Signs of hope and justice two years after Miller v. Alabama
By Jody Kent Lavy
July 8, 2014
Early one morning a few weeks ago, the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth team boarded a bus to New York for a re-sentencing hearing for a young man who was sentenced as a child to mandatory life without parole.
Angel was sentenced after he was charged and convicted in federal court for his role in a gang-related homicide after he, at age 15, rode his bike around the block as the lookout outside the home of a man who became the victim in an execution-style killing. Two years after the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Miller v. Alabama, which found that it is unconstitutional to impose automatic life-without-parole sentences on children, I find myself reflecting on the hearing as a poignant illustration of where we are in this movement to establish fair sentencing for children.