We've written plenty about Montgomery v. Louisiana, the January Supreme Court decision that found all juveniles mandatorily convicted and sentenced to life without parole had to be resentenced. From our previous article on the case:
Montgomery made retroactive Miller v. Alabama, which ruled in 2012 that mandatory life without parole sentences for juveniles violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. Neither ruling was all-encompassing—Montgomery only addressed statutorily mandated sentences, as did its predecessor. But Montgomery not only gave hope to thousands of people serving juvenile LWOP, it also underscored just how rare such sentences should be in the future. "[A] lifetime in prison is a disproportionate sentence for all but the rarest of children, those whose crimes reflect ‘irreparable corruption,'" said the court.
That is a very technical way of stating the broader point: basically, that the Supreme Court said that juvenile LWOP cases should be very, very rare. That not only goes for cases going forward, it goes for those people serving time already that get to be resentenced.
One of the states where the Montgomery ruling would have the most impact is Michigan. In July we wrote about Detroit Prosecutor Kym Worthy, who explicitly failed to follow the Supreme Court's guidelines. From that story:
Criminal justice reform advocates had hoped that Worthy would agree to re-sentence all the defendants to terms of years. Depending on the case, such a sentence could mean immediate release for some inmates, or the possibility of parole now or in the future for others. Ultimately, people just wanted Worthy to give each defendant the chance to eventually see a parole board. They wanted her to give every defendant hope.
Instead, Worthy has decided to once again seek life without parole sentences for many of those inmates.
"The public should rest assured that we will aggressively pursue life without possibility of parole in 60 cases,” she announced. (The other 81 cases will be sentenced to term of years.) Some of these inmates have served almost fifty years in jail for crimes they committed as a juvenile.
The Supreme Court said only the rarest of children would be irreparably corrupt. To Worthy, rare means 40 percent.
Worthy’s job is to uphold the law, but her failure to rethink more of Detroit’s JLWOP sentences is an explicit refusal to adhere to the Supreme Court’s decision. Now, a new article in USA Today highlights the other failures of Michigan prosecutors when it comes to resentencing:
Of the approximately 363 juvenile lifers in the state, prosecutors are seeking life without parole again for 229, more than 60%. Prosecutors in many Michigan countiesdecided that not a single juvenile lifer convicted in their courts deserved even a chance at parole.
In Macomb County, Prosecutor Eric Smith contends that not one of the 12 juvenile lifers convicted in his county shows potential for rehabilitation. Oakland County produced the state’s second highest number of juvenile lifers. There, Prosecutor Jessica Cooper is seeking life without parole again in 44 of 49 cases, insisting that the 44 are cases of irretrievable depravity, and that most of those individuals have continued their lives of crime and violence in the decades since their convictions.
It's beyond disappointing that prosecutors like Smith, Cooper, and Worthy have been so barbaric when it comes to juvenile life without parole sentencing. The Supreme Court has stated clearly that such punishment does not befit the vast majority of juveniles—and yet, Michigan refuses to budge.