WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday threw out mandatory life in prison without parole for juveniles. The ruling continued its trend of holding that children cannot be automatically punished the same way as criminal adults, without considering their age and other factors.
The 5-4 decision split along ideological lines: The court’s four liberals and swing vote Justice Anthony Kennedy joined to order states and the federal government to allow judges and juries to consider a juvenile’s age when they hand down sentences for some of the harshest crimes, instead of making life in prison without parole automatic.
By making youth “irrelevant to imposition of that harshest prison sentence, such a scheme poses too great a risk of disproportionate punishment,” wrote Justice Elena Kagan, who was joined in the majority opinion by Kennedy and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor.
The decision left open the possibility that individual judges could sentence juveniles to life without parole in individual cases of murder but said state and federal laws cannot automatically impose such a sentence.
This decision is in line with others the court has made, including ruling out the death penalty for juveniles and life without parole for young people whose crimes did not involve killing.
Dissenting, the court’s four conservatives said nothing in the Constitution forbids laws requiring mandatory life in prison without parole for juveniles. Chief Justice John Roberts was joined in the main dissent by Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
Twenty-six states and the federal government have made life in prison without parole mandatory for some types of murder and allowed it to be applied to 14-year-olds, court papers said.
The decision came in the robbery and murder cases of Evan Miller and Kuntrell Jackson, who were 14 when they were convicted and sentenced to life without parole.
Campaign spending
In a 5-4 decision, the court summarily overturned a century-old Montana state law that banned corporate political expenditures, saying it conflicted with the First Amendment speech rights of corporations. The ruling opens up corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on politics and elections.
