Jailing juveniles

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/13/AR2009121302444_pf.html

Editorial

THE SENATE Judiciary Committee should embrace a bill scheduled for debate on Thursday that institutes needed reforms in how the nation deals with youth who run afoul of the law.

The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Reauthorization Act does not impose federal strictures on state and local entities, but it provides funds for those that choose to comply with the legislation’s guidelines. In this way, the Justice Department, which administers the act, can provide incentives to states to comply with what it considers best practices.

Perhaps the most important provision in the legislation is one that calls on states to keep juveniles — even those charged as adults — separate from alleged adult offenders. Statistics show that juveniles held in adult facilities are more likely to be attacked, more likely to commit crimes once released and more likely to commit suicide than those held in facilities that house only minors. Even so, the act sensibly gives prosecutors and judges some discretion to detain in adult facilities youths who are charged with the most violent crimes and who pose a significant threat to other juveniles. And it makes accommodations for small or rural communities that do not have separate adult and juvenile facilities as long as youth are held out of “sight and sound” from the adults.

The bill rightly encourages states to eliminate the practice of locking up juveniles charged with status offenses, such as truancy or running away from home. Studies have shown that juveniles and communities fare much better when status offenders are redirected to counseling, mentoring or school-based programs. Under the act, states that now allow indefinite detention of status offenders would have three years to revise their policies in order to continue to qualify for federal funds.

The act also calls on states to be aware of and address the growing evidence that African American and Hispanic youths are frequently dealt with more harshly than their white counterparts. For instance, African American and Hispanic juveniles are much more likely to be detained even for minor crimes than are white juveniles and are much more likely to be tried as adults than white youths who are accused of similar crimes. States that receive federal funds would have to keep records of the race and ethnicity of juveniles who come into the system and how they are dealt with and create a plan to eliminate disparate treatment between minority juveniles and white offenders, if such exists.

Funding these new approaches is not cheap, but it is worthwhile. The bill calls for an appropriation of some $245 million for fiscal 2010, increasing to $442 million by fiscal 2015. To ensure that taxpayer dollars are well spent, lawmakers should insist that the periodic progress reports provided by states and an annual assessment by the Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention be made public.

Teen felons need chance for parole

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http://www.buffalonews.com/149/story/884872.html

By Murray Light

Does it make any sense for a judge to sentence a juvenile to life imprisonment and then add the caveat that the youngster shall not have the possibility of parole so long as he or she is alive?

There are those who say the judge who makes this a part of his sentencing of a juvenile is in violation of the Eighth Amendment that prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. They point to the 2005 ruling in Roper v. Simmons in which the Supreme Court abolished the death penalty for juveniles, and say that the logic for that decision should extend to life imprisonment without parole as well.

The Supreme Court currently has before it two cases involving juveniles and must decide whether life imprisonment without the possibility of parole is a violation of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution. A sentence of life without the possibility of parole is a judgment that an offender will never be fit to return to civil society no matter how long he or she lives.

There are those who say that this punishment is proper for adults who have committed terrible crimes but not for juveniles. They make the case that the court in the Roper case emphasized the immaturity of juveniles even at age 17, a point that finds growing support in brain science.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was the dominant court voice in the Roper case and who wrote for the court majority in its opinion, is likely to be assigned the role of writing the opinion in the two pending court cases. Since the ruling in the Roper case, research on brain behavior of juveniles strongly indicates that they are less mature than adults. This should be important in deciding whether that immaturity justified an exclusion from the sentence of life without parole. It is interesting to note that the two pending cases awaiting final determination by the court are quite different. In one case, the defendant was sentenced to life without parole for a probation violation involving a house break-in at the age of 17. In the other case, the defendant was convicted of sexual assault at the age of 13. It is difficult to understand how the two cases, so differing in severity, could be linked. Neither one on the face of it appears serious enough to justify the original sentences.

I would have to say that life without parole is never a fair sentence for a juvenile, although I do believe that teenagers must be held accountable and punished for their misdeeds. One cannot overlook another factor that has come to the forefront since the Roper case. Recent studies by very reliable groups now indicate that juveniles who commit crimes, including very serious offenses, grow up to be law-abiding adults and that it is impossible to predict which juvenile offenders will become criminals in their adult lives.

