Disproportionate Punishment: Study Notes (Transcript)

Disproportionate Punishment

  • Factors:
    • Is the harshness of the sentence proportionate to the severity of the offense?
    • Is the offender being punished as harshly as, or more harshly than, other offenders who have been convicted of more serious offenses within the same jurisdiction?
    • How do other jurisdictions punish offenders for this crime?

Terminology

  • Appellants: the party that makes an appeal of a case
  • Appellees: the party against whom the appeal is made
  • Petitioner: the party seeking review by the Supreme Court
  • Respondents: the party being brought to the Supreme Court

Miller v. Alabama (2012)

  • Question: Is mandatory life imprisonment without parole for a juvenile a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment?
  • Answer: Yes
  • Reasoning:
    • The idea of excessive sanction flows from the precept of justice that punishment for crime should be graduated and proportioned to both the offender and the offense
    • Based on the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society
    • Roper and Graham establish that children are constitutionally different from adults for purposes of sentencing because juveniles have diminished culpability and greater prospects for reform
    • Incapacitation could not support the life without parole sentence because deciding that a juvenile offender forever will be a danger to society would require making a judgment that he is incorrigible but incorrigibility is inconsistent with youth
    • By removing youth from the balance these laws prohibit a sentencing authority from assessing whether the law’s harshest term of imprisonment proportionately punishes a juvenile offender
    • This type of punishment is especially harsh for a juvenile because he will almost inevitably serve more years and a greater percentage of his life in prison than an adult would
    • In part because we view this ultimate penalty for juveniles as akin to the death penalty we treat it similarly to that most severe punishment
    • A sentencer misses too much if he treats every child as an adult
    • The mandatory sentencing schemes before us violate this principle of proportionality
    • Juveniles can still be sentenced to life imprisonment, it just cannot be mandatory by law, the judge must have discretion to make that decision