The U.S. Supreme Court has issued a reasonable ruling setting a limit on how far states can go to punish juvenile offenders.
If a juvenile offender hasn't killed anyone, the court said, then the state is constitutionally prohibited from imposing a life sentence without parole.
Instead, the court said, the state is obligated to provide the offender with an opportunity to demonstrate that he or she has matured to the point of being considered for parole.
The case, called Graham v. Florida, involved a situation where a judge imposed life without parole on a 17-year-old who had participated in a robbery and violated his parole involving an earlier robbery.
The ruling affects 131 offenders in 11 states, including Nebraska (with two such offenders) and Iowa (with seven).
Critics asserted that the ruling trampled on the prerogatives of elected state governments. But even with this ruling, states still retain ample ability to punish juvenile offenders.
The Graham ruling said outright that the authority to decide how to implement the ruling will rest with the state governments themselves. States are not under any obligation to release such offenders, the court said.
And it's still fully within the power of state lawmakers to impose strong penalties on juveniles in such cases -- but just not to the point of imposing life without parole.
Although it's true that the ruling does set a new constitutional standard, it's also true that the Graham decision is a balanced one typical of the Roberts court: narrowing governmental authority but still providing room for government action.
Court rulings and state legislation in recent years have moved away from imposing rigid penalties against juvenile offenders in certain instances. In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court said the death penalty against juveniles is unconstitutional. Last year, Texas banned life without parole for juveniles who commit murder.
Lawmakers and criminologists, meanwhile, have pointed to new findings in scientific studies of juvenile brain development. As stated in the Graham ruling, “developments in psychology and brain science continue to show fundamental differences between juvenile and adult minds.”
Society, in other words, needs to tread cautiously in automatically imposing the most severe penalties on individuals whose minds are still developing.
At the same time, though, horrendous crimes sometimes are carried out by juveniles, and states deserve to have considerable leeway in setting criminal justice policy. In the aftermath of the Graham decision, legal analysts note that new court challenges will undoubtably attempt to use the ruling as a lever to limit states' ability to impose mandatory minimum sentences for juveniles or life without parole for adults.
On these questions, we'd recommend that the court proceed cautiously.
As a group of distinguished legal scholars has observed in regard to underage offenders, “those who commit truly horrifying crimes as juveniles may turn out to be irredeemable, and thus deserving of incarceration for the duration of their lives.”
That quote comes from the Supreme Court majority in the Graham case.
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