Hopefully, Chief Justice John Roberts will assign Kennedy to write the opinion of the court in these two important but disparate cases. Currently there are 2,574 juveniles serving life without parole. It is a statistic we cannot be proud of.

Now, one final but important thought on this subject. It would be worthwhile for a body of lawmakers, with judicial backgrounds, to be named to review each of the 2,574 cases to determine if these juveniles now incarcerated for life have been placed there for the right reasons. I am certain many could or should be released from prison.

Murray B. Light is the former editor of The Buffalo News.

Developmental Psychologist Says Teenagers Are Different

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/science/01conv.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

By Claudia Dreifus

Laurence Steinberg, a developmental psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia, is one of the leading experts in the United States on adolescent behavior and adolescent brain biology. Dr. Steinberg, 57, has won the $1 million Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize, which will be awarded to him at a ceremony in early December in Switzerland. Here is an edited version of two conversations with Dr. Steinberg last month:

Q. YOU HEAR PARENTS SOMETIMES SAY, “I’M LIVING WITH AN INSANE PERSON. MY CHILD IS A TEENAGER.” ARE THEY BEING HYPERBOLIC?

A. I’m not one of those people who labels adolescence as some sort of mental illness. Teenagers are not crazy. They’re different.

When it comes to crime, they are less responsible for their behavior than adults. And typically, in the law, we don’t punish people as much who are less responsible. We know from our lab that adolescents are more impulsive, thrill-seeking, drawn to the rewards of a risky decision than adults. They tend to not focus very much on costs. They are more easily coerced to do things they know are wrong. These factors, under the law, make people less responsible for criminal acts. The issue is: as a class, should we treat adolescents differently?

Q. IS THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM BEGINNING TO TAKE THESE DIFFERENCES INTO ACCOUNT DURING SENTENCING?

A. It’s been coming up in cases. I went to Washington in November to watch the oral arguments in two related cases before the Supreme Court that ask: should someone who committed a crime as a teen be subjected to life imprisonment without a chance for parole, ever?

With these cases, and another in 2005 where the high court threw out the death penalty for adolescents, I was scientific consultant to the American Psychological Association on its amicus brief. What we said in the death penalty case — and now — was that we have considerable evidence showing that adolescents are different from adults in ways that mitigate their criminal responsibility. But since 2005, there’s been a lot of new scientific evidence supporting this position.

Q. WHAT IS THE NEW EVIDENCE?

A. In the last five years, as neuroscience has moved forward with functional magnetic resonance imaging and with research on animals, there have been dozens of new studies of adolescent brain development. These show that the brain systems providing for impulse control are still maturing during adolescence. Neuroscientists have shown that the part of the brain that improves most during adolescence is the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in complicated decision-making, thinking ahead, planning, comparing risks and rewards. And the neuroscientific research is showing that over the course of adolescence and into the 20s, there is this continued maturation of this part of the brain. So now, we have brain evidence that supports behavioral studies.

Moreover, we’re seeing that behavior can change once the brain more fully matures. Take thrill-seeking, for instance. What happens is that when people move out of adolescence, they become less interested in it. For example, I can’t stand riding on a roller-coaster now. I liked it as a teenager. I can’t stand driving fast now. I liked driving fast when I was a teenager. What has changed? I’m not as driven today by this thrill-seeking sensation. And in our studies, we’ve shown that there is a kind of normative decline in sensation-seeking after middle adolescence. A lot of adolescent crime is driven by thrill-seeking.

Q. HOW DOES THIS NEW INFORMATION

lead to concluding that the courts shouldn’t sentence some adolescents to life in prison without parole?

A. Given the fact that we know that there will be a developmental change in most people, the science says that we should give them a chance to mature out of it. No one is saying that kids who commit horrific crimes shouldn’t be punished. But most in the scientific community think that we know that since this person is likely to change, why not revisit this when he’s an adult and see what he’s like?

Q. DO YOU HAVE TEENAGERS AT HOME?

A. We have a son, Ben, who is now 25 and who works at Random House. He did something as a teenager that led me to a whole program of research. He and some friends went to the window of a girl they knew and inadvertently set off a burglar alarm. When a police squad car came, they panicked and fled. When I found out, I said: “Do you realize that you were running from armed police officers who thought they were interrupting a break-in. What were you thinking?” He said: “Well, that’s the problem. I wasn’t.” I wondered: “What goes on when kids are in a peer group that pushes them to make bad decisions?”

