Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca7-14-01944/USCOURTS-ca7-14-01944-0/pdf.json

Nature of Suit Code: 530
Nature of Suit: Prisoner Petitions - Habeas Corpus
Cause of Action: 

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In the

United States Court of Appeals

For the Seventh Circuit ____________________

No. 14-1944

BENARD MCKINLEY,

Petitioner-Appellant,

v.

KIM BUTLER,

Respondent-Appellee.

____________________

Appeal from the United States District Court for the

Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.

No. 11 C 4190 — John J. Tharp, Jr., Judge.

____________________

ARGUED OCTOBER 30, 2015 — DECIDED JANUARY 4, 2016

____________________

Before POSNER, RIPPLE, and HAMILTON, Circuit Judges.

POSNER, Circuit Judge. In 2001, a 16-year-old named 

Benard McKinley shot and killed a 23-year-old man, Abdo 

Serna-Ibarra, as he tried to enter a Chicago park. Both were 

with friends, and one of McKinley’s friends, a 15-year-old

named Edward Chavera, may have handed McKinley the 

gun. Whether or not he did, he told McKinley to shoot 

Serna-Ibarra. McKinley obeyed, shooting him in the back,

and when Serna-Ibarra turned around with his hands raised 

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McKinley shot him again, killing him. Tried in an Illinois 

state court and convicted by a jury of first-degree murder, 

McKinley was sentenced to consecutive 50-year prison 

terms, one for the murder and one for the use of a firearm to 

commit it. See 730 ILCS 5/5-8-1(a)(1)(a), (a)(1)(d)(iii) (2004). 

With no good-time credit or other chance of early release 

permitted to persons sentenced for first-degree murder in 

Illinois, McKinley will be imprisoned for the full 100 years 

unless, of course, he dies before the age of 116. See 730 ILCS 

5/3-3-2, 5/3-6-3(a)(2)(i). His accomplice, Chavera, pleaded

guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 17.5 

years in prison.

After unsuccessfully seeking post-conviction relief in the 

Illinois court system, McKinley petitioned the federal district 

court in Chicago for a writ of habeas corpus, on the ground 

(so far as relates to the present appeal) that his sentence violated the federal Constitution. See 28 U.S.C. § 2254(a). The 

district court denied McKinley’s petition, precipitating the 

appeal now before us.

To be allowed to press his claim in this court, however,

he had to have pressed it in the state judicial system first,

§ 2254(b)(1)(A), and have made clear that it was indeed a 

federal constitutional claim that he was pressing. Baldwin v. 

Reese, 541 U.S. 27, 32 (2004); Duncan v. Henry, 513 U.S. 364, 

365–66 (1995). This requirement of exhaustion is designed on 

the one hand to marshal the assistance of the state courts in 

enforcing federal constitutional law and on the other hand to 

diminish the burden on the federal courts of post-conviction 

proceedings by state prisoners—a potentially crushing burden given the size of the state prison population and the understandable tendency of prisoners, especially those serving 

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No. 14-1944 3

long sentences, to pepper the courts with post-conviction petitions.

Beginning in 2008 McKinley filed in Illinois courts a 

post-conviction petition, a petition for relief from judgment, 

and a motion for leave to file a successive post-conviction 

petition. Most of the claims in these filings had no possible 

merit, were properly rejected, and require no discussion. He 

did however make one possibly meritorious claim, challenging the sentence as a “cruel and unusual punishment under 

th[e] constitution of state and federal laws.” He had made a 

similar claim, without success, on direct appeal, describing

the length of his sentence as excessive given his youth when 

he committed the murder, and thus as a violation of the Illinois Constitution’s Proportionate Penalties Clause (as Article 

1, § 11 of the Illinois Constitution is known), which provides,

so far as might relate to this case, that “all penalties shall be 

determined both according to the seriousness of the offense 

and with the objective of restoring the offender to useful citizenship.”

