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- Title
JUVENILE LIFE WITH (OUT) PAROLE.
- Authors
LESLIE, RACHEL E.
- Abstract
Beginning in the late twentieth century, the Supreme Court gradually restricted the range of punishments that could be imposed on children convicted of crimes. The seminal cases Graham v. Florida, Miller v. Alabama, and Montgomery v. Louisiana banned the imposition of mandatory life without parole sentences on children who were under eighteen at the time of an offense and held that those juveniles must be given a “meaningful opportunity to obtain release based on demonstrated maturity and rehabilitation.” Some courts have extended the logic of these cases to invalidate life with parole sentences based on extremely long parole ineligibility periods, but no court has held that the practical unavailability of release within the current parole system makes any life sentence—regardless of its parole ineligibility period—functionally equivalent to life without parole. Building on recent scholarship about the constitutional role of parole release in juvenile sentencing, this Note points out that the Graham trilogy creates a substantive Eighth Amendment right for juveniles to be released upon a showing of maturity and rehabilitation, not merely a right to be considered for release. This Note exposes the failure of state parole systems to vindicate this right by systematically refusing to grant parole to juveniles. Because release on parole is a statistical improbability for juveniles sentenced to life with parole, this Note concludes that those sentences are actually unconstitutional sentences of de facto juvenile life without parole.
- Subjects
JUVENILE parole; PUNISHMENT; PAROLE
- Publication
New York University Law Review, 2023, Vol 98, Issue 1, p373
- ISSN
0028-7881
- Publication type
Article