The juvenile justice system oversees adjudications for juvenile offenders in juvenile courts. A juvenile offender is a youth under the age of 18 or the age of majority, depending on state

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MILLER V. ALABAMA 

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Miller v. Alabama 567 U.S. ——— (2012) Decided: Jun. 25, 2012 Vote: 5 (Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan)

4 (Roberts, J, Scalia, Thomas, Alito) Opinion of the Court: Kagan Concurring Opinion: Breyer (Sotomayor) Dissenting Opinion: Roberts, J (Scalia, Thomas, Alito) Dissenting Opinion: Thomas (Scalia) Dissenting Opinion: Alito (Scalia) Oral Arguments: Transcript | Audio

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Miller v. Alabama , decided by a 5–4 vote, June 25, 2012; Kagan wrote the opinion; Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito dissented.

The Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment forbids sentencing schemes that mandate life in prison without possibility of parole for juvenile murderers.

The ruling set aside life-without-parole sentences imposed in separate murder cases in Alabama and Arkansas against defendants fourteen years of age at the time o offenses. Evan Miller was convicted in an Alabama state court of murder in the course of an arson and murder in the course of a robbery for his part in the fire-related a neighbor, Cole Cannon, on July 15, 2003. Miller and a teenaged friend robbed Cannon of $300, beat him with a baseball bat and fists, and started a fire to cover up evidence of the beating; after they left the scene, Cannon died of smoke inhalation. Kuntrell Jackson was convicted of capital felony murder for his part in the Novemb 1999, shotgun killing of a video store clerk in Blytheville, Arkansas, during a botched robbery attempt. Jackson was not the shooter but knew his friend had a weapon in the store when the shooting occurred. Both states had permitted the death penalty for juvenile murderers, but the Supreme Court’s decision in Roper v. Simmons (2 eliminated that option and left a mandatory life-without-parole sentence as the only option for the specific murder counts at issue.

The Supreme Court in Graham v. Florida (2010) prohibited life-without-parole for juvenile offenders in nonhomicide cases as cruel and unusual punishment under the and Fourteenth amendments. Miller on direct appeal and Jackson in a state habeas corpus proceeding cited Graham to argue that their sentences also violated the E Amendment. The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals rejected Miller’s appeal, and the Alabama Supreme Court declined to review the decision. The Arkansas Suprem rejected Jackson’s petition; two justices dissented on the ground that the prosecution had failed to show an intent to kill on Jackson’s part. The U.S. Supreme Court g certiorari in both cases and scheduled them for argument in tandem.

In a 5–4 decision, the Court held that Arkansas and Alabama’s mandatory sentencing schemes were unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment and that a judge o must have the opportunity to consider mitigating circumstances before imposing life without parole on juveniles in murder cases. Writing for the majority, Kagan said R and Graham led to the conclusion that “mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles violate the Eighth Amendment.” Citing Graham, Kagan said that children “constitutionally different from adults” for purposes of sentencing because of their lack of maturity and underdeveloped sense of responsibility. Kagan found that the mandatory penalty schemes improperly ignored the role of age in determining the appropriateness of a lifetime of incarceration without parole. “By removing youth fro balance,” she wrote, “these laws prohibit a sentencing authority from assessing whether the law’s harshest term of imprisonment proportionately punishes a juvenile o The mandatory provisions also ran afoul of the Court’s decisions requiring individualized sentencing in capital cases, Kagan reasoned. “Graham and Roper and our individualized sentencing cases alike teach that in imposing a State’s harshest penalties, a sentencer misses too much if he treats every child as an adult,” she wrote rejected the argument for a categorical ban on life without parole for juveniles but suggested that “appropriate occasions” for the penalty would be “uncommon.”

The ruling reversed the state courts’ judgments and sent the cases back for further proceedings. Four justices joined Kagan’s opinion: Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer, an Sotomayor. In a concurring opinion, Breyer specified that Jackson should not be subject to life without parole unless the state proves an intent to kill. “Given Graham’s reasoning,” Breyer wrote, “the kinds of homicide that can subject a juvenile offender to life without parole must exclude instances where the juvenile himself neither ki intends to kill the victim.” Sotomayor joined his opinion.

In three separate opinions, the four justices who had dissented in Graham all rejected the ruling on the general ground that the Constitution left it up to legislatures, no Court, to determine whether to allow life without parole for juvenile murderers. “Neither the text of the Constitution nor our precedent prohibits legislatures from requiri juvenile murderers be sentenced to life without parole,” Roberts wrote in the longest of the three opinions and the only one joined by the other dissenters: Scalia, Tho and Alito.

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In his opinion, Roberts insisted that he was not questioning the Court’s prior rulings. In his opinion, however, Thomas repeated his earlier criticism of the Eighth Amen and individualized sentencing precedents and called the new ruling “even less legitimate than the foundation on which it is built.” Scalia joined his opinion.