All the petitions were rejected—the 100-year sentence 

stood—and so McKinley turned to the federal district court, 

invoking the federal habeas corpus statute. But he had failed 

to argue to the state courts on direct appeal that his prison 

sentence violated the cruel and unusual punishments clause 

of the Eighth Amendment, which the Supreme Court has 

made applicable to the states by interpretation of the due 

process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. By failing to

alert the state court to the possible presence of a federal 

claim, McKinley has forfeited the right to seek federal habeas 

corpus on the ground that his sentence violated the Eighth 

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Amendment, unless he can show that his failure to raise the 

claim in state court had been excusable.

In arguing that it had been, he places great weight on

Miller v. Alabama, 132 S. Ct. 2455 (2012), which held “that the 

Eighth Amendment forbids a sentencing scheme that mandates life in prison without possibility of parole for juvenile 

offenders.” Id. at 2469. But the Illinois sentencing 

“scheme”—the statutory provisions cited earlier governing 

sentences for murder and for deadly use of a firearm—did

not require that McKinley be sentenced to life in prison. He 

could have been sentenced to as little as 20 years for the 

murder plus 25 years for the deadly use of a firearm, for a 

total of 45 years. See 730 ILCS 5/5-8-4(a) (2004) (requiring the 

sentencing judge to impose consecutive sentences if “one of 

the offenses for which defendant was convicted was first degree murder”). There is more to Miller, however. The Supreme Court said that in deciding on a sentence for a minor 

(remember that McKinley was only 16 when he committed 

the murder) “we require [the sentencing judge] to take into 

account how children are different, and how those differences counsel against irrevocably sentencing them to a lifetime in prison.” Miller v. Alabama, supra, 132 S. Ct. at 2469

(footnote omitted).

The sentencing judge in this case didn’t do that. He said 

nothing to indicate that he considered the defendant’s youth

to have the slightest relevance to deciding how long to make 

the sentence. The only considerations he deemed relevant 

were that “the defendant had some type of juvenile adjudication for possession of [a] controlled substance, was in a 

[juvenile probation] program [that included counseling], and 

while in that program he committed this offense. I find that

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No. 14-1944 5

to be an aggravating factor,” and in fact “a serious aggravating factor.” He further emphasized that there had been no 

provocation for the murder. He rejected the suggestion that 

“the defendant’s criminal conduct was a result of circumstances unlikely to recur,” explaining that “historically ... his 

conduct indicated that the period of probation that he was 

given and the monitoring that he was given through Juvenile Court, really like your first chance scenario, was insufficient to deter the defendant from committing another offense.” In short, “multiple factors in aggravation apply” and

the 100-year sentence was “necessary to deter others from 

committing the same crime.”

The judge thus did not consider the Supreme Court’s

“children are different” statement in Miller, or similar statements in earlier Supreme Court cases, notably Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551 (2005), where the Court had marshaled 

psychological evidence in support of its conclusion that to 

impose the death penalty on a minor was a per se violation 

of the Eighth Amendment. Id. at 569–75. (Neither of the cases 

we just cited had been decided when McKinley was sentenced in 2004.) The present case of course does not involve 

the death penalty. And as we noted earlier, neither is it a 

case involving a mandatory sentence of life in prison. The 

judge exercised his discretion in sentencing McKinley to a 

term of years, rather than to life.

But it is such a long term of years (especially given the 

unavailability of early release) as to be—unless there is a 

radical increase, at present unforeseeable, in longevity within the next 100 years—a de facto life sentence, and so the logic 

of Miller applies. The respondent (the warden of the prison 

in which the petitioner is held) wants to limit Miller to cases 

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in which the legislature decrees imprisonment for life, thus 

stripping the sentencing judge of any discretion to impose a 

shorter sentence in light of the particulars of the defendant 

and his crime. But the “children are different” passage that 

we quoted earlier from Miller v. Alabama cannot logically be 

limited to de jure life sentences, as distinct from sentences 

denominated in number of years yet highly likely to result in 

imprisonment for life. Cf. Moore v. Biter, 725 F.3d 1184, 1191–

92 (9th Cir. 2013). The relevance to sentencing of “children 

are different” also cannot in logic depend on whether the 

legislature has made the life sentence discretionary or mandatory; even discretionary life sentences must be guided by 

consideration of age-relevant factors. See, e.g., People v. 

