When Mandatory Minimum Sentencing and the Laws Protecting Children Clash

Two fourteen year-old boys were tried as adults: one in Arkansas and one in Alabama. The 8th Amendment protects them from receiving life without parole as children, but because they were tried as adults they were given life without the possibility of parole as a mandatory minimum sentence.

“Most fundamentally, Graham v. Florida insists that youth matters in determining the appropriateness of a lifetime of incarceration without the possibility of parole. The mandatory penalty schemes [sic] however, prevent the sentencer from considering youth and from assessing whether the law’s harshest term of imprisonment proportionately punishes a juvenile offender. This contravenes Graham v. Florida’s foundational principle: that imposition of a State’s most severe penalties on juvenile offenders cannot proceed as though they were not children.” -Supreme Court Justice Kagan

Currently when mandatory minimum sentencing conflicts with the law protecting juvenile offenders from receiving life without parole, the mandatory minimums win.

Specifically, this is the precedent that was overridden. Again, here’s Justice Kagan. “The Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment “guarantees individuals the right not to be subjected to excessive sanctions.” Roper v. Simmons, 543 U. S. 551, 560. That right “flows from the basic ‘precept of justice that punishment for crime should be graduated and proportioned’ ” to both the offender and the offense.”

Take a look at this report from 1994 released by the Federal Judicial Center. You can get a clear picture of the findings just from the chapter titles.

We have allowed the above to overrule the 8th Amendment rights of juveniles.

Using data obtained from the Bureau of Prisons and state Departments of Corrections as of 2012, there were 3,278 prisoners serving life without opportunity for parole for nonviolent drug and property crimes in the federal system (and in the nine states that provided such statistics), clearly showing this isn’t only about whether or not someone lost their life in the process of a crime being committed.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, teenagers and young adults often act impulsively, without much consideration for consequences, because in teens “the parts of the brain involved in emotional responses are fully online, or even more active than in adults, while the parts of the brain involved in keeping emotional, impulsive responses in check are still reaching maturity.” The frontal cortex, the area of the brain that controls reasoning and decision-making, does not reach full development until around age 25, which is in part why the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American Bar Association, and other organizations have issued statements opposing juvenile life without parole sentences, because they do not believe children should be held morally culpable in the same way adults are.

Children caught up in crime should not be given life without parole. As it stands today in the vast majority of our 50 United States, at the judge’s discretion a juvenile can be tried as an adult which enacts mandatory minimum sentencing and circumnavigates their 8th Amendment rights completely.

Is that right?