OP-ED: Stop Sentencing Kids to Life Without Parole
By Nancy Schouweiler
September 4, 2014
Jurisdictions across the country should stop sentencing kids to spend the rest of their lives in detention.
“Children are constitutionally different from adults. … Because juveniles have diminished culpability and greater prospects for reform … ‘they are less deserving of the most severe punishments.’”
These are the words of the U.S. Supreme Court in Miller v. Alabama, in which the Court held that mandatory sentences of life without the possibility of parole for juveniles violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments and are therefore unconstitutional.