Gutierrez, 324 P.3d 245, 267–69 (Cal. 2014); Ex Parte Henderson, 144 So. 3d 1262, 1280, 1283–84 (Ala. 2013). Although our

court said in Croft v. Williams, 773 F.3d 170, 171 (7th Cir. 

2014), that Miller is inapplicable even to a defendant sentenced to life without parole provided that the legislature 

does not require such a sentence but leaves the matter to the 

sentencing judge, the court did not discuss the “children are 

different” passage in Miller. That passage implies that the 

sentencing court must always consider the age of the defendant in deciding what sentence (within the statutory limits) to 

impose on a juvenile.

The judge in this case failed to do that. He said nothing to 

indicate that he thought the defendant’s youth at all relevant 

to the sentence. He failed to mention that the defendant may

not have been armed at the beginning of the mêlée that resulted in the murder—the gun used in the murder may have 

been handed to him by a confederate, and whether it was or 

not, it is certain that the confederate ordered him to shoot 

Serna-Ibarra. The judge should have considered whether, in 

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No. 14-1944 7

a situation of excitement, McKinley had the maturity to consider whether to obey his confederate’s order, or was prevented by the circumstances from making a rational decision 

about whether to obey.

But there are obstacles to our reversing the denial of habeas corpus on the ground that the judge failed to consider 

the defendant’s age. One is the failure of McKinley’s lawyer 

in the state-court proceedings to assert a federal constitutional claim. But McKinley might be able to overcome this

obstacle because his “constitutional claim is so novel that its 

legal basis [wa]s not reasonably available to counsel” at the 

time of the state court proceedings, for a subsequent Supreme Court decision (in this case, Miller) overturned “a 

longstanding and widespread practice to which this Court 

has not spoken, but which a near-unanimous body of lower 

court authority has expressly approved.” Reed v. Ross, 468 

U.S. 1, 16–17 (1984) (quotations and citations omitted).

But that excuse is available only if the new constitutional 

principle “is held to have retroactive application,” id. at 17, 

and that is a further obstacle to McKinley. The Supreme 

Court has been reluctant to allow prison inmates to base collateral attacks on their convictions or sentences on claims to

retroactive application of federal constitutional principles. 

There are more than a million prison inmates in the United 

States, and every time the Supreme Court, or even a lower 

court, renders a decision that makes criminal law, whether

substantive or procedural, more favorable to defendants, 

prisoners seek retroactive application of the decision. The 

federal courts could be overwhelmed were this permitted 

without limit. This concern has led the Supreme Court to 

confine retroactive application of procedural doctrines of 

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criminal law to doctrines that can be said to be “watersheds” 

in the law, see, e.g., Whorton v. Bockting, 549 U.S. 406, 416–20 

(2007)—and only once has the Court found a watershed: the 

rule of Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963), that the defendant in a criminal case has a constitutional right to representation by counsel.

Recognizing the high bar that a procedural rule must 

surmount to be classified as “watershed,” this court has concluded that neither United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. 220 

(2005), which made the Sentencing Guidelines discretionary, 

nor Alleyne v. United States, 133 S. Ct. 2151 (2013), which required that facts affecting mandatory minimum sentences be 

proved to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt, is retroactive,

McReynolds v. United States, 397 F.3d 479 (7th Cir. 2005); 

Crayton v. United States, 799 F.3d 623 (7th Cir. 2015), though 

both were very important decisions. But even in the unlikely 

event that Miller’s rule requiring judges to consider how 

“children are different” were to be deemed a “watershed”

rule under federal law, McKinley’s claim would fail in our 

court because it is premature.