Since then, we’ve had people of different ages come to the lab and bring two friends with them. We give them computerized risk-taking tests while we image their brains. We compare brain activity when individuals are watched by their friends and when they are alone. For the adults, the presence of friends has no effect. But for adolescents, just having friends nearby doubles the number of risks they take. We’ve found that a certain part of the brain is activated by the presence of peers in adolescents, but not in adults.

Q. YOU ADVISED THE DEFENSE TEAM OF OMAR KHADR, THE YOUNGEST DETAINEE AT GUANTáNAMO BAY. WHY GET INVOLVED IN THAT CASE?

A. Because he was 15 when he was captured in a safe house in Afghanistan, where he’d been sent by his father, who was active in Al Qaeda. There was a battle in 2002 to take this house where American troops died.

He was interrogated for many hours and admitted to having thrown a grenade that killed an American soldier. He later recanted. I was asked by his Defense Department counsel to advise on whether what he said during interrogation was reliable and his degree of culpability, if he did do it.

In my deposition, I said I don’t know whether he did it or not, but there are studies that say that adolescents are more likely than adults to give false confessions. There’s the Central Park jogger case, where it turned out a group of teenagers gave false confessions. Five were convicted. Several years later, an adult murderer and rapist confessed to the crime.

Q. IT HAS JUST BEEN ANNOUNCED THAT YOU’VE WON THIS $1 MILLION KLAUS JACOBS PRIZE. WHAT DO YOU INTEND TO DO WITH THE MONEY?

A. I want to extend our work on adolescent development to teenagers in other cultures so that we can determine whether the patterns are universal. There’s a longstanding debate over how much of adolescent behavior is biological or cultural. Perhaps this award will lead to more answers.

Rethink life without parole for juvenile offenders

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http://www.tcpalm.com/news/2009/nov/28/michael-kessler-rethink-life-without-parole-for/

By Michael Kessler

I did some dumb things before I finished high school. You probably did, too. So did every single one of my friends. Although I certainly admit nothing, some of the things I did were even criminal acts.

It was not that any of us was inherently or incurably evil. We were just immature, and the risk-avoidance parts of our brains were not fully developed yet. In fact, according to Jay Niedd, a neuroscientist at the National Institute of Mental Health, the frontal part of the brain, the part that controls judgment, organizing, planning and strategic thinking, is not fully developed until well into one’s 20’s. As a result, before young people reach that age, their ability to understand the consequences of their actions, to themselves as well as to others, is still under development.

Most of us survived our teenage mistakes. Most of us did not repeat those mistakes once we reached our 20’s, 30’s and beyond. Most of us have gone on to lead law-abiding and productive lives. Most, not all.

Some never had that chance, and never will, because they have been condemned to prison for the rest of their lives with no possibility of parole.

There are more than 2,500 juvenile offenders serving life without parole. Most, of course, are for murder. Even so, America stands alone in imposing such a penalty for offenses committed by kids under 18. By contrast, the maximum penalty in Germany for a crime committed by a minor is 10 years; in Italy, 24.

There are just more than 100 people in the entire world serving life without parole for crimes committed as juveniles during which no one died. All are in the United States; 77 in Florida. Florida is one of only eight states with juvenile offenders serving life without parole for non-homicide crimes.

Championing this draconian and barbaric treatment of our wayward children is State Rep. William R. Snyder, who believes that children “have to be treated and punished as adults” when they “cross the line” and commit serious crimes.

Soon, the U.S. Supreme Court may tell Mr. Snyder he’s wrong.

Recently, the court heard arguments in two cases involving teenagers sentenced to life without parole for crimes that did not result in anyone’s death. Their claim is that life without the possibility of parole for non-homicide crimes committed by minors violates the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

In 2005, the court came to the same conclusion when it prohibited the execution of juveniles. There, the court found such an extreme penalty to be cruel and unusual, in part because teenagers are immature, irresponsible, susceptible to peer pressure and, most important, often capable of change.

