OPINION:
In just two years, Joe Harris Sullivan committed 17 criminal offenses, including several serious felonies and numerous violations even while in detention. Then, on May 4, 1989, when Sullivan was 13 years old, he helped rob the home of a 72-year-old woman - and he returned later that day, threw a black slip over her head and raped her so brutally that she required surgery. Having exhausted every attempt at rehabilitation, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Now, 20 years later, Sullivan gets a chance for his lawyers to argue before the Supreme Court on Monday that the U.S. Constitution suddenly forbids life sentences without parole for juvenile offenders, at least if their crimes do not result in another’s death. Also Monday, Terrance Graham, who, a month shy of his 18th birthday, violated probation by taking part in an armed robbery, has his lawyers make the same argument in a separate case. In both instances, plaintiffs argue that it is somehow “cruel or unusual punishment” for a juvenile offender to serve life without parole in violation of the Eighth Amendment as interpreted through “evolving standards of decency.”
This request for a bright-line rule against such sentences would overturn the understanding of the Constitution that has persisted for more than two centuries, ignore the careful crafting of laws by 43 state legislatures (plus the District), and overturn the studied deliberations of judges and juries throughout the land who already apply laws with numerous extra protections for juveniles.
In essence, according to Heritage Foundation legal expert Charles S. Stimson, here’s what plaintiffs are really saying: “You can commit as many rapes or violent crimes with guns as you want, up to a day before your 18th birthday, yet you are constitutionally prohibited from getting life without parole.”
To this, Mr. Stimson reasonably asks of the backers of this constitutionally and morally bankrupt proposition: “When you free him from jail, would you let him live next to you?”
Mr. Stimson and former colleague Andrew M. Grossman put out a major study in August called “Adult Time for Adult Crime” that meticulously refutes every argument advanced by the growing feel-good movement to ban life without parole for juveniles. They note that the sob-story case studies put forth by leniency proponents don’t tell the whole story.
Consider 14-year-old Ashley Jones, described in an activists’ report as “running away with an older boyfriend who shot and killed her grandfather and aunt.” What the leniency advocates left out was that in the same attack, Ashley herself hit her aunt in the head with a heater, stabbed her in the chest and tried to set her room on fire - and then stabbed her 10-year-old sister 14 times.
Not exactly an unwilling accomplice.
The Constitution clearly gives states primacy in determining the appropriate length of criminal sentences, especially so that extreme crimes like these can be evaluated case by case. Yet the plaintiffs cite the 2005 Supreme Court decision in Roper v. Simmons, which outlawed the death penalty for juvenile offenders, to argue that life sentences likewise violate decency and supposed international norms. What they ignore is that dozens of nations allow for juvenile sentences of life without parole or their functional equivalents. Also, rather than the Roper decision providing legal support for convicts Sullivan and Graham, it actually should lead to the opposite conclusion.
“To the extent the juvenile death penalty might have residual deterrent effect,” wrote Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, “it is worth noting that the punishment of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole is itself a severe sanction. …” In other words, a major reason to rule out the death penalty is because life sentences are available. Take away those sentences, too, and crime victims and their communities would lose necessary protections against hardened, heinous criminals.
The Supreme Court should rule against both convicts and let stand the wisdom of 43 state legislatures as developed over the experience of centuries.
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