the parole process.

Here’s the concern post-Miller: the risk assessment tools may rely on factors that defy the Supreme Court’s holding that children are categorically less culpable and more amenable to rehabilitation. For example, in many jurisdictions, the tools consider the inmate’s age at first commitment; the younger the age at first commitment, the higher the risk factor and the less likely the inmate is to be released. Similarly, many tools consider factors such as employment history and marital status before incarceration; being single and unemployed increases one’s risk assessment score. Juvenile offenders as a group, precisely because of their youth at the time of conviction, were unlikely to have been married or to have had an employment history. In other words, the risk assessment tools treat youth as an aggravating variable, while the entire logic of the Miller trilogy hangs on youth as a mitigating variable.

Finally, there are several other thorny questions implicated in jurisdictions that employ parole as a Miller remedy. Should states be expected to release a certain percentage of youth offenders seeking parole in order to satisfy the “meaningful opportunity” standard? When a parole board denies release, must it issue a decision and rationale in writing beyond the generic statement that an applicant is not a suitable candidate? What is an appropriate wait period for a board to impose before reconsidering a case? Henry Montgomery himself was denied parole earlier this year and given a two-year setoff period; he’s already 71 and surely at some age a two-year setoff violates the meaningful opportunity standard.

By my count, 11 states today are employing some kind of new, youth-informed parole procedure in order to address prisoners with claims under Miller. Other jurisdictions are employing their previously existing parole mechanisms to do so. Litigation challenging the adequacy of these procedures is already underway, and time will tell how helpful it was for the Court to suggest that states rely upon parole as a Miller remedy.