<<previous  |  index  |  next>>

VII. Life without Parole under U.S. Law

State and Federal Law

The Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment,²²⁷ which includes sentences that are grossly disproportionate to the offense.²²⁸ Although it has never ruled on the constitutionality of life without parole for children, the U.S. Supreme Court has often highlighted the inherent differences between youth and adults in the criminal law context. The Court has determined that youth offenders lack the “well-formed” identities of adults and are “immature[e] and irresponsib[le],” and “vulnerable or susceptible to . . . outside pressures.”²²⁹

In its 2005 decision to eliminate the juvenile death penalty, the Court enumerated “three general differences between juveniles under nineteen and adults.”²³⁰ First, “any parent knows” and “scientific and sociological studies . . . tend to confirm . . . [that youth possess a] lack of maturity . . . an underdeveloped sense of responsibility . . . [they take] impetuous and ill-considered actions and decisions . . . [and they are] comparative[ly] immatur[e] and irresponsibl[e].”²³¹ Second, the Court found that youth are more susceptible to negative influences and peer pressure. Third, the Court stated that a youth’s character is not as well-formed as that of an adult, meaning he or she can and probably will change. The Court concluded that it would be “misguided to equate the failings of a minor with those of an adult, for a greater possibility exists that a minor’s character deficiencies will be reformed.” ²³²

Even before this landmark decision, the Supreme Court has generally held that “less culpability should attach to a crime committed by a juvenile than to a comparable crime committed by an adult.”²³³ Similarly, due to children’s lesser capacities for rational thought, the Supreme Court has repeatedly limited children’s abilities to make autonomous decisions about other aspects of their lives.²³⁴

Some state courts have found life without parole unconstitutional when applied to child offenders. For example, when interpreting both the U.S. and Nevada constitutions, the Nevada Supreme Court held that life without parole constituted a severe “cruel and unusual” punishment for a fourteen-year-old convicted of murder. The Court pointed to the “undeniably lesser culpability of children for their bad actions, their capacity for growth, and society’s special obligation to children.”²³⁵ The Court continued:

To adjudicate a thirteen-year-old to be forever irredeemable and to subject a child of this age to hopeless, lifelong punishment and segregation is not a usual or acceptable response to childhood criminality, even when the criminality amounts to murder. . . . As said, hopelessness or near hopelessness is the hallmark of [this] punishment. It is questionable as to whether a thirteen-year-old can even imagine or comprehend what it means to be imprisoned for sixty years or more. It is questionable whether a sentence of virtually hopeless lifetime incarceration for this seventh grader “measurably contributes” to the social purposes that are intended to be served by this next-to-maximum penalty.²³⁶  

Two decades earlier, the Supreme Court of Kentucky determined that the sentencing of two fourteen-year-olds convicted of rape to life without parole violated the Kentucky state constitution and “shocks the conscience of society today and is intolerable to fundamental fairness.”²³⁷

Other state Supreme Courts, like those of Indiana and Illinois, have allowed for the possibility of parole in certain cases involving children who have been effectively sentenced to life in prison. The Supreme Court of Indiana has repeatedly found excessively long prison sentences, such as 120 years, disproportionate for children. At the same time, the court has merely reduced such sentences to time spans equivalent to a child’s natural life, such as sixty or eighty years. In one case, a trial court judge refused to consider age as a mitigating factor and sentenced a fifteen-year-old convicted of murder, rape, robbery, and auto theft, among other crimes, to 199 years in prison.²³⁸ The Indiana Supreme Court disagreed and reduced the sentence to ninety-seven years because, it concluded, even for the most heinous crimes, age is a “significant mitigating circumstance.”²³⁹ Under Indiana law, an individual would first become eligible for parole after serving twenty years of a ninety-seven year sentence.²⁴⁰

The Supreme Court of Illinois, which has not abolished life without parole for youth offenders, has imposed long sentences but allowed for the possibility of parole for certain children convicted of felony murder. In 2002, the Court affirmed a lower court judge’s decision to reduce a fifteen-year-old’s mandatory sentence of life without the possibility of parole to a sentence of fifty years, because the youth acted only as a “lookout” accomplice to the murder of two rival gang members. The sentencing judge found a life sentence without the possibility of parole for a child who was a mere lookout “unconscionable,”²⁴¹ due in part to the “greater rehabilitative potential” of children.²⁴² Under Illinois law, the youth will be eligible for parole after serving his fifty-year sentence.²⁴³

