ABA calls for end to life-without-parole sentences for kids

/in /by

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.

“With the adoption of Resolution 107C, the American Bar Association has sent a clear message to the legal community and policymakers across the country that children should never be sentenced to die in prison,” said ABA President, William C. Hubbard. “As the world’s foremost leader and defender of human rights, the United States should ban life without parole sentences for children – a severe violation of human rights.  The ABA applauds those states that have already taken steps to reform their laws and urges other states to pass similar reforms as soon as practicable.”

The ABA approved the resolution during its Midyear Meeting in Houston, made up of 560 delegates from state, local and other bar associations and legal groups from across the country.  In doing so, the ABA joins a growing movement among policy makers, opinion leaders and national organizations seeking an end to life-without-parole sentences for children, including the American Correctional Association, the National Probation and Parole Association, the National PTA, and that National Association of Counties.  Significantly, the ABA resolution received a favorable vote from the U.S. Department of Justice when it was heard by the Criminal Justice Section last fall, making its position in opposition to life-without-parole for children public for the first time. The resolution was sponsored by Kelly Mitchell, executive director of the Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice at the University of Minnesota Law School.

“Our sentencing strategies should focus on rehabilitating children and preparing them to re-enter society, rather than condemning them to die in prison,” said Stephen Saltzburg, a law professor at George Washington University and a former official in the U.S. Department of Justice. “We can never know what a child will be like when he or she is an adult, so we need to check in on them to see if they have changed as they have grown and matured.”

The United States is the only country in the world known to sentence its children to die in prison. In addition, the U.S. and South Sudan are the only countries that have yet to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which prohibits the imposition of life-without-parole sentences upon children.  Somalia ratified the treaty last month. Pope Francis also has called for an end to life sentences.

“We are thrilled to have the nation’s most respected legal organization add its voice in opposition to this unjust practice,” said Jody Kent Lavy, CFSY director & national coordinator. “Their partnership and the overwhelming support for establishing fair alternatives to life-without-parole sentences for children demonstrate that it is time now for the United States to join the rest of the world and stop sentencing our children to die in prison.”

Read the resolution

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What Happens at a Juvenile Lifer Hearing?


/in , /by

Once a month, in an ordinary brick two-story building off Route 9 in Natick, lines of people lock cell phones in their cars, hang their coats on a rack, pass through a metal detector, and climb the stairs to a hallway that leads to a space the size of a large classroom. They’ve arrived at a juvenile lifer parole hearing, where a prisoner, once sentenced as a teen, must prove that he or she has changed enough to warrant a shot at freedom. These hearings are not easy to attend or take part in—they are inevitably filled with weeping, anger, insensitivity, and sometimes forgiveness.

In Massachusetts, all lifer hearings are open to the public, but those for prisoners who were juveniles at the time of their crime are a relatively new phenomenon, and two are held on one day—one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The state became eligible for these hearings in 2013 after Diatchenko v. District Attorney, when the state’s Supreme Judicial Court ruled it unconstitutional to hand out mandatory life sentences to juveniles who commit murder.

Read More

By. Jean Trounstine

February 20, 2015

Needed: Level Heads

/in , /by

February 23. 2015

“I want to be very clear that no one who supports this bill is in any way indifferent to the victims.”

–Greg Leding, state representative from Fayetteville.

It’s a shame that Mr. Leding felt he needed to say he wasn’t indifferent to the murdered or their families. But that’s what it can come to when a body politic, even one composed of decent, law-abiding people in the main, a community like Arkansas, comes too close to becoming a society of distrust in which nothing, however obvious, can be taken for granted. Which may explain why Mr. Leding had to say what he did the other day.

Greg Leding, a Democrat serving in the Arkansas House, and Missy Irvin, a Republican over in the state Senate, have a more than reasonable bit of legislation pending at the General Assembly. There’s no reason to make any apologies for it. Their proposal is both just and merciful, for it might keep juveniles from serving life sentences when they’ve been convicted of murder.

Read More

Unlikely Cause Unites the Left and the Right: Justice Reform

/in , /by

By. Carl Hulse

February 18, 2015

Usually bitter adversaries, Koch Industries and the Center for American Progress have found at least one thing they can agree on: The nation’s criminal justice system is broken.

Koch Industries, the conglomerate owned by the conservative Koch brothers, and the center, a Washington-based liberal issues group, are coming together to back a new organization called the Coalition for Public Safety. The coalition plans a multimillion-dollar campaign on behalf of emerging proposals to reduce prison populations, overhaul sentencing, reduce recidivism and take on similar initiatives. Other groups from both the left and right — the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for Tax Reform, the Tea Party-oriented FreedomWorks — are also part of the coalition, reflecting its unusually bipartisan approach.

