life sentence | PROBABLE CAUSE

Monday, in a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court limited the practice of locking up juveniles for life when they haven’t committed murder. The court ruled in the case of Terrance Graham, who was 17 when he was implicated in a series of armed robberies and subsequently sentenced to life in prison. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted, even the prosecutor did not recommend life without parole. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who five years ago voted to outlaw the death penalty for killers under 18, wrote the majority opinion.

The Justice Department reported that no 13-year-old has been given life without parole for non-homicides in a decade. The more than 2,000 juveniles who are currently serving life sentences for killing someone were not affected by the court’s ruling.

While life sentences with no chance of parole are unusual for juveniles who have been tried as adults and convicted of crimes other than killing, three-dozen states still allow for the possibility of life sentences. Vermont and Kansas provide statutory provisions for trying children as young as 10 years old in adult criminal court. 60% of juveniles in Florida’s prisons, like Graham, are locked up for life for crimes other than homicide. Pennsylvania has the highest total number of juvenile lifers. Only Alaska, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico and Oregon prohibit sentencing minors to life without a chance for parole.

According to Frontline report, there has been little extensive research into the impact of laws making it easier to try kids as adults. But existing studies indicate that the get-tough approach has had little or no effect on the rate of juvenile crime. Two studies that examined whether trying juveniles as adults resulted in lowered juvenile crime rates found that there was no evidence to support that the laws had the intended effect.

Two additional large-scale studies indicated that juveniles who receive harsher penalties when tried as adults tended to reoffend sooner and more often than those treated in the juvenile system. A 1996 Florida study found that youth transferred to adult prisons had a nearly 30% higher recidivism rate than youth who stayed in the juvenile system. Given the hardcore clientele in most adult prisons, this statistic should come as no surprise.

In a second 7-2 ruling, the court upheld a federal law that allows for the indefinite imprisonment of inmates considered mentally ill and “sexually dangerous,” regardless of whether their sentences have been served. Under the current law, authorities must persuade a federal judge that continued imprisonment is necessary and also must try to transfer prisoners to state control.

The argument before the high court was not whether Graham was innocent or that he was seeking freedom now, but whether he deserved to someday make a case before the state parole board.

So what do you think? Should juveniles be locked up for life without parole for crimes other than murder? And should sex offenders who have served their sentence be released regardless of whether they’re deemed to be dangerous?

Last Thursday, the Minnesota State Supreme Court rejected the appeal of Lamonte Martin, who, along with 19 year-old Cornelius Jackson, was convicted of first-degree premeditated murder and sentenced to life without the possibility of release for shooting 19-year-old Christopher Lynch nearly a dozen times in May of 2006. The ruling upheld the convictions of both gang members who coldly executed Lynch as he begged for his life in a north Minneapolis alley.

This horrific act might have been just another in the long list of crimes associated with gang violence–crimes that occur daily in large cities across the country–except that Lamonte Martin was 17 at the time of the murder. His age was one of the issues cited on appeal.

A divided Minnesota court ruled that sentencing juveniles to life without the possibility of release does not violate the constitution’s ban on cruel or unusual punishment. Citing a 2005 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court on a Missouri case involving a juvenile killer, which overturned the death sentence for the juvenile but upheld a sentence of life without release, Justice Christopher Dietzen concluded that, “When a juvenile offender commits a heinous crime, the state can exact forfeiture of some of the most basic liberties.”

While the prosecution hailed the verdict, Martin’s public defender argued that the ruling was another case of the justice system failing to properly distinguish between teenagers and adults when it comes to criminal responsibility and life sentences.

So did the Supreme Court make the right decision in sentencing Martin to life in prison? After all he was just days from his 18^th birthday when he participated in Lynch’s brutal execution.

According to a 2005 report from Human Rights Watch, more than 2,225 juveniles across the country are serving life in prison without parole. Forty-two states permit judges and juries to sentence juveniles to life in prison without parole. Pennsylvania leads the nation in the number of juvenile lifers, with more than 330. Interestingly, Human Rights Watch found that 59% of the juveniles serving life-without-parole sentences nationally had no prior criminal convictions before being placed in prison for life.

So while some may argue that the decision handed down by Minnesota’s Supreme Court was cruel, it’s difficult to argue that it was unusual.