Breach of the Eighth Amendment (US Supreme Court)

The petitioner, Terrence Graham, age sixteen, was convicted for his participation in a robbery of a restaurant, on which occasion the manager was injured after he was hit with a pipe by an accomplice. Six months after release on probation, Graham was caught fleeing the police in connection with another armed robbery. The Florida Trial Court found that he had violated parole by running from the Police and sentenced him to life in prison without parole, for the original crime. Terrence Graham challenged his sentence under the Eighth Amendment. 

Justice Kennedy writing the majority judgement ordered the reverse of the petitioner’s conviction, having concluded that the Constitution prohibits the imposition of a life without parole sentence on a juvenile offender who did not commit homicide. The State need not guarantee the offender’s eventual release,  but if it imposes a sentence of life it must provide the offender with some realistic opportunity to obtain release before the end of that term.  

Justice Kennedy’s observations included that juveniles are less deserving of the most severe punishments; as compared to adults, juveniles lack maturity and have a less developed sense of responsibility. Justice Kennedy also observed that if prison was intended as a means of rehabilitation, convicting to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole would imply that good behaviour and character improvement are immaterial: the offender would die in prison no matter what he might do to demonstrate that the bad acts he committed as a teenager are not representative of his true character, even if he spent the next half century attempting to atone from his crimes and learn from his mistakes. The Eighth Amendment prohibited the denial of any chance to later demonstrate that he is fit to rejoin society, based solely on a non-homicide crime that he committed while he was a child in the eyes of the law. 

The Court was also critical of the fact that the United States and Somalia are the only countries that did not ratify article 37(a) of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which prohibits the imposition of ‘life imprisonment without possibility of release…for offences committed by persons below eighteen years of age.'

To read the Supreme Court judgement click here