Some state legislatures are also deciding that life without parole is a disproportionate sentence for youth offenders. In Kansas, for example, when legislators passed a bill substituting life without parole for the death penalty, they included a provision that exempted child offenders from either sentence.²⁴⁴ In 2005, Colorado lawmakers considered eliminating life without parole and other particularly long sentences for youth offenders, giving judges the ability to periodically re-examine a youth offender’s progress in prison. These provisions did not pass the Colorado legislature.²⁴⁵ In Florida in 2005, several state legislators introduced a bill to ensure parole for some children sixteen years old and younger sentenced to life. Florida’s bill did not pass the state Senate’s Committee on Criminal Justice.²⁴⁶

Several federal and state courts have determined that it is constitutionally permissible to sentence youth to life without parole. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that it was not cruel and unusual to sentence a fifteen-year-old first offender convicted of felony murder (in which his co-defendant killed the victim) to life without parole.²⁴⁷ Stating that it had no room to substitute its judgment for that of the legislature in the state of Washington, the court stated that the defendant’s youth had “no obvious bearing on” whether his sentence was disproportionate.²⁴⁸

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, while stating that “a sentence of natural life in prison . . . is exceptionally severe when the defendant is a minor and suffers from deficits of understanding,” nevertheless found that the sentence was not “unconstitutionally severe,” when a judge determines that the sentence is proportionate to the crime.²⁴⁹

Many state supreme courts throughout the United States have upheld life without parole sentences for children.²⁵⁰ In North Carolina, a disturbed and disabled thirteen-year-old with severe neurological problems was convicted of burglarizing an apartment and raping its occupant after harassing her for weeks. The trial court sentenced him to life without parole.²⁵¹ The North Carolina Supreme Court expressed its support for the legislature’s “reasonable” response to rising youth crime rates, listed states that transfer children to adult criminal court at particularly young ages, and ultimately refused to adopt any “penological theory” that children should be “treated instead of punished.”²⁵² Swayed most by its estimation that the crime committed in the case was “not the type attributable to or characteristic of a ‘child’” and was due no “special consideration[ ],”²⁵³ the court upheld the sentence of life imprisonment without parole.

In South Carolina, the state’s “Two-Strikes Law” sends people who commit two serious offenses to life in prison without the possibility of parole.²⁵⁴ A sixteen-year-old sentenced to life without parole under this law for burglary in the first degree and grand larceny had previously been tried in adult court for armed robbery, committed when he was fifteen. The South Carolina Supreme Court held that the life without parole sentence did not unconstitutionally violate contemporary standards of decency, because a “growing minority of states” impose the sentence on children, and “modern society apparently condones” such harsh punishment.²⁵⁵

Mandatory Sentences

While judges in the United States have ruled both for and against the constitutionality of the sentence, they have been more consistent in their opposition to mandatory life without parole for child offenders. For example, one judge sentencing a fifteen-year-old offender to life without parole stated in his order that it was “the sentence that I am mandated by law to impose. If I had my discretion, I would impose another sentence, but that is mandated by law.”²⁵⁶ Mandatory sentencing schemes eliminate statutory provisions allowing a judge to exercise discretion because of a child offender’s age, background, the legal interpretations of facts established at trial, or any other factor provided for by statute that might make another sentence more appropriate. In essence, they substitute the legislature’s generalized judgments about an entire category of youth offenders for the informed and individualized decisions once possible in a particular case.

The judge who sentenced fifteen-year-old Henry L. to life without parole for first degree murder reflected on his own lack of discretion and queried whether the legislature that developed the mandatory sentencing scheme understood the gravity of what it had put in place:

[T]he sentence that I must impose is mandated by law. I don’t have any choice in the matter. I’m not at all comfortable with this case, not because the Defendant didn’t receive a fair trial. I think that he did. . . .

One is always tempted in a case like this to search for some way to lessen the severity of the law because of the fact that the Defendant is only fifteen years old. The Motion for New Trial presented a certain amount of temptation to ignore the law and do something to fit the circumstances. I have a sworn duty to follow the law, and think in the long run the performance of the duty to follow the law is in the best interests of not only this community but the whole state.

