JUVENILE LIFE WITHOUT PAROLE: THE POTENTIAL FOR PROGRESS

by Nezua Limon
El Machete
November 9, 2009

The coming Supreme Court term may see the United States move closer to its ideals of justice, or
remain stubbornly locked in last place in at least one area—how we treat the smallest and weakest
among us. Of all nations in the world, the United States of America is the last to ban sentences that
require children to die in prison for crimes committed while young. Additionally, aside from Somalia,
the USA stands alone in refusing to ratify Article 37 of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the
Child (CRC). Were we to do so, the possibility of parole would have to be given to children.

On the 2008 campaign trail, when asked about the CRC, then-candidate Obama said, “It is
embarrassing to find ourselves in the company of Somalia, a lawless land.” He went on to promise
that “I will review this and other treaties and ensure that the United States resumes its global
leadership in human rights.”

Two cases are currently before the Supreme

Court that afford our nation the opportunity
to right this wrong and join the modern
world. Sullivan vs. Florida and Graham vs.
Florida will require the Supreme Court to
rule on whether life sentences for juveniles
that preclude the possibility of parole
(JLWOP) are, in fact, constitutional.

As a nation, we move forward bit by bit. At

times we take large strides to correct a slow
pace. The issue of Juvenile Life Without Parole is an area that now demands a second look. One day
soon, the idea of sentencing children to die in prison without even the possibility to redeem
themselves will seem as bizarre as those laws that barred women from voting.

In fact, it was only in 2005, in Roper vs. Simmons, that the Supreme Court finally ruled the juvenile
death penalty was unconstitutional. In arguing, the text describes a paradigm that informs legal
reasoning in US law and specifically the Eighth Amendment’s barring of cruel and unusual
punishment. It does this by consulting “objective indicia of consensus,” or signs in society or
practicing of law that certain punishments or rulings or situations are no longer deemed accepted by
the social body. The court need not see a definite declaration of as much, it infers this from many
indicators.

A simpler way to illustrate this dynamic would be to say given time, the human being grows and
evolves. A society is nothing more than a collection of human beings, and as such, evolves. A wise
law accounts for the progress a society is making by embodying its current morality or lean toward
new mores.
We need only look to our recent past to see examples. What is reasonable at one time to a person, or a
nation of people (e.g., child labor, women as property, right to own slaves) can later be understood to
be (and have always been) unreasonable or unjust. In general, we forgive a society for being imperfect
(as people are imperfect) though we demand it improve at all times.

All apparent indicators in our society today imply that people change over time. That the human
condition is not sealed in childhood, but of a developing and transient state. We speak to the young
often, reminding them they most likely will look back and see things very differently, such is the
change that a human mind and heart travel on the path to adulthood. It makes sense that this
understanding would be codified in the sentencing of minors.

Today, parole exists for adults. It is a given that a grown person can see the error of their ways and
have changed over time, or simply grow to be something better than they were. Or at least merit a
second chance. But aren’t children even more likely to change over time than an adult who has
already grown through his or her most malleable and fluid phases of mental and emotional
development? And who is more deserving of a second chance than a child? None of this is to say
every child sentenced to life in prison would or should walk free. The possibility of parole is just that:
possibility. The allowance that a person is not a static thing. A hope for a human being to hold on to
while in the hell that prisons are. A reason for them to live, and live well.

To hold that juvenile life without parole sentences

are just, one would also have to exclude children
from this possibility of potential to change over
time. To hold that juvenile life without parole
sentences are fair, we also must consider those
people—specifically young people—who break a
law to be of a type of human unlike the
perpetually law-abiding and thus subject to a
separate morality. These types of notions on
criminal nature was once prevalent in the US in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
when doctors and scientists of the era went to
great lengths to attempt a codification of forehead measurements or family histories to make a case for
criminality being something that marked one apart from the rest of the species. It was a gross and
unenlightened view that aided the concurrent eugenics practices of the day. Clearly we have moved
beyond the thinking of those times.

Another troubling aspect of the lack of any possibility to redress a life sentence is how people of color
are disproportionately affected by so many aspects of law, from who gets stopped more, searched
more, and shot more, to sentencing. In the US, African American children are actually ten times more
likely than white children to receive a life without parole sentence. In California, the ratio is even
more striking, at an egregious 20 to 1. When it comes to Latinos, half of the inmates incarcerated in
federal prison have no previous criminal record, are least likely to be both violent and nonviolent
recidivists. At the same time, Latinos are less likely overall to be given parole or probation than
non-Latinos! These facts all add up to a powerful and destructive form of institutionalized racism.
Given we understand those iniquities in our justice system exist and have been documented, are we
comfortable with a life sentence in prison for minors, without even the possibility of parole one day?
Doesn’t this mechanism resemble a giant tax-payer-funded killing machine aimed at one part of the
population?
Finally, what of those who are innocent of the crimes for which they have been accused, and wrongly
convicted? A terrible nexus of race and law and injustice frame the case of Efrén Paredes, Jr, a Latino
honor student wrongfully convicted at 15 years old of a murder and armed robbery that others have
already plead guilty to being involved in. Paredes was convicted and given two life sentences on
entirely circumstantial evidence in an one of the US’ top 25 most segregated towns by a nearly
all-white police department, court, and jury. Parades’ innocence is maintained worldwide and an
effort to free him has been enjoined by activists, authors and experts like world renowned wrongful
convictions expert Paul Ciolino, as well as the National Lawyer’s Guild (NLG). Can we truly look at
the horror that receiving such a sentence would be to an innocent person and yet insist it makes sense
in 2009 to make the possibility of parole something one needs to grow into, like the right to drink? To
offer it to adults, but to withhold it from children?

You can help push back against injustices like

this. Please take a moment and sign the petition
to show your support not only for Efrén’s
release, but for the over 2,500 prisoners
sentenced to life without parole when they were
juveniles. In addition to the myriad holes in the
case against Efrén, in September of this year
the Berrien County prosecuter who defended
the county’s case against Paredes claiming
police do not commit misconduct has had to
retract those words. Corruption has been
exposed in the Berrien county police
department’s Narcotics unit, and according to David Robinson, a former Detroit police officer turned
attorney, “Someone was asleep at the switch in terms of administrative responsibility to operate the
police department.” In his estimate, police misbehavior has gone on “over a significant period of
time.”

Surely any reasonable mind understands when humans come together and interact in systems guided
by even the most noble intent, injustices will occur. As a principle in general, this is inarguable. To
drag out a rather stale cliché and apologize for waking it, “that’s why they put erasers on pencils.”
And sometimes this means leaving room not only for the mistakes of the convicted, but for the
mistakes that the system—being but system of imperfect persons working together—will inevitably
make.

Giving children convicted of life sentences the possibility of parole is simply what a modern society
provides itself so that it may maintain the belief that it would never purposefully and unjustly put a
child to death in a big, locked box.

May the Supreme Court rule the same way.

You can sign the Free Efrén petition at http://tinyurl.com/FreeEPJ. A video Nezua created using
this article as a script can be viewed at: http://tinyurl.com/NezJLWOP.

Source: http://theunapologeticmexican.org/elmachete/2009/11/09/news-with-nezua-the-
potential-for-progress/