Remarkably, it has been more than a decade since the US Supreme Court kicked off its interesting (and uncertain) new line of Eighth Amendment jurisprudence with its ruling in Graham v. Florida, 560 U.S. 48 (2010). Graham declared sentencing juveniles to life without parole (LWOP) for non-homicide offenses to be unconstitutional, and was quickly followed by Miller v. Alabama, 567 U.S. 460 (2012), which held that mandatory LWOP sentences were unconstitutional for juveniles convicted of homicide. Four years later, Montgomery v. Louisiana, 136 S. Ct. 718 (2016), declared that Miller was to be applied retroactively, and now Jones v. Mississippi will explore exactly what Miller and these other cases actually mean for discretionary sentencing of juvenile homicide offenders.
A whole lot of amicus briefs have been filed in Jones on both sides, and the US Solicitor General has also weighed in and been granted leave to participate in tomorrow’s scheduled oral argument. Amy Howe at SCOTUSblog has this preview, which sets up the case this way:
After Miller and Montgomery, state courts can sentence individual juveniles to life without the possibility of parole as long as the sentence is not a mandatory penalty under state law. On Tuesday, the justices will hear oral argument in a case that asks them to decide what their rulings in Miller and Montgomery require states to do before imposing that sentence. A Mississippi man...
