From The Dish: Convicted Of Being A Minor

More for 2306 and our recent walk through the criminal justice system. The link takes to you a story about the unique "status offenses" that apply to juveniles. A recent report from the Texas Public Policy Foundation argues that the consequences of punishing these offenses may not be worth the benefits. 

- Click here for the article.
- Click here for the report.

The Dish highlights this part of the report:

Incarcerating or otherwise removing these youth from their homes increases the likelihood that they will be converted from today’s status offenders to tomorrow’s serious offenders, instead of being shepherded toward productive lives as young adults.

Among other things, research shows that status offenders, as a result of being exposed to seriously delinquent youth in close quarters, are in jeopardy of developing the more deviant attitudes and behaviors of higher-risk youth, such as anti-social perspectives and gang affiliation. While many of the causes underlying a status offenders’ behavior and the effects of incarceration has on their futures are also common to more serious offenders, the stakes are obviously higher for status offenders who have not committed property or person offenses and may be less likely to have previously been associated with seriously delinquent peers. In addition, the confinement of status offenders is expected to increase barriers to reentry into community, home, and school settings, and increase the likelihood that they will be rearrested, re-adjudicated, and re-incarcerated.

In short, there are very compelling reasons to avoid confinement of status offenders. The punishment fails to fit the “crime” since status offenses are simply behaviors that would be legal if committed by adult; alternative approaches are more effective and far less costly; and, as described in the previous paragraph, the futures of these youth would not be jeopardized by the negative impacts of exposure to serious offenders during placement.

Should solitary confinement for juveniles be considered cruel and unusual punishment?

As with solitary confinement in general there is a movement to claim that it is.

Mandatory life without parole sentences for juvenile defedants are cruel and unusual according to the Supreme Court

From the NYT:

The ruling left open the possibility of judges' sentencing juveniles to life imprisonment without parole in individual circumstances but said state laws could not automatically impose such sentences.

“Mandatory life without parole for a juvenile precludes consideration of his chronological age and its hallmark features — among them, immaturity, impetuosity, and failure to appreciate risks and consequences,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the majority. “It prevents taking into account the family and home environment that surrounds him — and from which he cannot usually extricate himself — no matter how brutal or dysfunctional.”

Justice Kagan’s opinion argued that the cases, involving 14-year-old boys who had taken part in murders in Arkansas and Alabama, were an extension of the court’s recent rulings on the young, which asserted that they still had unformed emotional and moral structures and that treating them as adults violated “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”

From Scotusblog:

. . . . there presently are approximately seventy-nine individuals currently serving life-without-parole sentences for crimes they committed at age thirteen or fourteen. The Court further explains that approximately 2500 people are serving life without parole for crimes they committed before they were eighteen.
The Court’s opinion brings together two strands of precedent to hold that a mandatory life-without-parole sentence for juveniles violates the Eighth Amendment. The first strand holds that the Eighth Amendment categorically prohibits punishments that enact a mismatch between the culpability of a class of offenders and the severity of the penalty. Citing, among cases, Roper and Graham, the Court explains that juveniles have always been regarded as less culpable because the distinctive attributes of youth diminish the penological justifications for imposing the harshest penalties on juvenile offenders, even when they commit severe crimes.  The second line of precedent holds that life without parole shares key characteristics with the death penalty, and thus raises similar Eighth Amendment concerns, most notably that defendants are entitled to individualized consideration when facing such a severe sanction.

Two Supreme Court Decisions Regarding Sentencing

In one, Graham v. Florida, the court decided 6-3 that life sentences without the possibility of parole for juveniles convicted of crimes less than murder was cruel and unusual punishment which violated the eighth amendment.

In the other, United States v. Comstock, a 7-2 court stated the Congress had the authority to allow continued confinement of some sex offenders who had completed their sentences, even though this power is not an enumerated (or delegated) power granted to Congress in Article One. It was argued on the basis of the necessary and proper clause, though the dissent wondered necessary and proper to do what?

Judges Behaving Badly

Scary stuff.