ABA calls for end to JLWOP
The American Bar Association (ABA), the country’s foremost legal membership organization representing nearly 400,000 prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys and other lawyers, today approved a resolution calling for an end to the practice of sentencing children to life in prison without parole and urging “meaningful periodic opportunities for release.”
In approving this resolution, the ABA demonstrates its commitment to ensuring that children are held accountable in a way that provides them the opportunity to be rehabilitated and prove themselves deserving of a second chance. Passage also signals the ABA’s commitment to reforming our country’s juvenile sentencing laws to reflect child developmental science demonstrating that adolescents are still growing and changing, and recent rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court affirming that children are “constitutionally different” from adults, and therefore less deserving of our harshest punishments.