September 3, 2009
I rarely weigh in on forensic issues in our field; my view is that this is the province of lawyers and politicians. However, I recently received an opinion piece, "Morning Bell: Adult Times for Adult Crimes," from The Heritage Foundation that I couldn’t let pass without comment. The long and the short of The Heritage Foundation position is that the U.S. should not reconsider its policy of sentencing juveniles to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The support for their position is based on a study, "Adult Times for Adult Crimes: Life Without Parole for Juvenile Killers and Violent Teens" by legal scholars Charles D. Stimson and Andrew M. Grossman, of The Heritage Foundation's Center for Legal and Judicial Studies.
To buttress their argument, The Heritage Foundation cites the fact that eleven other countries in the world allow juveniles to be sentenced to life in prison without parole. However, after viewing the United Nations Human Rights Council's 2009 Statement on Juvenile Sentencing (cited in The Heritage Foundation's article), I’m not so sure. The statement includes the following passage, "Eleven countries have laws with the potential to permit the sentencing of child offenders to life without possibility of release: Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Australia, Belize, Brunei, Cuba (legislation pending), Dominica, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, the Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka (legislation pending), and the United States. Currently, there is no evidence of any country, besides the United States, with child offenders sentenced to life without the possibility of release." So much for that evidence.
Some more interesting facts on juvenile life imprisonment come from the same UNHRC statement:
8. The Convention on the Rights of the Child (“CRC”), ratified by every country in the world except the United States and Somalia, codifies an international customary norm of human rights that recommends against life sentences and forbids the sentencing of child offenders to life in prison without possibility of release.14 There are now 135countries that have rejected the sentence through domestic legal commitments and 185 countries that have voted for the resolution in the General Assembly.15 The prohibition, arguably, has now reached the level of a jus cogens norm. As such, it is binding on all states, including those that have not formally ratified it themselves.
10. Customary international law is part of domestic law in the United States and, therefore, juvenile life sentences without the possibility of parole should be prohibited.19 Juvenile life sentences have not been consistently and historically applied. 20 The sentence was not used on a large scale until the 1990s when at least 40 states passed laws increasing the options for sending juveniles to adult courts.21
11. In the United States, there are an estimated 2,484 juveniles serving life sentences without parole. 22 Nationally, 59% of children were sentenced to life without the possibility of release for their first ever criminal conviction. Of these children, 16% were between the ages of 13 and 15 when they committed their crimes, and 26% were sentenced under a felony murder charge, where they did not pull the trigger or carry the weapon.23 In addition, African American youth are disproportionately represented through every stage of the juvenile justice process, including among those children serving life sentences without the possibility of release.24
Regardless of the policies of other countries, the reason for my commentary is that this flies in the face of emerging research on brain development. At this year's Chautauqua Institution, "State of Mind” conference, I attended the update on new brain research from John J. Ratey, Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. One of my takeaways from his update is that new science tells us human brains do not mature until the age of 25 or so. It seems to me that—despite how horrific the crime—to sentence juveniles with not-yet-fully-developed brain functioning to prison sentences with no opportunity for societal repatriation in their later, mature years is indeed cruel and unusual punishment.
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