Supreme Court Finds Life Without Parole Unconstitutional for Some Juvenile Criminals

Justices Rule 5 to 4, Ban Life Without Parole for Juvenile Offenders Who Didn’t Kill
By DEVIN DWYER and ARIANE de VOGUE

The Supreme Court ruled today that the 8th Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment means juvenile offenders who haven’t been convicted of murder shouldn’t be sentenced to life in prison without any chance of parole.
Writing for a 5-to-4 majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy called life without parole an “especially harsh punishment” for a juvenile and said that while states may be permitted to keep young offenders locked up, they must give defendants “some meaningful opportunity to obtain release based on demonstrated maturity and rehabilitation.”

Three quarters of the states allow life without parole for juveniles, but there are only 111 juveniles serving such sentences, which, Kennedy pointed out, amounts to a national consensus against the practice.

“It becomes all the more clear how rare these sentences are, even within the jurisdictions that do sometimes impose them, when one considers that a juvenile sentenced to life without parole is likely to live in prison for decades,” he wrote.

Kennedy also cited the “diminished moral culpability” of a juvenile, who is often still maturing as an individual, and the prospect of rehabilitation as factors in the ruling.

The decision directly addresses two Florida cases involving teenagers put away for life following their convictions for non-homicide crimes. Joe Harris Sullivan was imprisoned at age 13 for raping an elderly woman, and Terrance Jamar Graham was sentenced at 17 for armed robbery while on parole.
Scott Makar, the solicitor general of Florida, had argued that the crimes committed by Graham and Sullivan were so violent that life without parole was justified. “We like to think that it is only used rarely,” he said during oral arguments before the court, “in those cases that are justified for public safety purposes where we have very serious violent offenders.”

A 6-to-3 majority of the justices disagreed with Makar on the specifics of the Graham and Sullivan cases.

Chief Justice John Roberts supported the majority on the facts of the specific cases but disagreed with broader application of the sentencing rule.

“I would not, however, reach the same conclusion in every case involving a juvenile offender,” Roberts wrote. “Some crimes are so heinous, and some juvenile offenders so highly culpable that a sentence of life without parole might be entirely justified under the Constitution.”
Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas joined in a dissenting opinion, criticizing the majority for trumping states’ ability to determine their own sentencing guidelines by imposing “its own sense of morality and retributive justice.” “I am unwilling to assume that we, as members of this court, are any more capable of making such moral judgments than our fellow citizens,” Thomas said.

It was only four years ago that the court banned the death penalty for juvenile offenders. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the opinion, relied on scientific data that showed that juveniles had not sufficiently matured to warrant a death-penalty sentence.

“The susceptibility of juveniles to immature and irresponsible behavior,” Kennedy wrote, “means their irresponsible conduct is not as morally reprehensible as that of an adult.”

The United States is the only country in the world that allows such a punishment. But victims’ rights advocates argue that the attention should be focused on the crimes the young men committed.

In court briefs, the state of Florida described how Graham, just shy of his 17th birthday, joined with accomplices to bludgeon a restaurant manager over the head to steal money.

“Shortly after his release from a county jail,” wrote Florida attorney general Bill McCollum, “Graham almost immediately resumed an even more violent criminal life.”

A Second Chance, Wasted
In court, the trial judge castigated Graham, who had been given a lenient sentence for his first violent offense and chose to “throw it away” after his release.

“Given your escalating pattern of criminal conduct, it is apparent to the court that you have decided that this is the way you are going to live your life and that the only thing I can do now is to try to protect the community from your actions,” the judge said.

But some experts say that juveniles can change.

“I believe that kids are just less responsible then adults, and we can’t hold them to the same standards of criminal culpability,” said Laurence Steinberg, a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia.

“They are worse at making decisions, they are more easily coerced by others, and they have more trouble controlling their impulses,” he said.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Supreme_Court/supreme-court-life-parole-juveniles-kill/story?id=9536432

Placebo effect beats God, Prozac

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

This is the story of three drugs. Except one is not really a drug at all and is merely an illusion, a nifty construct, an intense belief that it might be a drug, even though, as mentioned, it is very much not. We just think it is. Isn’t that strange? Wonderful? Both?

The three drugs — which, sorry, are not so much drugs as they are modes of comprehending our own weird little minds, needs and inherent psychoses — are presented here by way of two recent studies that essentially reinforce what similar studies have been declaring for years and decades and, in the second case, since the ancient mystics suckled wild plants in the forest, licked God, found the source of the soul, and said, you know, holy f–.

Let’s lay it out: According to a major new overview study, all of America’s beloved wonderdrug antidepressants — all the Prozacs, Paxils, Effexors, Zolofts of the world — are essentially useless and don’t really work worth a damn.

