Tennessee Supreme Court finds state's uniquely harsh automatic life sentences unconstitutional for juvenile offenders

On Friday of last week, as summarized at this court webpage, the Tennessee Supreme Court issued a set of notable opinions addressing the constitutionality of the state's automatic life sentencing scheme for juveniles.  Here is, from the court website, links to: "the court's opinion in Tennessee v. Tyshon Booker, authored by Justice Sharon G. Lee and joined by Special Justice William C. Koch, Jr., the separate opinion concurring in the judgment authored by Justice Holly Kirby, and the dissenting opinion authored by Justice Jeff Bivins and joined by Chief Justice Roger Page."  Together, all the opinions run more than 50+ dense pages; they are all worth a read and cannot be easily summarized in a blog post.  But I can provide a poor-man's account (and also link to this local press coverage).

As explained in these opinions, Tennessee law requires a minimum term of 51 years in prison before parole consideration for murderers even for juveniles.  As the opinion for the court explains:  "Compared to the other forty-nine states, Tennessee is a clear outlier in its sentencing of juvenile homicide offenders.  So much so that Tennessee’s life sentence when automatically imposed on a juvenile is the harshest of any sentence in the country.  No one, including the dissent, disputes that a juvenile offender serving a life sentence in Tennessee is incarcerated longer than juvenile offenders serving life sentences in other states."

And so, decides the majority:

Tennessee is out of step with the rest of the country in the severity of sentences imposed on juvenile homicide offenders.  Automatically imposing a fifty-one-year-minimum life sentence on a juvenile offender without regard to the juvenile’s age and attendant circumstances can, for some juveniles, offend contemporary standards of decency....

Tennessee’s automatic life sentence when imposed on juvenile homicide offenders is an outlier when compared with the other forty-nine states, it lacks individualized sentencing which serves as a bulwark against disproportionate punishment, and it goes beyond what is necessary to accomplish legitimate penological objectives.  For these reasons, we hold that Tennessee’s automatic life sentence with a minimum of fifty-one years when imposed on juveniles violates the Eighth Amendment.

As for the remedy:

We exercise judicial restraint when remedying the unconstitutionality of the current statutory scheme for sentencing juvenile homicide offenders.  Rather than creating a new sentencing scheme or resentencing Mr. Booker, we apply the sentencing policy adopted by the General Assembly in its previous enactment of section 40-35-501.... Under this unrepealed statute, Mr. Booker remains sentenced to a sixty-year prison term and is eligible for, although not guaranteed, supervised release on parole after serving between twenty-five and thirty-six years.  Thus, at the appropriate time, Mr. Booker will receive an individualized parole hearing in which his age, rehabilitation, and other circumstances will be considered.

The dissenting opinion starts this way:

I respectfully dissent from the result reached by a majority of the Court today.  Quite frankly, I find the policy adopted as a result of the plurality opinion of Justice Lee and the concurring opinion of Justice Kirby to be sound.  However, it is just that.  It is a policy decision by which the majority today has pushed aside appropriate confines of judicial restraint and applied an evolving standards of decency/independent judgment analysis that impermissibly moves the Court into an area reserved to the legislative branch under the United States and Tennessee Constitutions.