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 |  Subject: For juveniles, justice is biased  Sun Jul 08, 2012 2:52 am | |
| The Supreme Court’s momentous health care and immigration decisions last week overshadowed everything else — but there were also two key rulings which abolished sentencing policies that mandate life imprisonment without parole for juvenile homicide offenders.
While court decisions like Miller v. Alabama and Jackson v. Hobbs, issued last week, are presented as “victories for young people,” the benefits for a few teenagers convicted of heinous violence in fact uphold wide-spread prejudices that threaten the rights of millions of America’s law-abiding youth. The rulings demonstrated that justice system biases against juveniles are still being overlooked.
First, the five justices in the majority found, laws give juveniles only “limited control over their own environment.” States do not allow youths, like the 14 year-old defendants in the Miller and Jackson cases, to choose which adults they associate with and must heed; where they live, or even “the ability to extricate themselves from horrific, crime-producing settings.” States, the court ruled, cannot strip juveniles of the basic rights that adults take for granted and then hold youths as responsible as adults for actions rooted in surviving bad environments.
Second, the court noted that Miller’s “request for funds to hire his own mental expert” and other rights routinely granted in adult hearings were denied in juvenile proceedings. States cannot restrict juveniles’ defense rights and then mandate ultimate punishments like the death penalty.
Third, justices found that a life sentence is “an especially harsh punishment for a juvenile, because he will almost inevitably serve more years and a greater percentage of his life in prison than an adult offender” for the same crime. States may not legislate life or death sentences that bar courts from considering the non-level playing field for young people.
These legal discriminations against youths easily justify last week’s decision. The court could also have pointed out that juvenile offenders typically serve longer jail time than adults for the same offenses—“do adult crime…do more than adult time,” as the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention put it.
In addition, more than 85 percent of the juveniles on death row were convicted of murdering adults, the Office of Juvenile Justice found. Minority youths who killed white adults were by far the most likely to be sentenced to death, while whites in general and adults and youths who killed youths received lesser punishments.
Unfortunately, the Miller decision, also invokes prejudices against teenagers. Juveniles are considered as less responsible for their acts because their “‘underdeveloped sense of responsibility’ lead to recklessness, impulsivity and heedless risk-taking,” the court declared.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0712/78163.html
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Anarcho-Capitalist, AnCaps Forum, Ancapolis, OZschwitz Contraband
“The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.”-- Max Stirner
"Remember: Evil exists because good men don't kill the government officials committing it." -- Kurt Hofmann |
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