Montgomery v. Louisiana

Montgomery v. Louisiana

Argued October 13, 2015
Decided January 25, 2016
Full case name Henry Montgomery, Petitioner v. Louisiana
Docket nos. 14-280
Citations

577 U.S. ___ (more)

Prior history motion to correct and illegal sentence denied, Miller held to be not retroactive
Holding
Miller's prohibition on life in prison without the possibility of parole for juvenile homicide offenders is a substantive rule that must be applied retroactively.[1]
Court membership
Chief Justice
John G. Roberts
Case opinions
Majority Kennedy, joined by Roberts, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan
Dissent Scalia, joined by Thomas, Alito
Dissent Thomas
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. VIII

Montgomery v. Louisiana, 577 U.S. ___ (2016), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that its previous ruling in Miller v. Alabama, 567 U.S. ___ (2012), that a mandatory life sentence without parole should not apply to juveniles convicted of murder, should be applied retroactively. This decision potentially affects up to 2,300 cases nationwide. This case is one in a series since 2005 that have mitigated the harshness of sentencing of juveniles.

Background

Issue

In 2005, the US Supreme court established in Roper v. Simmons that the death penalty for children under 18 was unconstitutional. In 2010, in Graham v. Florida, a life sentence without parole was ruled unconstitutional for non-murder crimes. Two years later, in Miller v. Alabama (2012), the Court decided that mandatory life sentence without parole should not apply to juveniles. [2]

Petitioner

The plaintiff, Henry Montgomery, committed a murder in 1963 when he was 17; as of 2015 he is 69.[3][4][5] He has become a model member of the prison community, serving as a coach on the prison boxing team, working in the prison’s silk-screen program, and offering advice to younger inmates.[6]

Opinion of the Court

On January 25, 2016, the Supreme Court voted 6–3 in favor of applying the ruling retroactively. Persons previously given automatic life sentences with no chance of parole as minors must now be re-sentenced or considered for parole. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion that "prisoners like Montgomery must be given the opportunity to show their crime did not reflect irreparable corruption; and if it did not, their hope for some years of life outside prison walls must be restored."[7] Kennedy said the decision was founded on substantive grounds, based "on the diminished culpability of all juvenile offenders, who are, he said, immature, susceptible to peer pressure and capable of change. Very few, he said, are incorrigible. But he added that as a general matter the punishment was out of bounds."[6]

Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas dissented.[7] Scalia wrote in the dissenting opinion that Kennedy had twisted the language in the Miller decision to make it sound categorical when it merely required a new sentencing procedure. Scalia also stated that it would be very difficult for judges and juries to decide whether defendants were incorrigible decades after they were originally sentenced.[7] Thomas filed a second dissenting opinion, stating that the decision "repudiates established principles of finality".[8]

See also

References

External links

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