A few days ago marked four years since the US Supreme Court decided Montgomery v. Louisiana, a ruling which made retroactive the Court's prior decision in Miller v. Alabama declaring mandatory LWOP for juvenile murderers unconstitutional. The folks at The Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth marked the occasion by producing this short effective review of juve homicide sentencing past and present. Here are some portions of the report:
When the Supreme Court decided Montgomery, over 2,800 individuals in the U.S. were serving life without parole for crimes committed as children — a sentence that the United States alone is known to impose on children. In the four years since Montgomery was decided, the number of individuals serving life without parole for crimes committed as children has been reduced by nearly 75 percent.
Fewer than 100 individuals have been resentenced to life without parole to date, which is less than 5 percent of all individuals whose sentences have been modified to date. And a number of those cases are on appeal.
Since Montgomery, close to 600 individuals have been released from prison who formerly were sentenced to life without parole as children, and that number continues to grow....
Today 22 states and the District of Columbia ban life-without-parole sentences for children, and in at least four additional states, no one is serving life without parole for a crime committed as a child. Therefore more than half the country has rejected life-without-parole sentences for children in law or in practice....
Over 70 percent of all youth ever sentenced to life without parole are people of color — primarily Black and Latinx.
Strikingly, racial disparities in the imposition of life without parole on children continue to worsen. The Supreme Court in Miller and Montgomery guaranteed all children an individualized sentencing hearing before life without parole can be imposed. Yet despite the now-discretionary nature of life without parole, and the Supreme Court’s unequivocal language that the penalty may be imposed only if a child has no capacity for rehabilitation, racial disparities have increased under this new framework.
Of new cases tried since Montgomery, approximately 70 percent of children sentenced to life without parole have been Black — as compared to approximately 61 percent before Montgomery...
With little guidance from the Supreme Court in Miller and Montgomery on the specifics of the resentencing process, states have varied significantly in the procedural protections afforded. This patchwork of interpretations raises a high risk that resentencings to life without parole will be arbitrary, based more on the jurisdiction and the idiosyncrasies of individual judges than on whether the individual is capable of positive change.
Some states — including Georgia, Louisiana, Ohio, and Michigan — have continued to sentence children to life without parole in new cases at a rate that far outpaces the rest of the country, and in contravention of the constitutional mandate established in Miller and Montgomery that the sentence be uncommon.
Approximately 1,600 of the individuals whose sentences have been modified following Montgomery will go before a parole board, and the likelihood of release through the parole process varies greatly by state. For example, Henry Montgomery — who was deemed a model prisoner by the Supreme Court in Montgomery v. Louisiana — has been denied parole twice by the Louisiana parole board.
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