Supreme Court gives kids who kill a deserved break
FILE - This June 20, 2012, file photo shows the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington. It's the biggest secret in a city known for not keeping them: the nine Supreme Court justices and more than three dozen other people have kept quiet for more than two months about how the high court is going to rule on the constitutionality of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon) Credit: AP
Kids who kill aren’t the same as adults who kill. That’s the common sense the U.S. Supreme Court reiterated this week in ruling that mandatory life without parole for juveniles convicted of murder is unconstitutional.
That doesn’t mean a killer child can never be sent to prison to leave only in a box. It’s just that making it mandatory is cruel and unusual punishment. As a society we shouldn’t be that quick to abandon all hope of redemption for any child, no matter how horrific their offense.
Before slamming the prison door shut forever, a majority of the court said a sentencing judge must be allowed to consider the characteristics of an individual child and the details of his offense.
The two cases that prompted the decision aren’t pretty. In one Kuntrell Jackson, who was 14 years old at the time, went to a video store in Arkansas with two other boys to commit a robbery. He stayed outside for most of the stick-up, but after he went inside one of his companions shot and killed the store clerk.
In the other case Evan Miller, also 14 at the time, spent a night drinking and drugging with a friend in Alabama before the two beat a neighbor and set fire to his trailer. The neighbor died.
Monday’s decision followed the same solid reasoning the court applied in 2005 when it banned the death penalty for juveniles, and in 2010 when it banned life without the possibility of parole for juveniles convicted of a nonhomicide offense.
Children are different. “Their ‘lack of maturity’ and ‘underdeveloped sense of responsibility’ lead to recklessness, impulsivity and heedless risk taking,” Associate Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the majority opinion. “They ‘are more vulnerable to negative influences and outside pressures. And because a child’s character is not as ‘well formed’ as an adult’s, his traits are ‘less fixed’ and his actions are less likely to be ‘evidence of irretrievable depravity.”
Mandatory sentences are a blunt instrument. They strip judges of the critical authority to judge. That’s unconscionable when faced with the profound question of whether a child should rot in prison.
Pictured Above: The U.S. Supreme Court