“People do things at 16 and 17 that they would not do at 37, but they spend a lifetime paying for it,” Snyder says.

No, Mr. Snyder, that’s just wrong.

We should not throw these children away. We should not condemn them to die in prison without any chance for redemption and parole.

Children should not be forced to spend their entire lives paying for the mistakes of their youth.

Kessler, a board-certified criminal trial lawyer, lives in Vero Beach

Life for Children

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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/26/life-for-children//print/

By Cal Thomas

The U.S. Supreme Court this month heard arguments in a case that could decide whether a child who commits a crime should be sentenced, in some circumstances, to life without parole.

There can be no question that some minors who murder are unfit to be released from prison for fear they might kill again. But what about crimes that don’t involve homicide? Should a 13-year-old be sentenced to life without the possibility of parole? Such a case is now before the court.

Perhaps if we focused more on redemption, rather than detention, the results would be different.

A study by Florida State University’s Public Interest Law Center estimates that nationwide there are 111 inmates in seven states serving life-without-parole sentences for non-homicide crimes they committed as juveniles. The overwhelming majority, 77, are housed in Florida prisons. Not many, unless you’re one of the 111.

Over the years we’ve managed to get the punishment part right, but what about the redemption part? Prisoners have few advocates and often feel abandoned and without hope. Clearly there must be a better way when the number of incarcerated grows every year, along with the cost of warehousing them in places that serve as hot houses of despair and training academies for hardened criminals. Many inmates will be paroled and commit more crimes.

I solicited success stories from people who work with teen offenders. One response came from Scott Larson, who serves on the board of Reclaiming Youth International and is president of Straight Ahead Ministries (www.straight-ahead.org) in Worcester, Mass. Mr. Larson writes, “My wife and I took up to seven youth at a time between 1990 and 2000, and 10 of those youth were locked up for manslaughter charges. Eight of those went to college; none were re-arrested. One is a lawyer and serving as the assistant deputy commissioner of Youth Services in New Jersey, two are counselors at a group home, one is a sales manager of a building company and the other five are working various jobs and doing well. …”

Mr. Larson says under current law, these youth “would all be doing life sentences (10 to 20 years) in adult prisons, though in each case they were present, but not necessarily the shooter in gang clashes.” He says his group also works with members of the Bloods and Crips gangs in Lynn, Mass., “and have seen them reconcile and work for good in their community. Gang violence this past year is down 57 percent in this city, which is the third most violent in Massachusetts.”

In September, ABC News’ “Primetime” program did a story on the Missouri Juvenile Justice System and an innovative approach that state is taking that has lowered the recidivism rate to 10 percent, the lowest in the country.

Young offenders are not locked behind bars. The state uses a highly relational approach, including hugs from staff and peer groups who express care and concern for them. In addition to appearing effective, the Missouri model is efficient, costing about half the national average, according to Mr. Larson.

A University of Texas study found more than half the states permit children under age 12 to be treated as adults for criminal justice purposes. According to the study, “in 22 states plus the District of Columbia, children as young as 7 can be prosecuted and tried in adult court, where they would be subjected to harsh adult sanctions, including long prison terms, mandatory sentences, and placement in adult prison.” Surely this is cruel and unusual punishment for all but the most violent and psychotic killers.

One size fits all sentencing doesn’t and it shouldn’t. Isn’t it better to attempt to reclaim children headed in the wrong direction than to doom them to life in prison without parole? I think it is. Let’s hope the Supreme Court thinks so, too.

Cal Thomas is a nationally syndicated columnist.

Should South Miami-Dade teen Dewayne Pinacle get life in prison for rape and robbery?

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http://www.miaminewtimes.com/content/printVersion/2012321

By Tim Elfrink

The old man cups a weathered hand behind an enormous ear to hear the question. His gaze goes distant, all the way back to that Sunday morning in 1990. Tears slick the crevassed corners of his eyes.

 “You ever have a gun pointed at you?” he finally asks. “It’s absolutely sickening.”

Albert Morris has done everything to forget that day, when his suburban South Dade driveway exploded in a burst of sexual violence that devastated his family and — eventually — led to a life sentence for Dewayne Pinacle, a troubled 15-year-old who raped Morris’s daughter and then stole hundreds of dollars in cash and jewelry.

