Under the Supreme Court’s Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, life without parole (LWOP) is reserved for the most incorrigible offenders; only the rare juvenile homicide offender who is irretrievably corrupt may receive such a sentence.1 In Miller v. Alabama,2 the Supreme Court held that the Eighth Amendment prohibits sentencing schemes that mandate LWOP for juvenile homicide offenders.3 Because juvenile homicide offenders are typically less culpable than adult homicide offenders,4 sentencing courts must take youth into account.5 While Miller offered substantive protection, the Court was silent on the procedural requirements, and state courts have varied in their interpretations of the mandate.6 The Court clarified that Miller was retroactive in Montgomery v. Louisiana,7 but it still left questions critical to the implementation of the new mandate unanswered, including whether Miller had created a presumption in favor of parole and whether sentencing courts must make explicit findings about “irreparable corruption” before sentencing (or resentencing) a juvenile to LWOP.8 Recently, in Chandler v. State,9 the Supreme Court of Mississippi affirmed that the trial court had satisfied Miller and had not abused its discretion in resentencing a juvenile homicide offender to LWOP, even though the sentencing court placed the burden on him to provide mitigating evidence of his capacity for rehabilitation and did not make a finding on the record that he was permanently incorrigible.10 Chandler highlights a potential problem with Miller and Montgomery: because the Court did not mandate any particular procedure to guarantee the rights that it recognized, it gave states the opportunity to procedurally undermine these substantive rights and deny juvenile homicide offenders the meaningful opportunity for future release that the Eighth Amendment requires.
In 2005, seventeen-year-old Joey Montrell Chandler was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.11 Chandler shot his cousin twice after learning that he had stolen marijuana and money that Chandler had planned to use to support his pregnant girlfriend.12 The Supreme Court of Mississippi affirmed the sentence on appeal,13 but Chandler received a new sentencing hearing in light of Miller.14
On resentencing, Judge Kitchens focused primarily on the issue of Chandler’s maturity. The facts section of the opinion highlighted that Chandler was “17 years, 6 months and 13 days old” at the time of the crime, and the analysis began with an extensive list of privileges available to seventeen-year-olds in general, including driving, joining the military with parental consent, obtaining abortions without parental consent, and receiving a private pilot’s certificate.15 Judge Kitchens then noted that Chandler was “mature enough to father a child with his girlfriend and . . . [sell] drugs.”16 Furthermore, the judge declared that Chandler was “very mature” because he acted alone, planned the crime, and was not mentally impaired or abused.17 With regard to rehabilitation, the judge stated only that the Executive has the ability to pardon.18 “After carefully reviewing the evidence in this case and the matters presented in the re-sentencing hearing,” Judge Kitchens found that Chandler should be sentenced to LWOP.19
Chandler appealed the second sentence on the grounds that the trial court failed to properly take the mitigating impact of his youth into account because it failed to issue findings for each of the Miller factors; in particular, the court had omitted any findings concerning Chandler’s individual capacity for rehabilitation in the record.20 The Mississippi Supreme Court affirmed.21 Writing for the court, Justice Coleman22 stated that the trial court had “exceeded” its minimum obligation under Miller and Parker v. State23 by conducting a hearing and considering all that was presented.24 Because “[n]othing in the record indicates that the trial court did not take [the evidence that Chandler proffered] into account” and the trial court acknowledged the Executive’s power to pardon, the decision to resentence Chandler to LWOP was not “automatic[]” and therefore not in violation of Miller or an abuse of discretion.25
Chief Justice Waller26 dissented, arguing that the sentencing court failed to address the primary focus of Miller by skirting the issue of Chandler’s capacity for rehabilitation and not articulating that Chandler was among “the rarest of juvenile offenders,”27 as required in other states.28 The Chief Justice deemed the trial court’s solitary statement about executive pardons insufficient evidence that the sentencing court had adequately considered the defendant’s capacity for rehabilitation, particularly in light of the testimony from Chandler’s family and friends and his excellent disciplinary record in prison.29 Since “Miller established that a LWOP sentence is an unconstitutionally disproportionate punishment for juvenile homicide offenders whose crimes reflect transient immaturity,”30 any decision from the trial court that did not “at a minimum . . . address[] Chandler’s capacity for rehabilitation and ma[k]e an on-the-record finding that Chandler was one of the rare juvenile offenders whose crime reflected permanent incorrigibility” was insufficient as a matter of law.31
