Not as headline a case as the Arizona immigration case or the yet-to-be-announced Affordable Care Act litigation, but the Supreme Court's ruling today in Miller v. Alabama is really nice to see. Basically this case extends the logic of the 2005 decision Roper v. Simmons, which prohibited the death penalty for crimes committed before the age of 18, to also prohibit life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for such crimes. Both cases featured the Court's four liberals plus Justice Kennedy; though she was still on the Court then, O'Connor dissented from Roper. The argument is very similar in each case: like execution, a sentence of life without parole constitutes "giving up" on someone, condemning them as beyond rehabilitation, beyond correction (in the sense of "Department of Corrections"), beyond any hope that they might some day be able to rejoin society. And, so sayeth the Court, nothing someone does when they're still a minor can be sufficient reason to give up on that person forever.
I'm happy about this case for a lot of reasons, one of which is just that it's a left-wing result that I like very much on its own merits. But I'm also kind of pleased to see slightly innovative uses of the Eighth Amendment continuing even through this dark era on the Court. Obviously Kennedy is the key figure there, with this just sort of happening to be one of the areas where he's idiosyncratic (in keeping, generally, with his internationalist slant; many European countries have held life without parole for anyone unconstitutional). But if I were to write up a wish list for genuinely creative liberal jurisprudence should we get to replace one of the five conservatives before one of the liberals gets replaced by a Republican, the Eighth Amendment would be high up on it. Ideally I'd like to see the Court become willing to straight-up scrutinize the whole "punishment fitting the crime" thing, and overturn some of these obscenely long prison sentences that have been trendy over the last few decades. It's a little hard to tell what might be possible with five actual liberals on the Court, since it's been so bloody long since that was last the case, but one reason to smile about Miller is its indication that some creative Eighth Amendment jurisprudence may not be so terribly impossible.
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Hmmm, actually, it appears that this case only concerned *mandatory* sentences of life without parole for offenses committed as a minor. Judges can still impose such a sentence in particular cases, using their discretion, although of course Scalia in his dissent worried that the Court might prohibit that as well before too long. I'm not sure how much less important that makes this case.
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