Opinion ID: 3207057
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Recent Juvenile Sentencing Jurisprudence

Text: Over the past decade, the United States Supreme Court has recognized that juveniles are constitutionally different than adults with respect to the law’s harshest criminal sentences. Beginning with its decision in Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551, 568 (2005), in which it held that the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments bar -9- the imposition of the death penalty on any individual who was a juvenile at the time the capital crime was committed, the Supreme Court has emphasized juvenile offenders’ “diminished culpability” and greater likelihood of rehabilitation. Building on the rationale of Roper, the Supreme Court held in Graham “that for a juvenile offender who did not commit homicide the Eighth Amendment forbids the sentence of life without parole.” Graham, 560 U.S. at 74. As the Supreme Court subsequently explained, Graham insists that a defendant’s “youth matters in determining the appropriateness of a lifetime of incarceration without the possibility of parole” because “the characteristics of youth” serve to “weaken rationales for punishment.” Miller, 132 S. Ct. at 2465, 2466. Two years after deciding Graham, the Supreme Court held in Miller that “the Eighth Amendment forbids a sentencing scheme that mandates life in prison without possibility of parole for juvenile offenders.” Id. at 2469. The Supreme Court explained that its decision mandates that a sentencer consider an offender’s “youth and attendant characteristics” before “imposing a particular penalty.” Id. at 2471. “Taken together, Graham and Miller establish that ‘children are different’; that ‘youth matters for purposes of meting out the law’s most serious punishments’; and that ‘a judge or jury must have the opportunity to consider mitigating circumstances before imposing the harshest possible penalty for - 10 - juveniles.’ ” Horsley, 160 So. 3d at 399 (quoting Miller, 132 S. Ct. at 2469, 2471, 2475). In the aftermath of Graham and Miller, this Court has confronted several issues that have required us to consider how those cases affect juvenile sentencing in Florida. In Falcon, this Court held that the Supreme Court’s decision in Miller applies retroactively to juvenile offenders whose convictions and sentences were already final at the time Miller was decided. Falcon, 162 So. 3d at 956. In Horsley, this Court held that the appropriate remedy for any juvenile offender whose sentence is unconstitutional under Miller is to apply chapter 2014-220, Laws of Florida—legislation enacted by the Florida Legislature in 2014 to bring Florida’s sentencing laws into compliance with the Graham and Miller decisions. Horsley, 160 So. 3d at 409. This Court has also considered several juvenile sentencing cases that implicate Graham. In Henry, this Court concluded that Graham prohibits sentencing juvenile nonhomicide offenders to aggregate prison terms that ensure those offenders will be imprisoned without obtaining a meaningful opportunity to obtain release, based on their maturity and rehabilitation, and that resentencing pursuant to chapter 2014-220, Laws of Florida, is the proper remedy for any sentence that violates Graham. Henry, 175 So. 3d at 680. Similarly, in Gridine v. State, this Court established that for a defendant convicted of attempted murder, a - 11 - seventy-year sentence is unconstitutional because it fails to provide a “meaningful opportunity for early release.” 175 So. 3d 672, 674-75 (Fla. 2015). And, in Lawton v. State, this Court held that the Supreme Court’s ban on sentencing juveniles to life without parole for nonhomicide offenses is unqualified, even if the juvenile committed a homicide during the same criminal episode. 181 So. 3d 452 (Fla. 2015). This Court concluded that Graham’s categorical rule leaves no room for the “homicide-case exception” previously recognized by some Florida district courts. Id. at 453. The unifying theme of these unanimous decisions has been our recognition of what “flows straightforwardly from [the Supreme Court’s] precedents: specifically, the principle of Roper, Graham, and [the Supreme Court’s] individualized sentencing cases that youth matters for purposes of meting out the law’s most serious punishments.” Miller, 132 S. Ct. at 2471. The “most serious punishments” at issue in our recent juvenile sentencing cases have all involved sentences without the possibility of parole, which is true of most sentences in Florida since the mid-1980s and of all sentences, including those for first-degree murder, since the mid-1990s. But even though the Legislature has eliminated parole in Florida, there are still inmates—those sentenced before its elimination—who remain eligible