NY Times

The State Supreme Court unanimously ruled Thursday that all of Florida’s juvenile offenders who received automatic sentences of life in prison must be resentenced under a law passed in 2014. The long-awaited ruling answers the question of whether the United States Supreme Court’s 2012 decision in Miller v. Alabama, which effectively banned automatic life sentences for juvenile killers, applies retroactively. An estimated 250 state prisoners, 17 of them from Lee and Collier Counties, are serving life sentences for murders committed before they turned 18. Under Florida’s 2014 law, passed to conform with the Supreme Court decision, only juveniles who committed homicides after July 2014 were subject to a revised sentencing structure, which required a judge to consider several factors before determining a prison term. For about 20 years before the law’s passage, Florida mandated a life sentence for juveniles convicted of first-degree murder. After the law passed, Florida trial and appeal courts have grappled with whether juveniles who killed before July 2014 and received automatic life sentences should receive the same consideration. The state’s five appeals courts gave conflicting opinions. Justice Barbara J. Pariente wrote in the opinion handed down Thursday, “The patent unfairness of depriving indistinguishable juvenile offenders of their liberty for the rest of their lives, based solely on when their cases were decided, weighs heavily in favor of applying the Supreme Court’s decision in Miller retroactively.”