Morris has suddenly found the worst moment of his life thrust into the heart of a raging national debate. The U.S. Supreme Court is considering whether to ban life sentences for juveniles. Indeed, the Florida Legislature will soon consider a bill that would make it easier for defendants Pinacle’s age to get out early.

The Sunshine State is a national leader in imprisoning juveniles for life. Hundreds here have been sentenced to life for murder. And we top the nation in life sentences for lesser crimes; of the 109 juveniles who meet that description around the country, 77 are in Florida prisons.

“Long sentences at 15 and under are cruel and unusual because science has proven we’re still developing mentally,” says Sheila Hopkins, an associate director of Florida Catholic Conference. “They usually don’t fully understand what they’re doing at that age. To put them away with no hope of parole simply isn’t right.”

But a close look at the case of Dewayne Pinacle — one of only two Miami-Dade teens given life sentences for non-homicide crimes — makes the argument that some young defendants deserve a life behind bars.

“It’s terrible what he did to my family,” Morris says. “I don’t think that kid should ever get out of jail.”

Albert Morris — who asked that his real name not be used for this story — was born in 1931 in rural Pennsylvania and joined the Air Force after high school in the time between World War II and the Korean War. He worked “every job imaginable” in the force, other than as a pilot, at bases from Illinois to Texas to Wyoming.

In 1953, after Morris was discharged, his brother helped him land a job selling tickets for Miami-based Eastern Air Lines. He later met his wife, Karen, through the company. The couple married in the early ’60s. They bought a small ranch home on a quiet stretch of SW 107th Court, about a mile east of Florida’s Turnpike. In 1968, they had twins — Amy and Catherine. (The names of victims and their friends have been changed to protect their identities.)

The sisters mostly lived together until age 21, when both were University of Miami seniors and Catherine moved in with a friend off-campus. Amy stayed at home with her parents. “They were normal, happy kids,” Morris says. “Amy was almost finished with a degree in family therapy.”

On April 20, 1990, Amy was up late celebrating. Her boyfriend, Mike Harper, had just graduated from UM. Amy and her best friend, Sherry — Mike’s sister — were throwing a party.

Amy, a pretty brunette who had been an honors student at Miami Killian Senior High and then at UM, headed home after midnight.

At the same time, just down the street, two teenagers pulled into a driveway and robbed a woman at gunpoint.

The gunman, 15-year-old Dewayne Pinacle, had grown up less than two miles away in a ramshackle home on SW 146th Terrace. He’d been in trouble for years — first for skipping school and then for busting out windows in an Avis rental car lot. At age 14, he was nailed for burglary.

This night, Pinacle was hanging out with Wayne Seth Grant, an 18-year-old who’d already earned one felony robbery conviction. The two sped away with the woman’s wallet.

Then they spotted Amy heading home and followed her to the family’s driveway. When she parked, Pinacle sprinted to her car, thrust his arm inside the window, and held a pistol to her head.

The 15-year-old demanded the girl’s purse and jewelry. Amy handed them over.

Waving the gun, Pinacle ordered her out of the car and over to the back seat of his ride, where Grant was waiting behind the wheel. He got in beside Amy, and as they cruised down the dark street, he forced her to the floor and told her to undress. Then he raped her. When he couldn’t keep an erection, he berated her and threatened to kill her.

The teens stopped five minutes later, near Fairwood Park. Grant, too, raped Amy. When they were finished, Amy asked to put her clothes back on. “That won’t be necessary,” Pinacle told her. “We’re going to kill you anyway.”

But first they took her to a nearby Publix with an ATM. Pinacle and Grant took out $200.

Back at home, Morris was having trouble sleeping. He wondered where his daughter was. Just before 3 a.m., he walked into the living room and turned on the TV set. He watched Absence of Malice, the Paul Newman/Sally Field classic.

Suddenly the door opened. Amy walked in. Morris began to speak — then he noticed a young man behind her. “What is this?” he asked, rising from the couch.

“Dad, he’s got a gun,” Amy said. Pinacle pointed it at Morris and asked for his VCR. Then he demanded his wallet. He’s going to shoot us both, and when my wife wakes up, he’ll shoot her too, Morris thought.

Instead, Pinacle grabbed the VCR and ran. The teens left.