. . . It’s obvious to me that we can’t, as a society, say that fifteen-year-old children should be held to the same standards as adults. Our law provides this. I think the law is wrong.²⁵⁷

Some judges find sentencing child offenders to life without parole especially troubling because it rejects the possibility of a child’s rehabilitation. In a case involving a child offender facing life without parole, the Supreme Court of Nevada said, “We may possibly have in the child before us the beginning of an irremediably dangerous adult human being, but we certainly cannot know that fact with any degree of certainty now.”²⁵⁸ In Michigan, a trial court judge refused to impose life without parole on Nathaniel Abraham, who was convicted of murder committed when he was eleven years old. The judge emphasized the impossibility of deciding in the present whether a child offender might reform him or herself in the future: “Don’t ask the Judge to look into a crystal ball today and predict five years down the road . . . Don’t predict today, at sentencing, whether the child will or will not be rehabilitated, but keep the options open.”²⁵⁹

Even some prosecutors question the mandatory sentencing of children to life without parole. Florida State Attorney Harry Shorstein prosecuted fourteen-year-old Joshua Phillips for killing his eight-year-old female neighbor in 1998. Shorstein has said he would not have objected to having a less stringent sentencing option for judges to consider in the case of youth offenders. In Phillips’s case, the judge had only one mandatory sentencing option—life without parole.²⁶⁰ Shorstein said, “I oppose mandatory sentences and the Legislature’s tying the hands of judges and prosecutors.” He continued, “No matter how tough you are on crime, you can’t say a fourteen-year-old is the same as an eighteen-year-old.”²⁶¹

Case Study: Jose A.

Jose A. was fifteen at the time of his crime and is serving life without parole in the federal prison system. He was prosecuted for murder under federal racketeering laws for conspiring with three other individuals, all of whom were alleged to be members of the Latin Kings gang in Yonkers, New York. The U.S. Attorney’s motion to transfer his trial to adult court was granted after a hearing, in which the court was required to weigh factors such as the seriousness of Jose’s offense, his maturity, and his potential for rehabilitation.

Jose’s former defense attorney, Paul Rinaldo told a researcher for this report about the transfer hearing: “He didn’t have a chance to stay in juvenile court. The prosecutor focused on the fact that [Jose] was a gang member and emphasized the nature of the crime, that it wasn’t done out of passion, that it was planned and the victim had been tracked down . . . The victim also was not a gang member. There was no convincing the court to pay attention to [Jose’s] actual role in the crime.”²⁶²

Jose wrote about his role: “I was alleged to have participated in the murder by acting as a lookout. At my trial, various co-conspirators testified that I rode my bicycle around the block and was to look for police while another person committed the murder.”²⁶³ Contemporaneous press accounts, his defense attorney, and testimony at trial all substantiate Jose’s role in the crime as a lookout.²⁶⁴ At trial, witnesses testified that Jose had been in the gang as a “Pee Wee Latin King” (for children) for no more than two or three months prior to the murder. They explained that Jose was fifteen years old at the time and that his “job was to ride his bicycle around the block as a lookout.”²⁶⁵ One of Jose’s co-conspirators entered into a plea agreement in which he received a fifty-year sentence and admitted to shooting the victim as a reprisal.²⁶⁶ At his sentencing hearing, Jose’s attorney asked the judge to consider a sentence other than life without parole. The judge found that she was “required by law to sentence . . . to the mandatory minimum term of life imprisonment and that I do not have the discretion to depart.”²⁶⁷

Jose’s attorney said: “This trial was one of the worst. Right up until the very end, I really thought we had a chance. The prosecutor had three other perpetrators to convict, including the triggerman! And, I mean, [Jose] was such a minor player. While the other gang members had clearly planned things out and tracked the victim a few times prior to the murder, the evidence showed that [Jose] was brought in only that night . . . And his role was so stupid . . . I even brought a map into the courtroom to show the jury how crazy it was to have him ride away from point A, the victim’s house, and then expect him to hustle on back, pedaling like mad, to say he saw a cop around the corner!     . . . Jose broke down when he heard the jury give their verdict. He knew what was coming. It’s a horrible memory.”²⁶⁸