Supreme Court's staggering deviation from precedent regarding children convicted of violent crimes

For nearly two decades, the Supreme Court has established more leniency toward children convicted of violent crimes, in line with the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

This trend came to an abrupt stop on Thursday, with the Court’s decision in Jones v. Mississippi that judges do not need to find a juvenile murderer to have a hope of rehabilitation before sentencing them to die in prison.

Most stunning, however, is the manner in which the Court got there, by casting aside years of precedent with the stroke of a pen. Yesterday’s decision was a frightening reminder of how easily the Court can speak out of both sides of its mouth: claiming fidelity to its own past decisions, while simultaneously gutting them.

Courts are governed by the doctrine of stare decisis, Latin for “to stand by things decided.” In short, stare decisis is the fundamental doctrine that precedent matters, and that a court will stand by its rulings on issues previously brought before it. As the Supreme Court has said, stare decisis “promotes the evenhanded, predictable, and consistent development of legal principles, fosters reliance on judicial decisions, and contributes to the actual and perceived integrity of the judicial process.” Such predictability is critical for helping the public understand what its rights are.

Put another way, in plain language, stare decisis isn’t just a legal expression of if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but more like it ain’t broke, and moreover, our role as its stewards demands that we ensure that it be respected and protected.

This basic backdrop makes the court’s decision in Jones so perplexing. Since 2005, a series of Supreme Court rulings have methodically addressed questions of how youths can be sentenced for serious crimes. In 2005, the Court ruled that juveniles cannot be sentenced to death. In 2010, it banned the use of life without parole for juveniles not convicted of homicide. Two years later, it ruled in Miller v. Alabama that mandatory life without parole sentences for minors violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Finally, in 2016, the Court found that its ruling in Miller could be applied retroactively.

The Court’s decision in Jones broke this pattern in dramatic fashion. In the case, a 6-3 majority, led by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who wrote for the majority, found that judges need not specifically find a juvenile defendant “permanently incorrigible” — beyond redemption — before sentencing him to life in prison. Brett Jones, convicted of the 2004 stabbing death of his grandfather after an argument when Jones had just turned 15, was challenging a mandatory sentence of life without parole imposed in Mississippi.

This decision to refuse to impose restrictions on the ability of states to sentence juveniles to life without parole was a clear break from the Court’s history, couched in language suggesting, wrongly, that the nation’s highest Court wasn’t the right venue to decide such issues. Jones “articulates several moral and policy arguments for why he should not be forced to spend the rest of his life in prison,” Kavanaugh wrote, but “our decision allows [him] to present those arguments to the state officials authorized to act on them, such as the state legislature, state courts, or Governor.”