In the shortest of the dissents, Alito vigorously criticized the effect of the decision and emphasized his disagreement by reading portions of his opinion from the bench a 17-1/2-year-old who sets off a bomb in a crowded mall or guns down a dozen students and teachers is a ‘child’ and must be given a chance to persuade a judge to his release into society,” Alito wrote. “Nothing in the Constitution supports this arrogation of legislative authority.”

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ROPER, SUPERINTENDENT, POTOSI CORRECTIONAL CENTER V. SIMMONS 

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Barr, Attorney General v. Lee Death Penalty Debates Skipper v. South Carolina (476 U. What Does the U.S. Constitution S about Capital Punishment? Zant v. Stephens (456 U.S. 410)

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Brown, Warden v. Sanders Loving v. United States Penry v. Johnson, Director, Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Institutional Division Report of the Department of Justic Bureau of Justice Statistics: "Capi Punishment 1998" Sochor v. Florida

Learn More About Juvenile Ankenbrandt, as Next Friend and of L.R. v. Richards Juvenile Crime, 1997-1998 Legisla Chronology What Is Juvenile Court? What Is the Juvenile Justice Syste Why Don't Juveniles Have a Right Trial by Jury?

Roper v. Simmons 543 U.S. 551 (2005) Decided: Mar. 1, 2005 Vote: 5 (Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer)

4 (Rehnquist, O'Connor, Scalia, Thomas) Opinion of the Court: Kennedy Concurring Opinion: Stevens (Ginsburg) Dissenting Opinion: O'Connor Dissenting Opinion: Scalia (Rehnquist, Thomas)

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Roper, Superintendent, Potosi Correctional Center v. Simmons, decided by a 5-4 vote, March 1, 2005; Kennedy wrote the opinion; Scalia, Rehnquist, O’Connor, and Thomas dissented.

Christopher Simmons was sentenced to death by a St. Louis court for a gruesome murder that he helped commit in 1993 when he was seventeen. Ten years later, the Missouri Supreme Court overturned the death sentence on the ground that executing a juvenile offender amounted to “cruel and unusual” punishment under the Eighth Amendment.

Lawyers for the state appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which had upheld the execution of older teenagers in a closely divided decision in 1989. In a change of course, however, the Court in 2005 used Simmons's case to prohibit the execution of juvenile offenders nationwide.

A majority of justices in the 5-4 decision said that juveniles were less culpable and less able to control their actions than adult offenders and that a “national consensus” had formed against executing juvenile offenders since the Court's previous ruling. The dissenting justices sharply criticized the ruling, saying it was based on little more than the “subjective” views of the majority.

Background. Capital punishment had been a divisive issue for the Court since the 1970s when it first threw out all existing death sentences in 1972 and then allowed capital punishment to resume in 1976 if juries were given guidelines for imposing the death penalty. Over the next two decades, the Court ruled out capital punishment in some specific types of cases—for example, rape—but rejected broader constitutional challenges.

Twice in the late 1980s, the Court considered the constitutionality of executing persons for offenses committed while under the age of eighteen. In Thompson v. Oklah (1988), a fractured 5-3 majority effectively forbade the execution of juvenile offenders under the age of sixteen. But one year later, the Court voted 5-4 in Stanford v. K to uphold capital punishment for defendants from Kentucky and Missouri who were sentenced to death for murders committed at the ages of seventeen and sixteen, respectively.

O’Connor cast the pivotal vote in both cases. She cited what she called a “national consensus” against execution of fifteen-year-olds and the absence of such a conse against execution of older teenagers. O’Connor also wrote the Court's opinion in another 5-4 decision in 1989 that allowed execution of mentally retarded offenders (P Lynaugh).

The Court reversed itself on the mental retardation issue in 2002. With O’Connor and Kennedy in the majority, the Court held, 6-3, that execution of mentally retarded offenders amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. Stevens's opinion in Atkins v. Virginia found a “national consensus” against the practice on the basis of the dec number of states that permitted it. In a footnote, Stevens also noted that execution of mentally retarded offenders was “overwhelmingly disapproved” in “the world com Dissenting justices criticized both bases for the decision.

When the Court reconvened in October 2002, Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer signaled that they were similarly ready to bar execution of juvenile offenders. Th dissented from the Court's refusal to issue a writ of habeas corpus to overturn the death sentence imposed on Kevin Stanford, the Kentucky inmate in the 1989 decisi O’Connor and Kennedy were silent.

The Case. Christopher Simmons was a high school junior in the St. Louis suburb of Fenton in September 1993 when he and a fifteen-year-old friend murdered an eld woman named Shirley Crook, who was apparently chosen at random, merely for the sake of the killing. The two youths used an unlocked window to gain access to C home and then used duct tape to cover her eyes and mouth and bind her hands. They then used Crook's minivan to drive her to a railroad trestle spanning the Meram River, where they tied her hands and feet together before throwing her off the bridge. Crook's body was recovered the next afternoon.

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