To explain: the respondent (the warden) acknowledges 

that McKinley may have a remedy in state court because, as 

the warden tells us, “Illinois law allows a prisoner to file a 

successive postconviction petition if he shows cause for, and

prejudice from, failing to raise the claim in an initial postconviction petition.” See 725 ILCS 5/122-1(f) (2015). In People 

v. Davis, 6 N.E.3d 709, 722 (Ill. 2014), the Illinois Supreme 

Court found that the defendant had satisfied this cause and 

prejudice test for his Miller claim because Miller had been

unavailable to him either on direct appeal or in his initial 

post-conviction proceedings, and the court held that under 

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No. 14-1944 9

Illinois law it could be enforced retroactively on collateral 

review. The Davis decision thus gives the petitioner in the 

present case an available avenue for relief in state court for 

his claim.

Particularly important is the statement in Davis that Miller “applies retroactively to cases on collateral review” under 

Illinois law. Id. at 720. Davis holds that Miller is retroactive 

because it changed substantive rather than procedural law, 

and so is not controlled by the requirement that a procedural 

rule must be a “watershed” rule if it is to apply retroactively. 

Id. at 722. Indeed, a state is not required to have such a requirement at all. And although the Illinois Supreme Court 

has adopted the “standards for determining when a new 

constitutional rule would apply to federal habeas corpus actions pending in federal courts” to “collateral proceedings 

pursuant to the [Illinois] Post-Conviction Hearing Act” as a 

matter of state law, id. at 720, a state court is not required, 

when applying state law, to interpret those standards the 

same way as federal courts do. 

McKinley like Davis had no opportunity to invoke Miller

either in his direct appeal or in any of his state postconviction proceedings. He had been convicted and sentenced in 2004 and his conviction and sentence had been affirmed in 2007. He filed his post-conviction petition in 2008,

and that proceeding ended in 2011 when the Illinois Supreme Court denied review. Miller was not decided until 

2012. So the Illinois state courts have had no opportunity to 

consider the bearing of Miller on the appropriateness of reconsidering McKinley’s sentence. Miller speaks to the propriety of a life sentence for juveniles, and an Illinois court 

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might well believe as do we that the sentencing judge in this 

case utterly failed to consider that “children are different.”

The state court might begin by reflecting on the considerations that should inform a decision on the length of a 

prison sentence. One is the need to prevent the defendant 

from committing crimes upon release; the likelier that he is 

to recidivate, the longer the appropriate sentence. Another 

pertinent consideration is the need to deter other potential 

criminals, who if rational will consider the length of the sentences being meted out to persons who commit crimes similar to the crimes these potential criminals commit or intend 

to commit; the longer the sentence, the greater the cost that 

the would-be criminals face. Last is the perceived need for 

long sentences for the most serious crimes, in order to assuage the indignation that such crimes arouse in the general 

public. But a defendant’s youth and immaturity may influence consideration of each of these factors, because children

have diminished culpability, greater prospects for reform, 

and less ability to assess consequences than adults. See Miller 

v. Alabama, supra, 132 S. Ct. at 2464–65.

Murder is of course one of the most serious crimes, but 

murders vary in their gravity and in the information they 

reveal concerning the likelihood of recidivism by the murderer. In the case of a 16-year-old kid handed a gun by another kid and told to shoot a designated person with it, it is 

difficult to predict the likelihood of recidivism upon his release from prison or to assess the deterrent effect of imposing a long sentence on him, without additional information. 

A competent judicial analysis would require expert psychological analysis of the murderer and also of his milieu. Does 

he inhabit a community, a culture, in which murder is rouCase: 14-1944 Document: 54 Filed: 01/04/2016 Pages: 17
No. 14-1944 11

tine? Are other potential murderers likely to be warned off 

murder upon learning that a 16-year-old kid has been sentenced to life in prison, or are they more likely to think it a 

fluke? Is the length of a sentence a major factor in deterrence? Given that criminals tend to have high discount rates, 

meaning that they weight future events very lightly, does it 

matter greatly, so far as deterrence is concerned, whether a 

murderer such as McKinley is sentenced to 20 years in prison or 100 years? And here is where Miller plays a role. It 

does not forbid, but it expresses great skepticism concerning,

life sentences for juvenile murderers. Its categorical ban is 

limited to life sentences made mandatory by legislatures, but 

its concern that courts should consider in sentencing that 

“children are different” extends to discretionary life sentences and de facto life sentences, as in this case. A straw in the 

wind is that the Supreme Court vacated, for further consideration in light of Miller, three decisions upholding as an exercise of sentencing discretion juveniles’ sentences to life in 

prison with no possibility of parole: Blackwell v. California, 

133 S. Ct. 837 (2013); Mauricio v. California, 133 S. Ct. 524 

(2013); Guillen v. California, 133 S. Ct. 69 (2012).

