Listen to thisJoe Ligon has spent almost 63 years in a Pennsylvania prison for his role in a 1953 murder when he was a 15-year-old boy. At the time, the mandatory sentence for murder was life without the possibility of parole.
Mr. Ligon, now 78, has served more time than anyone else in Pennsylvania, and perhaps in the nation. But he may soon be freed, after the Philadelphia district attorney, Seth Williams, announced last week that his office would seek new sentences for all of the 300 or so prisoners who have been serving sentences of mandatory life without parole for homicides they committed as juveniles. The new sentences would fall between 20 and 35 years, depending on the seriousness of the crime, after which the defendants will have a chance at parole.
“It’s my goal to give all of these individuals some light at the end of
the tunnel,” Mr. Williams told The Philadelphia Inquirer. That
light is very close for as many as one-third of the prisoners, who have
already served several decades and will now be able to make a case for
immediate release. With Philadelphia currently having the most juvenile
lifers of any county in the nation, Mr. Williams has also decided to stop
seeking life without parole for juveniles in all future cases.
In
2012, the Supreme Court, in Miller v. Alabama, barred mandatory sentences of
life without parole for juveniles convicted of homicides. The justices ruled
that sentencing courts must make “individualized sentencing decisions” for
such defendants because they are not as morally culpable as adults, and are
more capable of changing over time. A life without parole sentence should be
imposed on a juvenile only in the most extreme circumstances, the court
said.
In January, the justices voted to apply that decision retroactively, making as many as 2,500 people who were already serving mandatory life sentences eligible for new sentences or a parole hearing.
States may still sentence juveniles to life without parole if proper weight has been given to the defendant’s age, though 12 states have eliminated all such sentences for juveniles since the Miller decision. In the last two weeks alone, the Iowa Supreme Court struck down such sentences as unconstitutional, and a bill to repeal the punishment overwhelmingly passed the State Legislature in Louisiana, which has the most juveniles sentenced to life per capita in the country. (Unfortunately, on Monday night, at the end of the legislative session, the bill fell victim to a dispute over unrelated legislation.)
This evolution in the treatment of America’s youngest offenders has been surprisingly rapid in recent years. Almost nowhere else in the world are young people regularly sent to prison for the rest of their lives. In January, the Supreme Court reiterated that children are constitutionally different from adults in their level of culpability and capacity for growth, and therefore, in the words of Justice Anthony Kennedy, must be given an opportunity to show that they deserve to have “hope for some years of life outside prison walls.”
Now that Mr. Williams has put that principle into practice, district attorneys in other counties with large numbers of juvenile lifers have a clearer path to follow.
8 June 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/opinion/when-a-life-sentence-starts-at-15.html?ref=opinion
