Michigan’s High Court Is Charting a Course Against Punitive Excess
This month, the Michigan Supreme Court announced that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for people under the age of 21 violate the state constitution’s ban on cruel or unusual punishment. The court also held, based on a separate recent decision, that this rule applies retroactively. These decisions are the latest from a court that’s been steadily carving out a path against excessive sentencing.
Under the federal Constitution, such sentences are illegal only for people under 18. Laws that require a judge to condemn children to live the rest of their lives in prison, the U.S. Supreme Court has explained, are unconstitutional because kids’ “transient rashness, proclivity for risk, and inability to assess consequences” make them less culpable, and because brain science shows “fundamental differences between juvenile and adult minds.”
In extending those protections to young adults, the Michigan high court pointed to similar research showing that “19– and 20-year-olds are more similar to juveniles in neurological terms than they are to older adults.” The court also noted that only in recent decades did life-in-prison sentences frequently come without the possibility of early release — reflecting a nationwide shift toward punitive excess that started in the 1970s. Until 1969, the court said, most people sentenced to life without parole in Michigan were released after less than 24 years because of good-behavior credits and other sentence-reduction mechanisms.
Michigan’s supreme court is the third state high court to expand protections against mandatory life without parole to 20-year-olds. Washington’s was the first, in 2021. Last year, Massachusetts’s went even further, declaring not only that mandatory life without parole sentences are unconstitutional for older adolescents — that is, sentences required by statute that leave no discretion to the judge — but that people under 21 cannot be sentenced to die in prison under any circumstances.
Michigan courts have protected youths from extreme prison terms in other ways too. In 2022’s People v. Stovall, the high court held that life in prison — even with the possibility of parole — was unconstitutional for children convicted of second-degree murder, which encompasses non-premeditated killings. Earlier this year, a Michigan appellate court held in People v. Eads that 50-year minimum sentences for kids are constitutionally equivalent to the life sentences struck down in Stovall.
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