NY Times

Why are Michigan’s prosecutors ignoring the Supreme Court?

Across the state, they are flouting the justices’ clear message in two recent decisions. The first ruling, in 2012, banned mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles in homicide cases. While the court did not prohibit life-without-parole sentences for juveniles completely, it has said that punishment should be used only in the rarest cases — when the defendant “exhibits such irretrievable depravity that rehabilitation is impossible.”

In January, the justices clarified that this rule applies not just going forward but to every inmate already serving such a sentence, or about 2,500 people nationwide.

Michigan prisons house 363 of these inmates. All but a very few should be resentenced to shorter terms, with the possibility of parole. Yet prosecutors are seeking to keep more than half of them locked up forever.

In Wayne County, which includes Detroit and is responsible for about 150 such inmates, the county prosecutor, Kym Worthy, wants to resentence at least 60 of these people to life without parole. In Oakland County, outside Detroit, the county prosecutor, Jessica Cooper, is seeking life without parole for 44 of the 49 currently serving life without parole. These cases involved “heinous, heinous” crimes, Ms. Cooper said.

Young people convicted of murder should be justly punished, but Michigan’s approach isn’t close to what the Supreme Court envisioned. The point made in the court’s rulings is that young people are biologically and psychologically different from adults. They are more impulsive and more prone to change as their brains continue to develop. When it comes to driving, voting and buying alcohol, society recognizes these realities; so should the criminal justice system.

Some states are changing their laws to reflect this understanding of juvenile development. In the last five years, 12 states — including Texas, Nevada, Wyoming and West Virginia — have banned life-without-parole sentences for juveniles in all cases, for a total of 17, according to a new report from the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth. Four states ban the sentence in nearly all cases, and three others have never imposed such a sentence.

In many cases, even the prosecutors believed that more lenient terms were appropriate. In Wayne County, for instance, nearly one-third of those serving life without parole were initially offered plea deals that averaged 20 years. One defendant now serving life rejected a plea offer of four years behind bars.

It’s not just defense lawyers and children’s advocates criticizing this trend in Michigan. Former Gov. William Milliken, a Republican, has called for an outright ban on life without parole for juveniles. And a former Wayne County prosecutor, John O’Hair, who was responsible for putting away more than 90 of the inmates currently serving that sentence, has said that in light of the Supreme Court’s rulings, “it’s hard to imagine that a prosecutor would blithely seek life sentences again.” Now it is up to federal judges to force Michigan’s misbehaving prosecutors to follow the law.