The evidence provided in this brief supports bold reforms for youth and emerging adults sentenced to extreme punishments.
The National Youth Justice Network released a report detailing legislative trends on youth rights from 2023. This report highlights key gains made by several states around juvenile court fines and fees, expungement, transfer, and youth interrogation among other issues, and flags several regressive legislative trends rooted in harmful narratives about young people. This overview of…
This report presents the evolution of the second look movement, which started with ensuring compliance with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions in Graham v. Florida (2010) and Miller v. Alabama (2012) on the constitutionality of juvenile life without parole (“JLWOP”) sentences.12 This reform has more recently expanded to other types of sentences and populations, such…
A concentration of a few states has unevenly complied with Miller and the possibility of resentencing provided by Montgomery. Some states have refused to comply at all. This uneven implementation of the Miller decision has a particularly profound impact on racial disparities among those serving JLWOP. An analysis of those deemed worth protecting from JLWOP…
This article makes the argument against the imposition of life without parole for young people who commit felony murder using an adolescent development framework. The author analyzes existing case law to outline that, just as the U.S. Supreme Court found the death penalty inappropriate for felony murder and relied on adolescent brain development research in…
The paper proceeds as follows: Part I describes the changes in law in the late 1980s and early 1990s that resulted in a marked increase in young people sentenced to life or life-like sentences, as well as the evolving understanding of psychosocial and neurological development that followed. Part II summarizes the U.S. Supreme Court’s Eighth…
This Article is one of the first to explore the racialized impact of the two most controversial and ubiquitous forms of what we call “imputed liability murder.” An analysis of ten years of murder prosecutions in the state of Minnesota reveals that imputed liability murder is anything but a fringe subtype of homicide: an astounding…