Amy begged her father not to call the police and finally told him what Pinacle and Grant had done to her. “We were all incredibly scared,” says Sherry Harper, Amy’s best friend. “Dewayne threatened to kill her, to kill her dad. She ended up spending weeks at our house she was so terrified.”

A break in the case came three months later, after Morris obtained videotapes from the ATM at Publix and gave them to police. Someone from the neighborhood recognized Pinacle, and the pair was arrested August 9. Morris and his daughter picked Pinacle and Grant’s mug shots.

On November 25, 1991, a jury convicted the two men of ten felonies after listening to Amy’s wrenching testimony. Judge Fredricka Smith sentenced each to eight life sentences. Through it all, Pinacle sat stone-faced. “He showed zero remorse,” Morris says. “He was just… cold.”

Amy spent years in therapy but eventually graduated from UM with a master’s degree. Morris and his wife stayed in their home for another four years before they picked up and moved to a quiet retirement community in Sarasota.

But in the late ’90s, a movement began to reconsider life sentences without parole for juveniles. By then, only the United States and Somalia had refused to sign an international treaty banning the practice. And a slew of terrible cases marred the public’s faith in the punishment.

The most important case was in Pensacola, a year before Pinacle’s crime. A 13-year-old named Joe Sullivan was convicted of raping a 72-year-old woman, and a judge sentenced him to life. After the trial, his defense attorney was disbarred and the judge has been accused of botching the sentence.

The Supreme Court earlier this month took up the case. After banning the death penalty for young offenders last year, the court might now do the same for juvenile life sentences — at least when no murder is involved. “Every state recognizes the difference between an adult and a minor,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said during argument. “The teenager can’t drink, can’t drive, can’t marry. There are many [legal] limitations on children because they are children.”

Change is also brewing on the legislative front. Last year, Michael Weinstein, a freshman Republican state representative from outside Jacksonville, introduced a bill in Tallahassee that would give age 15-and-under prisoners a chance to get out of jail early. Weinstein is a former prosecutor who works as executive director of the State Attorney’s Office in Jacksonville.

“If we really believe in the idea of rehabilitation, this is the place to start,” Weinstein says. “If we can’t rehabilitate prisoners who were 15 and under at the time of their crime, we can’t rehabilitate anyone.”

Weinstein’s bill would require defendants to have had no prior violent record, to be under age 16 at the time of their crime, to earn a GED in prison, and to have a clean record behind bars.

Pinacle seems to meet all of those criteria. In several appeals of his sentence — the most recent in 2007 — he has pointed to his progress behind bars. In fastidious penmanship, he writes he earned a GED and petitioned a judge to consider the “progress and changes that has occurred in my life since my incarceration at age 16.”

But Amy’s family and friends say releasing Pinacle would victimize them all over again. “His rights can’t supercede the rights of the innocent victims,” says Sherry Harper, who now works as a psychotherapist in Texas. “None of us would feel safe knowing that he’s out on the streets again.”

Morris, sitting in his neat peach-painted condo with a golf course out back, says his family is still paying for Pinacle’s crimes. Amy now has her own family and a life outside Florida. But that would change if Pinacle left prison.

“As bad as that night was, it went away eventually,” he says, staring into the distance. “Now to talk about letting him out… it’s terrifying.”

Florida Stands Alone in Putting Away Juveniles

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sun-sentinel.com/news/opinion/editorials/fl-editorial-juvenile-incarceration-20091120,0,1465722.story

Editorial

Florida is ground zero for a question that the U.S. Supreme Court is pondering: Is it constitutional for judges to send children to prison for the rest of their lives for crimes other than murder?

The case before the high court demonstrates how far out of the legal mainstream Florida is on this issue.

Nationally, just 109 prisoners are serving life sentences without the possibility of parole for crimes — short of homicide — that they committed as minors. But 77 of them, more than two out of three, are in Florida. No other state comes close — California has four.

Adolescents’ developing brains work differently than adults, as two medical groups noted in filing a friend-of-the-court brief. Children are more impulsive and lack the judgment of grown-ups.

Such differences are widely acknowledged in laws that make kids wait until at least 16 to drive, 18 to vote and 21 to drink. The same reasoning led the Supreme Court in 2005 to outlaw the death penalty for crimes committed before 18.