Neither Miller—which obviously had no bearing on the 

original sentencing of McKinley since it hadn’t been decided 

yet—nor any of the questions raised in this opinion was addressed by the sentencing judge, who treated McKinley as if 

he were not 16 but 26 and as such obviously deserving of effectively a life sentence.

We therefore vacate the judgment of the district court 

and remand the case to that court with instructions to stay 

further consideration of McKinley’s habeas corpus claim 

pending his filing of a successive post-conviction petition in 

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12 No. 14-1944

state court seeking resentencing on the basis of Miller and 

the concerns expressed in this opinion regarding the sentencing proceeding that resulted in a 100-year prison sentence for a 16-year-old.

SO ORDERED

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No. 14-1944 13

RIPPLE, Circuit Judge, dissenting.

I agree with my colleagues that Mr. McKinley failed to 

raise his Eighth Amendment claim in state court. See Slip op. 

at 7. I disagree, however, that Miller v. Davis, 132 S. Ct. 2455 

(2012), provides a basis for relief for Mr. McKinley, that Miller excuses his default, and that Mr. McKinley should have 

the opportunity to return to the Illinois courts to pursue a 

third post-conviction petition for relief.

In Miller, the Supreme Court held that “mandatory life 

without parole for those under the age of 18 at the time of 

their crimes violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on 

‘cruel and unusual punishments.’” 132 S. Ct. at 2460. Although we have not answered the question whether Miller

should be applied retroactively to cases on collateral review, 

we held in Croft v. Williams, 773 F.3d 170, 171 (7th Cir. 2014), 

that, in cases like Mr. McKinley’s where the defendant was 

sentenced to a discretionary life sentence, “Miller is inapplicable.” 

The majority acknowledges Croft, but distinguishes it. 

According to the majority, Miller did something more than 

establish a rule that a juvenile cannot be sentenced to a mandatory life sentence; Miller also established that “children are 

different,” and, in sentencing them, state courts must 

acknowledge and give credence to this principle. Slip op. at 

4–5. Our decision in Croft, they continue, “did not discuss 

the ‘children are different’ passage in Miller,” and, therefore, 

does not bind this panel. Slip op. at 6. 

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Even if I could accept this characterization of Croft, the 

“‘children are different’ passage in Miller” does not provide 

a basis for returning Mr. McKinley to the state courts. As the 

majority acknowledges, the “children are different” statement in Miller has parallels “in earlier Supreme Court cases, 

notably in Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551 (2005),”1 Slip. op. at 

5, and also in Graham v. Florida, 130 S. Ct. 2011 (2010).2 “Children are different,” therefore, is not a new rule—either substantive or procedural—that justifies Mr. McKinley’s failure 

to raise his Eighth Amendment claim in the state courts. 

Moreover, Roper was handed down during the pendency 

of Mr. McKinley’s direct appeal, and Graham was handed 

down during the pendency of Mr. McKinley’s first petition 

for post-conviction relief (and prior to filing his motion for 

 

1 See Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551, 569–574 (2005) (discussing “[t]hree general differences between juveniles under 

18 and adults” which “render suspect any conclusion that a 

juvenile falls among the worst offenders” and concluding 

that ‘[t]he differences between juvenile and adult offenders 

are too marked and well understood to risk allowing a 

youthful person to receive the death penalty despite insufficient culpability”).

2 See Graham v. Florida, 130 S. Ct. 2011, 2026, 2030 (2010) 

(explaining that “Roper established that because juveniles 

have lessened culpability they are less deserving of the most 

severe punishments” and concluding that “the limited culpability of juvenile nonhomicide offenders[] and the severity 

of life without parole sentences all lead to the conclusion 

that the sentencing practice under consideration is cruel and 

unusual”).

