Sussman on Graham v. Florida and the Juvenile Justice System

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July 13, 2012

Sussman on Graham v. Florida and the Juvenile Justice System

Aaron Sussman?has posted?The Paradox of Graham v. Florida and the Juvenile Justice System?(Vermont Law Review, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

On June 25, 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court in the consolidated cases Miller v. Alabama and Jackson v. Hobbs held that mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole for any juvenile offenders violated the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. This holding is the latest in a series of Supreme Court decisions establishing that certain sentences are unconstitutional when applied to juveniles primarily because, as the Court put it in Miller and other cases, ?children are different.? Of this series of cases, the most significant is the 2010 decision Graham v. Florida, which found life sentences without parole unconstitutional when applied to juveniles convicted of non-homicide offenses. The Graham Court emphasized that, compared to adults, children have a unique ?capacity for change? and thus must be afforded a ?meaningful opportunity for release based on demonstrated maturity and rehabilitation.? This reasoning raises important questions to which the Court and juvenile justice systems are unlikely to provide an answer ? namely, what will influence that ?capacity for change? to be in a positive direction and not a negative one, and what must juvenile justice systems do to make the ?meaningful opportunity for release? actually meaningful?

This Paper posits that Graham is one of a handful of criminal justice cases that, by their logic and principles taken at face value, should be systemically transformative, but are paradoxically limited by their own transformative potential. In these ?paradox cases,? a sharp disjuncture emerges between the Supreme Court?s language and the realities of the criminal justice system, a disjuncture that, in the context of Graham and its progeny, helps preserve the perception of legitimacy but may inhibit even small steps toward improving the conditions and rehabilitative potential of the juvenile justice system.?

To resolve the paradox of Graham, I propose looking to an unlikely source of reform ? the Prisoner Litigation Reform Act ? as providing a tenable path toward reconciling the ambitious language of Graham (and echoed in Miller) with the less hopeful reality for children in the juvenile justice system.

July 13, 2012 | Permalink

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Source: http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/crimprof_blog/2012/07/sussman-on-graham-v-florida-and-the-juvenile-justice-system.html

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