Wait, that’s not quite right. They can sort of work just fine, help millions of people and have enjoyed tremendous success. But there’s a huge caveat: Statistically speaking, all these drugs work no better — and often are far worse for you — than sugar pills, fake pills, placebos that patients only think are powerful, mind-altering compounds, but which in fact are no more chemically miraculous than a peppermint Altoid.

Have you heard this before? Of course you have. The placebo effect has been known for years. Decades. Forever. It’s one of those hotly controversial, yet irrefutable medical/psychological wonders that we don’t have the slightest clue how to unravel, much less leverage. And hence, it just freaks us the hell out.

Nevertheless, the recent findings, the result of one of the most comprehensive studies in recent years, are still nothing short of astounding. A sugar pill works as well as a hit of Prozac, if the patient believes she’s getting the latter? It’s just all sorts of confounding, in how it reveals how the power of the mind is still, to this day, barely understood, untapped, wildly feral, far more brightly powerful than we know what to do with.

It also reveals just how deeply invested massive drug companies are in convincing everyone they can “cure” depression with powerful, often dangerous chemical alternatives, how fearful doctors are of refuting this, how reluctant patients are to understand the difference, and how, above all else, nothing is as it seems.

Problem is, it ain’t just the pills. The placebo effect — hereby defined as the sheer force of will and belief, of the mind’s (and heart’s) ability to heal and nurture itself sans external assistance — applies to all sorts of constructs in our tortured modern world.

Organized religion? Hell yes. Is your life flawed and painful? Are you guilt-ridden and terrified of the world’s swarm of demons and daggers? Of course you are, sinner. Here, have a giant, unknowable deity. Give to it all your faith, hope, belief, money, angst, sexual shame. Believe in it wholly and without doubt, to the point where you lose a sense of yourself and your true divine source, forever and ever, amen.

There now. Feel better? Are miracles starting to happen in your life? Do you feel uplifted and joyful? Are you healed? It’s the power of Jesus! It’s God in your life! It’s because you have blind faith! No no no, it’s not you, silly. Even though, in fact, it totally is. Shhh.

Of course, what we call the power of faith is just the power of the mind, soul, the Self, rather harshly rerouted through some external conduit that relieves us from having to figure s–t out for ourselves. After all, it’s just much easier to give it all over to the god, the pill, the product, than it is to delve deep into one’s own dark and inscrutable psyche. Same as it ever was.

But whatever works, right? If expensive pills genuinely help millions, who’s to argue? If devout belief gives you stability and a sense of place, what’s wrong with that? It’s all well and good… until you factor in the cost.

The organized religion racket rakes in hundreds of billions a year, and requires a massive toll in guilt, shame, dogma, homophobia, war, pedophilia and sexual hysteria. The antidepressant market runs $10 billion a year and makes millions into casual addicts, convincing many they are powerless to get better without chemical assistance.

The placebo market is, at last check, absolutely free. Man, they just hate that.

Behold, study number two. This research reveals another time-honored truth that science is only now beginning to barely get a grip on, albeit nervously, suspiciously. Few want to claim it or ponder what it might mean to how we define illness, consciousness, God, the sanctity of the DSM-IV.

This research reveals, once again for the millionth time, that various psychedelics like MDMA, LSD and psilocybin really do, in fact, have a rather stunningly helpful — and often permanent — effect on the health and well-being of numerous patients, almost universally and without fail.

(Did you hear that? That’s the sound of a million mystics and healers, teachers and gurus throughout history, sighing and rolling their eyes).

Of these drugs’ power to dance and frolic with the brain’s synapses, there is absolutely no doubt. This is no placebo effect. This is no sheer force of will. Psilocybin, for one, is an E-ticket to a shifting dimension, a dance on the blurrier edges of definitive reality. Ecstasy is a widening out, a warming up, an opening into the cold, cold heart of the human species.

Patients who get to dabble with these fine plants and chemicals are reporting astonishingly positive, almost impossibly curative reactions. Lives are forever altered. Ideas of the soul, heart, human connection forever reset and restored. Possibilities expand, PTSD contracts, hearts open, fear and inhibition dissolve. Love expands. And man, the PTB hate that, too.

Do you know why? Two reasons: One: No one holds the patent to these drugs. No one company stands to rake in billions if, say, MDMA is somehow decriminalized. Two: Science loves reliable data, anchor points, the flawed sturdiness of the scientific method. But when it comes to hallucinogens and psychotropics, it’s all just a delightful, slippery mess. The swim and swirl of consciousness, it would appear, just refuses to be pinned down.

The grand upshot: We are but infants. We hammer and prod at the brain, the self, inundate it with chemicals and blast it with terminology to try and get it to behave and respond in somewhat predictable ways. And yet, the ancient plants, the mystical connections they offer to that original source seem to prove one irrefutable point: We still have a long, long way to go to get back to where we started.