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No. 14-1944 15

leave to file a successive state post-conviction petition). Consequently, the principle that forms the basis of the majority’s 

decision to return Mr. McKinley to the state courts was 

available to him during his first, second and third attempts 

at state-court relief. Mr. McKinley simply failed to invoke 

that principle. 

The majority believes, however, that returning 

Mr. McKinley to the courts of Illinois is appropriate because 

those courts “have had no opportunity to consider the bearing of Miller on the appropriateness of reconsidering McKinley’s sentence.” Slip op. at 9. My colleagues posit that the Illinois courts may be willing to entertain Mr. McKinley’s 

Eighth Amendment claim because, in People v. Davis, 6 

N.E.3d 709, 722 (Ill. 2014), “the Illinois Supreme Court found 

that Davis had satisfied this cause and prejudice test for his 

Miller claim because Miller was unavailable to [Davis] either 

on direct appeal or in his initial post-conviction proceedings, 

and the court held that under Illinois law it could be enforced retroactively on collateral review.” Slip op. at 8–9. The 

majority finds one remark in Davis “[p]articularly important”: “that Miller is retroactive because it changed substantive rather than procedural law.” Id. at 9.

As an initial matter, the Illinois courts have been deprived of this opportunity to consider the “children are different” argument only because Mr. McKinley failed to present it, not because the argument was unavailable to him. 

Furthermore, Davis provides little basis for concluding that 

the Illinois courts will look charitably on Mr. McKinley’s late 

arguments. Davis concerned the sentencing of a juvenile defender to a mandatory sentence of natural life imprisonment. 

Davis, 6 N.E.3d at 714 (“Because defendant was found guilty 

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of murdering more than one victim, section 5-8-

1(a)(1)(c)...required the trial court to sentence defendant to a 

term of natural life imprisonment, for which parole is not 

available....” (emphasis added)). Concluding that the defendant fell within the rule of Miller, the Supreme Court of 

Illinois went on to conclude that Miller should apply retroactively because it “places a particular class of persons covered 

by the statute—juveniles—constitutionally beyond the 

State’s power to punish with a particular category of punishment—mandatory sentences of natural life without parole.” Id. at 722. Because this new rule was substantive, the 

court continued, it “constitutes ‘cause’ because it was not 

available earlier to counsel and constitutes prejudice because 

it retroactively applies to defendant’s sentencing hearing.” 

Id. (citation omitted). 

The state supreme court, however, also noted the limitation of this substantive rule: “We observe that Miller does not 

invalidate the penalty of natural life without parole for multiple murderers, only its mandatory imposition on juveniles. 

A minor may still be sentenced to natural life imprisonment without parole so long as the sentence is at the trial court’s discretion 

rather than mandatory.” Id. at 723 (second emphasis added)

(citation omitted). Therefore, even if there were no procedural impediments to returning Mr. McKinley to state court, 

nothing in Davis suggests that, once there, Mr. McKinley 

could obtain the relief he seeks.

Although not directly stating so, today the majority both 

recognizes a new constitutional right and holds that it is 

cognizable on habeas review: the right of a juvenile not only 

to have the trial court explicitly consider age as a mitigating 

factor in sentencing, but also to have the sentencing court 

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No. 14-1944 17

consider specific information in that sentencing process. The 

majority also supplies the contours for this right. “A competent judicial analysis,” my colleagues instruct, “would require expert psychological analysis” of both the juvenile offender and “his milieu.” Slip op. at 10 (emphasis added). Sociological considerations also must enter the sentencing 

court’s analysis; it must consider both whether “other potential murderers [are] likely to be warned off murder upon 

learning that a 16-year-old kid has been sentenced to life in 

prison” and whether it “matter[s] greatly” to them “whether 

a murderer such as McKinley is sentence to 20 years or 100 

years.” Id. at 10–11.

The majority’s conception of sentencing for juvenile offenders may be a very salutary one. But it is not our prerogative to establish such standards on habeas review.

I therefore respectfully dissent.

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