High court rules out life sentences for juveniles

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court today ruled that teenagers may not be locked up for life without chance of parole if they haven’t killed anyone.

By a 5-4 vote, the court said the Constitution requires that young people serving life sentences must at least be considered for release.

The court ruled in the case of Terrance Graham, who was implicated in armed robberies when he was 16 and 17. Graham, now 22, is in prison in Florida, which holds more than 70 percent of juvenile defendants locked up for life for crimes other than homicide.

“The state has denied him any chance to later demonstrate that he is fit to rejoin society based solely on a nonhomicide crime that he committed while he was a child in the eyes of the law,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion. “This the Eighth Amendment does not permit.”

Chief Justice John Roberts agreed with Kennedy and the court’s four liberal justices about Graham. But Roberts said he does not believe the ruling should extend to all young offenders who are locked up for crimes other than murder; he was a “no” vote on the ruling.

Life sentences with no chance of parole are rare and harsh for juveniles tried as adults and convicted of crimes less serious than killing, although roughly three dozen states allow for the possibility of such prison terms. Just over 100 prison inmates in the United States are serving those terms, according to data compiled by opponents of the sentences.

Those inmates are in Florida and seven other states — California, Delaware, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska and South Carolina — according to a Florida State University study. More than 2,000 other juveniles are serving life without parole for killing someone. Their sentences are not affected by today’s decision.

Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented from Monday’s ruling.

Thomas criticized the majority for imposing “its own sense of morality and retributive justice” on state lawmakers and voters who chose to give state judges the option of life-without-parole sentences.

In other action today, the court:

— Ruled that federal officials can indefinitely hold inmates considered “sexually dangerous” after their prison terms are complete. The high court reversed a lower court decision that said Congress overstepped its authority in allowing indefinite detentions of inmates considered “sexually dangerous.”

“The statute is a ‘necessary and proper’ means of exercising the federal authority that permits Congress to create federal criminal laws, to punish their violation, to imprison violators, to provide appropriately for those imprisoned and to maintain the security of those who are not imprisoned by who may be affected by the federal imprisonment of others,” said Justice Stephen Breyer, writing the majority opinion.

The opinion overruled a decision from the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va.

— Ruled that a Texas mother illegally moved her son from Chile to the United States during a custody dispute with the boy’s British father in the first test of the boundaries of an international child custody treaty.

The high court ruled that the Hague Convention on child abduction — aimed at preventing a parent from taking children to other countries without the other parent’s permission — demands that the child goes back to the South American country.

However, Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the 6-3 decision, said Jacquelyn Abbott can argue in lower courts in the United States for an exception to the international treaty that could allow her son to stay in the U.S.

The child, born in Hawaii, is a U.S. citizen.

— Declined to take up a challenge from cable television operators to the 18-year-old requirement that they carry local broadcast stations on their systems. The justices rejected an appeal from Cablevision Systems Corp. The court upheld a federal “must carry” law, enacted in 1992 when cable TV systems faced much less competition than they do today.