U.S. Supreme Court ruling against juvenile life sentences is ignored by Florida
Late last year, in a case forever formally memorialized as Graham v. State of Florida, 130 Supreme Court Reports 2011, the United States Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional for non-homicide juvenile offenders to receive life sentences. The sixteen year old defendant raped and terrorized two waitresses at gunpoint. For his efforts, he received a life sentence so that he presumably will not commit a similar crime ever again.
The Supreme Court found this sentence to be overly Draconian and vacated the sentence. Honoring the letter but not the spirit of the ruling of our nation's highest court, the resentencing court modified the sentence to 65 years in prison, to run concurrently with a 27 year sentence that he received on another matter.
While clearly this young man was not any reasonable person's paradyme of moral rectitude, his attorney rightfully argued that the defendant would almost certainly die in jail and accordingly, the Florida court was ignoring the spirit of the Supreme Court ruling. My information is that Florida and Texas are contending for the honor of being the state with the most juveniles offenders serving life without parole.
While I can perhaps understand the visceral attitude of revenge that wants to lash out and put vicious offenders away for life regardless of their age, I nevertheless believe as a society we should try to act in a more civilized fashion. Perhaps it would be appropriate to devote more effort in attempting to rehabilitate our juvenile miscreants, oops, I mean offenders.