This week, the Supreme Court will hear a case testing whether the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment prohibits sentencing a teen to life in prison without parole for a nonhomicide crime. Punishment is generally deemed "cruel" if it's more than "graduated and proportional." It is constitutionally "unusual" if imposed so infrequently "that a national consensus has developed against it." (Click here to follow Dahlia Lithwick).
The seeds for this particular constitutional challenge were sown in Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion in a 2005 case, Roper v. Simmons, banning capital punishment for juveniles. That case hinged on the growing national consensus against executing teens, bolstered by scientific studies finding teenage brains to be underdeveloped in ways that make their owners less culpable than adults. The question for the court this time is not just whether teens are really different than adults, but whether being sentenced to die in prison is truly different from being sentenced to die there by lethal injection.
The court ordered two different Florida cases to be argued on the same day—suggesting it may resolve each one differently (the court may simply find that age 13 is too young for life without parole but 17 is not). In Joe Sullivan's case, he and two accomplices robbed a 72-year-old woman, then he and a confederate allegedly returned to her home and raped her. Sullivan was tried in adult court and sentenced to life without parole. He was 13. Terrance Jamar Graham tried to rob a restaurant with two accomplices. He was charged as an adult, pled guilty to armed burglary charges, and received one year behind bars and three years probation. But when he violated probation, Graham was sentenced, without trial, to life without parole. He was 17. In both cases the sentencing judges were certain these boys were beyond hope or help.
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