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† Criminal InJustice is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Kay Whitlock, co-author of Queer (In)Justice and Considering Hate, is contributing editor of CI. Criminal Injustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm CST.
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JWLOP, Three Years Later
by nancy a heitzeg
“Issue: (1) Whether Miller v. Alabama adopts a new substantive rule that applies retroactively on collateral review to people condemned as juveniles to die in prison; and (2) whether the Supreme Court has jurisdiction to decide whether the Supreme Court of Louisiana correctly refused to give retroactive effect in this case to this Court’s decision in Miller v. Alabama.”
Facts about the sentence
- “The majority of sentences to life without parole for youth have been imposed in states where judges are obligated to impose it as a mandatory sentence, without consideration of any factors relating to a child’s age or life circumstances.
- More than 25% of people serving life without parole after being sentenced as children were convicted of felony murder or accomplice liability, meaning they were not the primary perpetrators of the crime, and may not have even been present at the time someone was killed.
- The majority of youth sentenced to life without parole are concentrated in just five states: California, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
- Children sentence to life in prison without parole are often the most vulnerable members of our society. Nearly 80 percent of juvenile lifers reported witnessing violence in their homes; more than half (54.1%) witnessed weekly violence in their neighborhoods.
- African American youth are sentenced to life without parole as children at a per capita rate that is 10 times that of White youth.
- 80 percent of girls and nearly half of all children sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole have been physically abused.
- 77 percent of girls and 20 percent of all youth lifers said they have been sexually abused.”
And as with the death penalty, a recent study, Juvenile Life Without Parole in Law and Practice: The End of Superpredator Era Sentencing , reveals that a handful of harsh counties account for the majority of these cases”
“The report counted 2,341 people serving juvenile life-without-parole sentences nationwide. The counties responsible for imposing a quarter of all such sentences are: Philadelphia; Los Angeles; Orleans, in Louisiana; Cook, in Illinois, and St. Louis. Michigan, which has one of the country’s biggest populations of juvenile lifers, declined to provide information. (Detroit’s Wayne County would likely have ranked alongside Philadelphia had it been included.)”
And so, despite incremental efforts at review and reform, we remain, in so many ways, No Country for Children.
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