The Unaddressed Issue in the “Nonhomicide” Juvenile Life Without Parole Debate

The SCOTUS Nine. Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The issue of whether or not kids under 18 should be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole is so widely discussed among human and prison rights activists in the United States (and the people who cover them) that the acronym for “juvenile life without parole” (JLWOP) is often itself pronounced — “jailwop” — and spoken in conversation without so much as a pause to consider explaining it. It’s like the word “scuba” to people who follow this stuff: So commonplace it’s not worth defining.

So, to these folks, it wasn’t much of a surprise yesterday and over the weekend to see the deluge of coverage granted to two recently-heard JLWOP Supreme Court cases. Discussion about these cases made appearances in just about every media outlet in the country.

As usual, the most succinct and comprehensive coverage came from Mr. Liptak at the New York Times. He summarized the pre-hearing issues here and then got some debatish quotes from SCOTUS (that’s wonk-speak for “Supreme Court of the United States of America,” thank you very much) justices for a followup. The second story boils the debate down to this:

Outside the context of the death penalty, the court’s Eighth Amendment jurisprudence has not taken the offender’s age into consideration in deciding whether a sentence is proportional to the crime. Requiring sentencing judges to add age to the sentencing calculus would presumably make a difference in some but not all cases.

The issue at hand is what the court calls “nonhomicide” cases. Sullivan v. Florida and Graham v. Florida involve situations where kids under 18 were convicted and sentenced to JLWOP, respectively, for raping a 72-year-old woman and generally being an incorrigible criminal. No one died in either of these cases, but the facts (as presented in the briefs linked above) were clear: these two kids were convicted of doing very bad things. Should they serve life for their crimes?

SCOTUS must decide. They’ll render their decision in the spring.

In the meantime, I think it’s worth pointing out that “nonhomicide” does not, apparently, account for what’s known as “accomplice liability” crimes — which generally involve the broadening of murder charges to include pretty much anyone who even heard about the crime if it eventually lead to murder. I’ve harped on this over and over again, but Pennsylvania has a great deal more juvenile lifers than any other state in the nation. However, not one “nonviolent” offender — according to this study (cited in the Times‘ multimedia thing here) — is in Pennsylvania. Which seems wrong.

Stacey Torrance’s case, for example, involves a situation in which a 14-year-old was given life in prison for being a part of a robbery that eventually lead to someone being killed — by two other people, more than a day later, who were in their 20s (and are also serving life). The 14-year-old was not, strictly speaking, guilty of a homicide. But he was involved in a crime that lead to a homicide. Should he serve life? An issue of semantics, perhaps. But still worth considering.

Though apparently not at this juncture in SCOTUS’s decision-making process.