Title: Sentencing Children Who Kill: One Giant Leap for the US Supreme Court, One Small Step for International Human Rights Law
Abstract: In the recent combined cases of Miller v Alabama and Jackson v Hobbs,1 decided on 25 June 2012, the US Supreme Court (‘the Court’) outlawed Federal and state statutes that impose mandatory sentences of life without the possibility of parole (LWOP) for persons under the age of 18 years who are convicted of homicide. Miller is the latest in a line of cases in which the Court has grappled with the question of whether the most severe punishments are constitutionally permitted for young offenders who commit serious crimes. In Roper v Simmons2 in 2005, the Court outlawed the death penalty for young offenders in all cases, and in Graham v Florida3 in 2010, the Court outlawed both mandatory and discretionary sentences of LWOP for young offenders in all non-homicide cases only. As a result of these cases, then, the most severe punishment available at present for children who kill in the United States is a discretionary sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-12-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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