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Page Number: 14.0

10 

MILLER v. ALABAMA 

Opinion of the Court 

ment.  Graham, 560 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 21) (quoting 
Roper,  543  U. S.,  at  571).    Similarly,  incapacitation  could
not  support  the  life-without-parole  sentence  in  Graham: 
Deciding that a “juvenile offender forever will be a danger 
to  society”  would  require  “mak[ing]  a  judgment  that  [he] 
is  incorrigible”—but  “ ‘incorrigibility  is  inconsistent  with 
youth.’ ”  560  U. S.,  at  ___  (slip  op.,  at  22)  (quoting  Work-
man  v.  Commonwealth,  429  S. W.  2d  374,  378  (Ky.  App. 
1968)).  And for the same reason, rehabilitation could not 
justify  that  sentence.  Life  without  parole  “forswears
altogether the rehabilitative ideal.”  Graham, 560 U. S., at 
___  (slip  op.,  at  23).    It  reflects  “an  irrevocable  judgment 
about  [an  offender’s]  value  and  place  in  society,”  at  odds
with a child’s capacity for change.  Ibid. 

Graham  concluded  from  this  analysis  that  life-without-
parole  sentences,  like  capital  punishment,  may  violate
the Eighth Amendment when imposed on children.  To be 
sure, Graham’s flat ban on life without parole applied only 
to  nonhomicide  crimes,  and  the  Court  took  care  to  distin-
guish  those  offenses  from  murder,  based  on  both  moral 
culpability  and  consequential  harm.  See  id.,  at  ___  (slip 
op., at 18).  But none of what it said about children—about 
their  distinctive  (and  transitory)  mental  traits  and  en-
vironmental  vulnerabilities—is  crime-specific. 
Those 
features are evident in the same way, and to the same de- 
gree, when (as in both cases here) a botched robbery turns
into a killing.  So Graham’s reasoning implicates any life-
without-parole sentence imposed on a juvenile, even as its
categorical bar relates only to nonhomicide offenses.
  Most fundamentally, Graham insists that youth matters
in  determining  the  appropriateness  of  a  lifetime  of  incar-
ceration  without  the  possibility  of  parole.    In  the  circum-
stances  there,  juvenile  status  precluded  a  life-without-
parole sentence, even though an adult could receive it for a
similar  crime.  And  in  other  contexts  as  well,  the  charac-
teristics of youth, and the way they weaken rationales for