for - 12 - parole consideration.4 And for those parole-eligible inmates who were juveniles at the time of the crime, the question remains whether the principles articulated in Graham and Miller have any application. The State argues that Atwell’s sentence is not unconstitutional because Miller unambiguously applies only to mandatorily imposed life without parole sentences. Because Atwell’s sentence is not “without parole,” the State asserts, it is not unconstitutional under Miller. To the State, it is quite literally as simple as that. However, throughout this Court’s post-Graham and Miller juvenile sentencing jurisprudence, we have consistently followed the spirit of Graham and Miller rather than a narrow, literal interpretation. For example, in Henry, this Court stated that “[i]n light of the United States Supreme Court’s long-held and consistent view that juveniles are different—with respect to prison sentences that are lawfully imposable on adults convicted for the same criminal offenses—we conclude that, when tried as an adult, the specific sentence that a juvenile 4. Although Florida’s sentencing statutes no longer provide for parole, there are still approximately 4,626 inmates, sentenced before its elimination, who remain eligible for parole consideration as of July 1, 2014. See Fla. Comm’n on Offender Review 2014 Annual Report 6, 8, available at https://www.fcor.state.fl.us/docs/reports/FCORannualreport201314.pdf. In the fiscal year 2013-2014, only 23 of the approximately 4,626 eligible inmates, half a percent, were granted parole. Id. at 6. - 13 - nonhomicide offender receives for committing a given offense is not dispositive as to whether the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment is implicated.” Henry, 175 So. 3d at 680. This Court then recognized, as the Supreme Court itself had done, that “[c]ategorical rules tend to be imperfect” and accordingly determined that the Graham Court had “no intention of limiting its new categorical rule to sentences denominated under the exclusive term of ‘life in prison.’ ” Id. at 679-80. Other state supreme courts have interpreted Miller similarly to how this Court has interpreted Graham, noting that “nothing [the United States Supreme Court] has said [about children] is ‘crime-specific,’ suggesting the natural concomitant that what it said is not punishment-specific either.” State v. Lyle, 854 N.W.2d 378, 399 (Iowa 2014) (holding that all mandatory minimum sentences of imprisonment for juvenile offenders are unconstitutional). The Iowa Supreme Court, in fact, confronted a similar challenge in State v. Ragland, 836 N.W.2d 107 (Iowa 2013). There, the defendant was mandatorily sentenced to life in prison without parole. After Miller was issued, the Governor of Iowa commuted Ragland’s sentence, along with the sentences of thirty-seven other juvenile offenders, to life sentences with the possibility of parole in sixty years. Id. at 110-11. The Iowa Supreme Court concluded that this action was unconstitutional and reasoned that “[f]or all practical purposes, the same - 14 - motivation behind the mandates of Miller applies to the commuted sentence in this case or any sentence that is the practical equivalent to life without parole.” Id. at 121 (emphasis added). The Iowa Supreme Court further noted that “it is important that the spirit of the law not be lost in the application of the law.” Id. Therefore, the Iowa Supreme Court remanded the Ragland case for resentencing in accordance with Miller. Id. at 122. Though it did not reference the Iowa case, this Court applied similar reasoning in its Henry and Gridine holdings, concluding that lengthy term-of-years sentences can implicate Graham as unconstitutional for juveniles if those sentences fail to provide for the critical mechanism—a meaningful opportunity for release— at the heart of the Graham holding. Indeed, we did so even though those sentences were not technically labeled as “life in prison.” See Henry, 175 So. 3d at 680; Gridine, 175 So. 3d at 674-75. This Court also acknowledged in Horsley that Miller stands for the proposition that “youth matters for purposes of meting out the law’s most serious punishments” and that the Eighth Amendment categorically prohibits certain punishments without “considering a juvenile’s ‘lessened culpability’ and greater ‘capacity for change.’ ” Horsley, 160 So. 3d at 398-99 (quoting Miller, 132 S. Ct at 2460). It is thus evident from our case law that this Court has—and must—look beyond the exact sentence denominated as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court - 15 - and examine the practical implications of the juvenile’s sentence, in the spirit of the Supreme Court’s juvenile sentencing jurisprudence. We accordingly apply those principles to the sentence in this case.