The Supreme Court further hobbled life sentences for juvenile offenders in a decision that affects a case from the 1960s.
The high court ruled 6-3 on Monday that an earlier ruling that outlawed mandatory sentences of life without parole for juveniles can be retroactively applied to earlier cases.
The case, called Montgomery v. Louisiana, centers on Henry Montgomery, who was 17 years old in 1963 when he killed a deputy sheriff in Louisiana. He was sentenced to life without parole.
However, in 2012, the Supreme Court ruled in the case Miller v. Alabama that a juvenile convicted of murder couldn’t receive a mandatory life sentence. It violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, except in especially heinous cases, the court said.
So Montgomery wanted the ruling to apply to his sentence of life in prison. Louisiana’s Supreme Court denied his motion by saying that the Miller case ruling doesn’t retroactively apply to such a case.
But the Supreme Court disagreed. In an opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the majority said when a decision on constitutional law controls the outcome of a case, the constitution requires a state to retroactively apply that rule.
Since the Miller case rendered all life sentences without parole for juveniles unconstitutional, it must retroactively apply to Montgomery’s case.
Kennedy, a perennial swing vote in the court, wrote that the state could extend parole eligibility to juvenile offenders. That would neither “impose an onerous burned on the states nor disturb the finality of state convictions,” he said.
It also gives Montgomery the chance to go before a parole board and prove he isn’t the “troubled, misguided youth” he once was, Kennedy said.
The court’s liberal wing of justices Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan joined Kennedy in the decision. Chief Justice John Roberts also joined in the ruling, but Justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented.