In Florida’s brief to the high court defending the state’s juvenile sentencing law, it argued that it has the right to imprison for life criminals who are deemed permanent threats to society. Granted.

But when the criminal is a child, it’s not realistic for a judge to conclude that the growing, changing individual standing before the bench at sentencing can never be rehabilitated.

It would make far more sense to allow a parole board sometime in the future to decide whether a child convicted of a serious crime has been rehabilitated enough to get a shot at being a productive taxpaying member of society, rather than a tax-draining prisoner.

Texas and Colorado have amended their laws on juvenile sentencing to end life-without-parole sentences for children. Both states set 40 years as the maximum sentence before a parole review.

Regardless of how the Supreme Court rules, Florida shouldn’t have to be told that its practice of forever locking away minors who don’t commit murder is as unreasonable as it is unusual.

BOTTOM LINE: Court should reject locking up children for life for crimes other than murder.

Line Drawn in One Case Dissolves in Another

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/24/us/24bar.html?_r=3&pagewanted=print

By Adam Liptak

The law is made up of rules and standards.

Here is an example of a rule, established by the Supreme Court in Roper v. Simmons in 2005: If you commit murder even hours before your 18th birthday, you cannot be put to death for your crime. The same killing a few hours later may be a capital offense. The court drew a bright-line rule at 18.

Here is an example of a standard, one proposed by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. this month at Supreme Court arguments over whether juvenile offenders may be sentenced to life without the possibility of parole: Why not, the chief justice asked, interpret the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment to require sentencing judges to consider the defendant’s age on a case-by-case basis?

“If you do have a case where it’s the 17-year-old who is one week shy of his 18th birthday and it is the most grievous crime spree you can imagine, you can determine that in that case life without parole may not be disproportionate,” Chief Justice Roberts said. “If it’s a less grievous crime and there is, for example, a younger defendant involved, then in that case maybe it is disproportionate.”

The lawyers in the two cases the court heard — one involving a rape committed by a 13-year-old, the other an armed burglary by a 16-year-old — had at least two answers to the chief justice’s proposal. One was that it is too soon to tell at sentencing whether unformed teenagers will later change for the better. The other was that states already take age into account but do so in very different ways.

According to a report from researchers at Florida State University, just two states, Florida and Louisiana, have imprisoned 94 of the nation’s roughly 110 juvenile offenders sentenced to die in prison for crimes in which no one was killed.

But there is a third possible retort, one that draws on the Supreme Court’s 2002 decision in Atkins v. Virginia barring the execution of the mentally retarded. That sounds like a rule, in that it made an entire class of people categorically ineligible for the death penalty. But it turns out to be a standard.

Proving age is pretty straightforward, and inmates who were under 18 when they committed the crimes that sent them to death row promptly had their sentences commuted after the court’s decision in Roper. The Atkins decision, on the other hand, “has spawned extensive, intricate and bitterly contested litigation,” Carol S. Steiker and Jordan M. Steiker wrote in the DePaul Law Review last year.

The Supreme Court in Atkins said mental retardation requires proof of three things: “subaverage intellectual functioning,” meaning low IQ scores; a lack of fundamental social and practical skills; and that both conditions were present before age 18. The court said IQ scores under “approximately 70” typically indicate retardation.

How has this standard been applied in practice?

A new study from three law professors at Cornell, one that resonates with potential lessons for juvenile life without parole, shows that states making case-by-case determinations have taken wildly different approaches.

The study, conducted by John H. Blume, Sheri Lynn Johnson and Christopher Seeds, tried to collect all determinations concerning retardation in capital cases in the six years after Atkins, finding 234. That means about 7 percent of the nation’s roughly 3,200 death row inmates have claimed to be mentally retarded.

Nationwide, the claims have succeeded about 38 percent of the time. But state success rates vary widely.

North Carolina courts heard 21 Atkins claims and ruled in the inmate’s favor 17 times. Alabama courts heard 26 claims and ruled for the inmate 3 times.

Recall that the Supreme Court said an IQ of “approximately 70” should usually satisfy the first part of the test. In Alabama, Mississippi and Texas, four inmates with IQ scores of 66 and 67 were held not to be retarded. But in Pennsylvania, an inmate whose score ranged from 70 to 75 won an Atkins claim. In California, a score of 84 did the trick.

