WASHINGTON—Sometimes it’s really hard for non-lawyers to accept the legal world and its incessant nit-picking when the fate of people’s lives is at stake. A case in point is Montgomery v. Louisiana, which the U.S. Supreme Court took up on October 13.
In 2012, in Miller v. Alabama, the Court ruled in 5-4 decision that a mandatory sentence of a person under the age of 18 to life imprisonment was not constitutional, and violates the Eighth Amendment banning “cruel and unusual punishments.” The petitioner Montgomery is asking the Court to apply Miller retroactively. The Louisiana Supreme Court has ruled against making Miller retroactive in the case of Mr. Montgomery, who has now appealed to the Supreme Court.
Henry Montgomery was sentenced by Louisiana to life without chance of parole when he was a teenager for committing homicide. At stake in this case are potentially the lives of hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand prisoners currently serving life without parole (LWOP) sentences in the United States that were handed down when they were minors before the Miller decision. Mr. Mark Plaisance, who spoke on behalf of the petitioner, reckoned the number to be 1,500.
It should be noted that the Court did not rule in Miller that a person under 18 convicted of the crime of homicide cannot be sentenced to life without parole. Even if Montgomery wins at the Supreme Court, he could still be sentenced again to life without parole at a new sentencing. The Court said in Miller, however, that LWOP should be uncommon—a point that was often brought up at the hearing.
What the Miller decision actually did was stop the practice of making mandatory the LWOP sentence for juveniles who had committed murder.
Mitigating Circumstances of the Crime
The details of the case are these. In November 1963, a 17-year-old black youth, Henry Montgomery, was arrested in East Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for the murder of a sheriff deputy, a white law enforcement officer. It was a time of “racial tension and turmoil that included reported cross burnings,” states the brief for the “petitioner,” who is Mr. Montgomery. Montgomery was tried, convicted, and automatically received the death penalty. There was no sentencing phase, that is, no hearing either before a jury or judge to consider age or other mitigating circumstances in the sentencing.
In 1966, the conviction and death sentence were overturned by the Louisiana State Supreme Court that cited evidence of Ku Klux Klan activities a week prior to the trial, according to Montgomery’s brief. In 1969, Montgomery was retried, found guilty, and again automatically received a mandatory LWOP sentence. At the time, “state law precluded Mr. Montgomery from receiving an individualized sentencing hearing at which a judge or jury could consider such mitigating evidence in determining an appropriate and proportionate sentence,” states the petitioner’s brief.
