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Justices: Decision ending mandatory life terms for juveniles is retroactive

Roughly 500 Pennsylvania inmates serving life terms for murders they committed as teenagers will be given a chance to argue for their eventual release under a U.S. Supreme Court ruling issued Monday.

Roughly 500 Pennsylvania inmates serving life terms for murders they committed as teenagers will be given a chance to argue for their eventual release under a U.S. Supreme Court ruling issued Monday.

In a 6-3 opinion, the justices made retroactive their 2012 decision that sentencing juveniles under guidelines that make life without parole mandatory is "cruel and unusual," an acknowledgment that minors should not be punished for criminal acts in the same way as adults.

The ruling affects more than 1,500 inmates nationwide, who must now be granted new sentencing hearings or the opportunity to be considered for parole.

Much of that workload will fall on courts in Pennsylvania, which houses more prisoners sentenced as minors to automatic life terms than any other state. One recent study found Philadelphia alone is responsible for 9 percent of all such inmates in the nation.

"The question now is, how do we go about dealing with a number that substantial," said Bradley Bridge, a lawyer with the Defender Association of Philadelphia. "At some points, the [state's] courts and the legislature will weigh in. Until then, what we do know is that the sentence many of these people are serving is illegal and needs to be fixed."

Despite the questions surrounding how the ruling would be implemented, prisoners who had long ago resigned themselves to dying behind bars were already celebrating the new possibility of eventual freedom.

"It's a sense of jubilation on the cell block right now," Kempis Songster, 43, said in a phone call from Graterford Prison, where he is serving a life term imposed in 1988 for his involvement as a 16-year-old in a drug killing. "It's like a burden lifted. I'm almost beside myself. I know I've still got to be cautiously optimistic."

Jorge Cintron Jr., 36, also imprisoned at Graterford, was convicted of first-degree murder at 17. He said he was already thinking about whom he might call to testify about his difficult childhood and the work he has done in prison to better himself should he get a new hearing.

"Up until now, we got treated like a death sentence," he said. "There will be other battles in Pennsylvania, as it always is. At least we got over this hurdle."

Families who lost loved ones to teenage killers they thought would never be released called the ruling dismaying.

"I was so sick to my stomach, I had to come home," said Bobbi Jamriska of Pittsburgh. Her sister was killed in 1993 by her teenage boyfriend, who is now serving a mandatory life sentence.

"I guarantee you, there are hundreds of grieving people all over Pennsylvania that believed, like I did, that 'life without parole' meant life without parole."

The Supreme Court's decision, outlined in an opinion by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, followed its recent pattern of limiting punishment options for juveniles, who it has consistently found deserve special consideration because they have not yet fully matured and show greater prospects than adults for reform.

In 2004, it barred the death penalty for those whose crimes were committed before they were 18. In 2010, it prohibited life without parole for crimes other than homicide. Then, in the 2012 case Miller v. Alabama, the court blocked all future mandatory life sentences, even for murder.

The case decided Monday centered on 69-year-old Henry Montgomery, who has been in prison for more than 50 years for killing a sheriff's deputy in Baton Rouge, La., in 1963.

"Prisoners like Montgomery must be given the opportunity to show their crime did not reflect irreparable corruption," Kennedy wrote. "And if it did not, their hope for some years of life outside prison walls must be restored."

Under the ruling, state courts will retain the right to uphold life sentences that were imposed, but a judge must first consider whether a lesser sentence would be more appropriate.

Kennedy nodded to that possibility in his opinion, writing that a judge "might encounter the rare juvenile offender who exhibits such irretrievable depravity that rehabilitation is impossible and life without parole is justified." He was joined in the majority by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the four members of the court's liberal bloc.

Justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel A. Alito Jr., and Clarence Thomas dissented, with Scalia calling the majority's ruling "a devious way of eliminating life without parole for juvenile offenders."

"In Godfather fashion, the majority makes state legislatures an offer they can't refuse: Avoid the utterly impossible nonsense we have prescribed by simply 'permitting juvenile homicide offenders to be considered for parole,' " he wrote. "Mission accomplished."

Pennsylvania was one of seven states with appellate courts that had specifically decided against applying the Miller ruling retroactively.

Juvenile-justice experts blame the state's high number of inmates serving life terms they received as youths on two laws - one that imposes an automatic life sentence for defendants convicted of first-degree murder, and another that requires all children accused of murder to be charged as adults, though they can petition a court to be tried as juveniles.

After the Miller ruling, Pennsylvania's lawmakers approved a bill revising the mandatory juvenile murder sentence down to 35 years for those 15 and older or 25 years for those younger than 15.

State Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Stewart Greenleaf (R., Montgomery), who sponsored the bill, said it was not yet clear whether further legislation would be required to bring the state in compliance with Monday's ruling or whether judges would be bound by those guidelines in retroactive resentencing hearings.

Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams said in a statement that his office was reviewing how it would move forward with about 300 Philadelphia cases that might be affected by the ruling.

Meanwhile, Marsha Levick - a lawyer at the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center who served as cocounsel in the case decided Monday by the justices - was preparing to rally the local lawyers to respond.

"We have so many individuals who are serving this sentence, it will require marshaling not just public defenders, but engaging the private bar in trying to move these cases forward," she said.

Patricia Moore Grant, whose brother, Richard Moore, has been serving a no-parole life sentence since he was 14, is just glad he may soon be getting a second shot.

In 1986, a Philadelphia judge found him and two other teens guilty of second-degree murder stemming from the death of an 81-year-old woman, who had a fatal heart attack when they broke into her Southwest Philadelphia home.

Now 45 and housed in the Mahanoy state prison in Northeastern Pennsylvania, Moore has become an exemplary inmate, Grant said. He earned his high school diploma and has been trained as an electrician - all despite having no chance, before Monday, at ever getting out.

Grant now hopes a judge might one day see the "good man" her brother has become.

"Are you the same person you were when you were 14?" she said. "I'm not the same person I was two years ago.

"It's like punishing a child by saying, 'Go to your room for the rest of your life.' "

jroebuck@phillynews.com

215-854-2608

@jeremyrroebuck

Staff writer Amy S. Rosenberg contributed to this article.