How to Stop Sentencing Children to Death by Incarceration
The Supreme Court in April handed down its decision in Jones v. Mississippi, a ruling that permits sentencing judges to condemn children to spend life in prison without the possibility of parole without entering a finding that the child is, in the court’s words, “permanently incorrigible.” This was wrong. Importantly, however, the case did not present the question of whether juvenile life without parole is constitutional at all. As a result, there is still a way for the Court to…