Justice King32 also provided a separate dissenting opinion to challenge the majority’s holding that abuse of discretion was the appropriate standard of review. Relying on the precedent of death penalty cases,33 Justice King concluded that imposition of LWOP on a juvenile necessitates the same heightened scrutiny as capital punishment because it is the most severe penalty available.34
The Chandler majority interpreted Miller and Montgomery narrowly, and in so doing, the court made it much less likely that juvenile homicide offenders in Mississippi will receive the “meaningful opportunity to obtain release” that the Supreme Court promised.35 Scholars in the death penalty context have commented on the “[p]rocedural undermining of substantive rights,” through which the Supreme Court’s acknowledgement of a substantive right is weakened by the erection of procedural barriers in lower courts.36 The Mississippi Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Miller–Montgomery precedent in Chandler is an example of this phenomenon; the decision undermines the spirit of the Supreme Court’s rulings and risks inequitable application of constitutional mandates based on jurisdiction. While the Miller holding was narrow,37 the clarifying language of Montgomery suggests that the central promise of Miller was that LWOP should be reserved for a very small subset of the worst juvenile offenders.38 The Montgomery dissenters’ fear that the majority holding would make “imposition of [juvenile LWOP] a practical impossibility” further supports the conclusion that Miller was intended to broadly restrict the class of juvenile homicide offenders ineligible for parole.39 The Mississippi Supreme Court has ignored this suggestion, however, and used three tools to procedurally undermine the grant of substantive rights: implementing the strictest possible standard for immaturity, finding no presumption in favor of parole, and not requiring sentencing judges to make a finding of permanent incorrigibility before sentencing a juvenile homicide offender to LWOP.
Rather than reserving LWOP for “the rare juvenile offender,”40 the Supreme Court of Mississippi’s LWOP decisions have led other Mississippi courts to interpret Miller as prohibiting LWOP only for juvenile homicide offenders “whose crimes reflected only transient immaturity,” not for those “whose crimes reflect[ed] irreparable corruption.”41 Under this standard, LWOP is constitutionally permissible if the crime reflected any level of corruption which the judge perceived as irreparable.42 Though the Montgomery Court’s assertion that Miller “rendered [LWOP] an unconstitutional penalty for . . . juvenile offenders whose crimes reflect the transient immaturity of youth”43 arguably left open the question of how much transient immaturity a crime must reflect before LWOP is rendered unconstitutional, the state court’s decision to limit the class of juvenile offenders eligible for relief by implementing the strictest possible standard highlights the way that Mississippi exploited the deference that the Supreme Court afforded it to limit the impact of Miller and Montgomery.44
The Chandler court undermined the substantive rights protected in Miller and Montgomery by denying the existence of a rebuttable presumption in favor of parole eligibility for juvenile homicide offenders.45 This decision placed the burden on Chandler to present mitigating evidence of his youth and potential for rehabilitation in order to prove that he was part of the constitutionally protected class, rather than placing the burden on the prosecution to present evidence that Chandler was one of the rare offenders for whom LWOP is constitutional. The Chandler majority refused to implement a presumption in favor of parole because neither Miller nor Montgomery explicitly mandated one.46 But several aspects of the Miller and Montgomery opinions suggest that acknowledgment of this presumption would be more faithful to the Court’s intent than would denial. Writing for the Miller majority, Justice Kagan47 predicted that juvenile LWOP would become “uncommon.”48 Montgomery reaffirmed this sentiment; the Court referred to Miller as a categorical bar on LWOP “for all but the rarest of juvenile offenders”49 and reiterated six times that juvenile LWOP should be “rare.”50 Based on these observations, six state supreme courts have held that faithful implementation of Miller and Montgomery requires a presumption in favor of parole.51 In Commonwealth v. Batts,52 the Pennsylvania Supreme Court stated that, though isolated remarks in Miller and Montgomery could be interpreted to suggest that the burden of proof should be placed on the defendant,53 the notion that the juvenile offender should bear the burden of proof “is belied by the central premise of Roper, Graham, Miller and Montgomery — that as a matter of law, juveniles are categorically less culpable than adults.”54 In recognition of this reduced culpability, there should be a presumption in favor of parole for juvenile offenders.
