Court to rule on legality of juvenile lifers

Civil-rights activists for years have decried Pennsylvania's notorious top ranking as the state sending the most juveniles to jail for life.

But now, eight months after a state lawmaker held a hearing in Harrisburg to debate the fairness of a life sentence for minors, the U.S. Supreme Court may decide the issue.

The nation's top court announced this week that it will study two unrelated Florida cases of teens sentenced to life - a 13-year-old, for rape, and a 17-year-old, for home invasion - to decide whether punishing juveniles with life-without-parole sentences violates the Constitution's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments.

Advocates for juvenile lifers were cautiously optimistic that the high court's involvement could spur reform that they have championed for years.

Pennsylvania leads the nation in the number of minors it sends to prison for life, with about 450; minorities are disproportionately represented. Most countries forbid the sentence for juveniles.

"We have more juvenile lifers than any jurisdiction in the world," said Bill DiMascio, executive director of the Pennsylvania Prison Project.

DiMascio worried, however, that the justices could "split hairs" by permitting the sentence for crimes like homicide but disallowing it for other crimes in which the victims survived. In Pennsylvania, the life-without-parole sentence is levied only in cases of first- or second-degree murder, meaning that all juvenile lifers have been convicted of that.

"The sentence is cruel and inhumane, no matter the offense, especially for juveniles who don't have the decision-making capacity and impulse-control [of adults] and shouldn't be held to the same level of culpability," DiMascio said.

In taking the Florida cases, it's unclear whether the court will focus on age or offense in determining the fairness of life incarceration.

The court in 2005 outlawed the death penalty for offenders younger than 18. But in several recent rulings, justices have overturned life sentences in cases in which the victims have survived.

State Sen. Stewart Greenleaf, R-Bucks/Montgomery, welcomed the Supreme Court's scrutiny.

"It's not a clear issue; there are injustices that result from a just-treat-them-all-the-same philosophy," said Greenleaf, who held a fact-finding hearing in Harrisburg last September about life sentences for juveniles.

"There are some individuals involved in clearly horrendous crimes, and that's one thing. But then you may have a young teenager sentenced to life for a murder in which they weren't even at the scene," because they acted as lookout or otherwise indirectly facilitated the crime, sometimes unwittingly, Greenleaf added. "There deserves to be some punishment, but life imprisonment?"

Greenleaf said that he is working on legislation that would give judges more discretion to make sure that the penalty reflects the role that the offender had in a homicide. *