Read More

Black teens who commit a few crimes go to jail as often as white teens who commit dozens

/in , /by

By Max Ehrenfreund

January 30, 2015

Boys are less likely to commit crimes but they are more likely to be placed in a correctional facility than they were three decades ago, according to a new study that shows the justice system for juvenile offenders has become much more punitive. The trends are particularly pronounced among boys from racial minorities, according to the paper by Tia Stevens Andersen of the University of South Carolina and Michigan State University’s Merry Morash.

Although there were negligible differences among the racial groups in how frequently boys committed crimes, white boys were less likely to spend time in a facility than black and Hispanic boys who said they’d committed crimes just as frequently, as shown in the chart above.

Read More

Louisiana inmate in key case to be freed

/in , /by

By Lyle Denniston

January 29, 2015

A Louisiana prison inmate whose life sentence is under review by the Supreme Court was on the verge of being released on Thursday, according to news accounts in New Orleans.  George Toca, convicted of second-degree murder nearly thirty years ago when he was seventeen years old and sentenced to life in prison without parole, was involved in a new plea bargain, those news stories said.

On December 12, the Supreme Court granted review of Toca’s case, to decide whether he could benefit from a 2012 decision limiting life-without-parole sentences for juveniles who are convicted of murder committed while still a minor.  With his murder conviction and sentence now apparently being vacated, that case could lose its legal significance for the Justices.

Read More

Throw the Book at Them

/in , /by

By. Leon Neyfakh

January 28, 2015

This past Saturday, 53 inmates at Eastern Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in upstate New York, were awarded college diplomas as part of the Bard Prison Initiative, a program that enables convicted felons to take courses and earn degrees while incarcerated. Among the graduates were newly minted experts in advanced math, literature, and social studies who had written senior papers with titles like “The Artistic Excursions of Thomas Hardy” and “Combinatorial Game Symmetry: Encountering the Odd Multiple of K.”

Read More

US teenage lifers - children sentenced to jail forever

/in , /by

By Andrew Purcell

January 25, 2015

John Pace spent his last day of freedom at the house in West Philadelphia that he shared with his mum, his six brothers and four sisters. It was September 18, 1985 and summer was coming to an end. In the early evening, he set out for his friend’s place, some grass in his pocket and a wine cooler in his hand. Wine mixed with fruit juice and fizzy water was no drink for a man, but that was all right. He was seventeen years old.

Read More 

UNLV event focuses on life-without-parole sentences for juveniles

/in , /by

By Michael Lyle

January 22, 2015

When he was 14 years old, Marcus Dixon was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole after 40 years for murder with use of a deadly weapon.

“I messed up,” Dixon said Thursday during a juvenile justice event at UNLV. “I know that. But life without parole for a kid isn’t right.”

His 1999 conviction was for fatally shooting 16-year-old Daryl Crittenden in 1998. After numerous court appeals and appearances before the Nevada Pardons Board, Dixon on Jan. 15 walked out of his cell at Carson City’s Northern Nevada Correctional Facility into a new life.

“It’s like I’ve been waiting for this day my entire life,” said Dixon, now 31.

Dixon’s story is a common narrative among Nevada inmates who were given life sentences without parole as juveniles. The latest research by Nevada legal clerks shows that prison population is at 17.

“In our current criminal justice system, it is legal to sentence children to die in prison,” said Mary Berkheiser, a professor at UNLV’s Boyd Law School and director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic. “We need to change that. The lives of these young men matter.”

 

Read More

Gov. Cuomo Commish: New York State Should Raise the Age to 18

/in , /by

By Gary Gately

January 19, 2015

New York state should raise the age that youths can be tried and convicted as adults to 18, a commission appointed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo recommended Monday.

Cuomo, speaking in Albany, said he planned to propose the recommendations of the Governor’s Commission on Youth, Public Safety & Justice as a legislative package to the State Assembly.

In a 164-page report, the commission said its recommendations would reduce by 1,500 to 2,400 the number of crimes against people across the state every five years while saving taxpayer dollars.

And pointing to states including Connecticut and Illinois that have raised the age of criminal responsibility, the report said recidivism and juvenile crime rates can be lowered through “evidence-based” interventions that steer nonviolent young offenders out of the juvenile justice system and into family mental health or other services.

Read More