The Chandler court’s refusal to implement such a presumption also belies the Supreme Court’s intent to reserve juvenile LWOP for rare cases because of the difficulties inherent in the task of providing evidence of the mitigating impact of youthfulness and capacity for rehabilitation. The Miller Court noted that mandatory LWOP for juvenile homicide offenders was unconstitutional in part because “incompetencies associated with youth” may prevent juvenile offenders from fully assisting their attorneys.55 It would be unfaithful to the Court’s recognition of the incompetencies intrinsic to youth for a sentencing court to place the burden on the juvenile offender to prove that he is a member of the protected class.56 Yet that is precisely what the Chandler majority did. Though it could be argued that the offenders, like Chandler, who received resentencing hearings in light of Miller and Montgomery could carry such a burden because they are no longer juveniles, the court’s refusal to acknowledge a presumption in favor of parole still constitutes an inappropriate procedural barrier to relief because mitigating evidence such as testimony from family members, friends, or former teachers becomes more difficult to obtain when the offender has been incarcerated for a substantial period of time.57 Because of the inherent difficulty of providing evidence on the impact of youthfulness, states should recognize a presumption in favor of parole eligibility for juveniles to effectuate the Court’s instruction that LWOP be used rarely.58
The Chandler court’s procedural decision that the sentencing court was not required to issue a finding of irreparable incorrigibility also diminishes the impact of Miller and Montgomery.59 The court based this conclusion on the statement in Montgomery that “Miller did not require trial courts to make a finding of fact regarding a child’s incorrigibility,”60 but this assertion was tempered by a clarification four sentences later: “That Miller did not impose a formal factfinding requirement does not leave States free to sentence a child whose crime reflects transient immaturity to [LWOP].”61 One legal scholar suggests that in light of this clarification, the lack of a formal factfinding requirement in Miller is better understood as a refusal to tell the states exactly how to make the determination of incorrigibility than as a statement that the sentencing court need not make such a finding.62 Furthermore, Justice Scalia’s Montgomery dissent63 and Justice Sotomayor’s concurrences in Adams v. Alabama64 and Tatum v. Arizona65 suggest that members of the Court interpret Montgomery as imposing an “incorrigibility requirement.”66 Seven of the eleven state supreme courts that have directly addressed the question have held that imposition of LWOP on a juvenile homicide offender requires a finding of incorrigibility.67 These courts often concluded that LWOP is “beyond the court’s power to impose”68 in the absence of such a finding because “the court must determine whether the juvenile is one of the rare offenders for whom the sentence is permitted.”69 In contrast to this reasoning, the Mississippi Supreme Court took advantage of the latitude that the Supreme Court afforded state courts in Miller and Montgomery by refusing to implement procedures (such as a requirement that the sentencing judge make a finding of permanent incorrigibility on the record) that would protect the right that the Supreme Court intended to guarantee.70
Though the procedure that the sentencing court followed in Chandler satisfied the base constitutional mandates of Miller and Montgomery, it failed to grasp the central promise of the Court’s decisions.71 While some states have implemented changes to their sentencing processes that may actually render juvenile LWOP “uncommon,”72 Mississippi has interpreted the mandates so narrowly that they have become all sizzle and no steak. As a result of the directives that LWOP is unconstitutional only when the crime reflected “only transient immaturity,” that sentencing courts are not to recognize any presumption against LWOP, and that a finding of “permanent incorrigibility” is not required before the implementation of such a sentence, many of the defendants, like Chandler, who have received resentencing hearings in Mississippi have had their sentences upheld despite the second chance.73 Chandler illustrates the “[p]rocedural undermining of substantive rights”74 that state courts may engage in when the Supreme Court issues a narrow substantive holding accompanied by language suggesting a broader intent without any procedural requirements. The underlying substantive grant loses significance for defendants in jurisdictions where sentencing officials are not required to follow procedures that ensure the rights will be recognized.