Professor Johnson said there was a lesson here.

“If you look at Atkins, which is supposed to be a categorical rule but has some play in the definitions, you get enormous pushback from the states that don’t want to do it,” she said. Were the court to adopt Chief Justice Roberts’s approach for juvenile life without parole, she added, “the problem of Atkins’s application would be greatly magnified.”

Yet there is an obvious appeal to the chief justice’s suggestion.

“If you go down on a case-by-case basis, there are no line-drawing problems,” he said at the arguments this month. “You just simply say age has to be considered as a matter of the Eighth Amendment.”

Justice Antonin Scalia objected. He had dissented in Atkins and Roper, and he was not brimming with sympathy for the two juvenile offenders in the cases before the court.

His problem with Chief Justice Roberts’s proposal was grounded in a preference for easily applied binary rules over mushy standards that give judges too much power.

“And then we apply a totality-of-the-circumstances test,” Justice Scalia said dismissively of the chief justice’s proposal, “which means, ‘whatever seems like a good idea.’ ”

Statement from Jody Kent on the Convention on the Rights of the Child

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“Friday was the 20th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which details the special needs of youth, and therefore the special protections they require. Only the United States and Somalia have not ratified this convention. However, last week the Somali government announced their intention to ratify the treaty.

Our nation’s refusal to sign the most widely ratified human rights treaty, does not give us permission to ignore the rights of children in this country. Our nation should be a leader in protecting our most vulnerable population, rather than one that focuses on the question, “at what age is it most appropriate to give up on children?” When we ignore young people we are turning our back on essential American values.

We have a responsibility to change that. We have a responsibility to reform bad public policies that ignore the special characteristics of youth and declare them worthless human beings.

Therefore, in order to live in a society that reflects our values, we have a responsibility to end the practice of sentencing youth to life in prison without hope of ever being released.”

Jody Kent is the National Coordinator of the Campaign for Fair Sentencing of Youth.

Teenage 'lifers': Court should end no-parole terms for youths

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http://blog.nj.com/njv_editorial_page/2009/11/teenage_lifers_court_should_en.html

Editorial

Khalif Williams was 16 when he was charged with raping and robbing a 19-year-old East Orange woman at gunpoint while she waited at a Newark bus stop in 2007. He was charged as an adult and, in May, he was sentenced to 15 years in state prison.

Under state law, Williams, now 18, must serve about 12 years of his sentence before becoming eligible for parole. Had he committed this crime in Florida, however, the teenager could have been made to live out his life in prison without the possibility of a second chance.

“To sentence someone under 18 to life in prison without acknowledging the possibility of rehabilitation is wrong,” says Cecilia Zalkind, executive director of Association for Children of New Jersey in Trenton.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments this week on whether life sentences with no parole imposed on two Florida juveniles constitute cruel and unusual punishment. Joe Sullivan was 13 when he and two older boys sexually assaulted a 72-year-old woman. He has been in prison 20 years so far. Terrance Graham was 17 when he was convicted of armed robbery while on probation for another violent offense.

There’s no question these were serious crimes, but neither involved a homicide, and the question before the court is whether a juvenile should be locked away forever for a crime short of murder. Around 106 young offenders are serving life sentences in the United States for crimes in which no one was killed — 77 in Florida, which has one of the most punitive juvenile systems in the country.

The Supreme Court banned the death penalty for juveniles in 2005, saying adolescents do not have the same maturity to determine right and wrong as adults and noting their potential for rehabilitation.

It was a wise decision. But given that reasoning, it is cruel and contradictory for the court to approve sentencing juveniles to life in prison with no chance of release.

Many states, including New Jersey, have made sentencing juvenile offenders a more rehabilitative process. The state has invested time and resources into reentry programs that focus more on helping teenagers turn their lives around than punishing them. And while these programs do not give a pass to serious juvenile offenders like Williams, they do have a greater emphasis on educational and social programs than punishment.

Serious crimes call for serious time, but locking up teenagers and throwing away the key will do nothing to help them change for the better. The court is expected to make a decision by spring. We hope it will rule in their favor.