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Tuesday, February 03, 2009
13 year-olds in prison for life...and the Eighth Amendment
In today's Times, Adam Liptak has a very interesting piece detailing the situation in which a defendant was sentenced to life without parole for a crime he committed at age 13. A quick overview:
In 1989, someone raped a 72-year-old woman in Pensacola, Fla. Joe Sullivan was 13 at the time, and he admitted that he and two older friends had burglarized the woman’s home earlier that day. But he denied that he had returned to commit the rape. The victim testified that her assailant was “a colored boy” who “had kinky hair and he was quite black and he was small.” She said she “did not see him full in the face” and so would not recognize him by sight. But she recalled her attacker saying something like, “If you can’t identify me, I may not have to kill you.” At his trial, Mr. Sullivan was made to say those words several times. “It’s been six months,” the woman said on the witness stand. “It’s hard, but it does sound similar.” The trial lasted a day and ended in conviction. Then Judge Nicholas Geeker, of the circuit court in Escambia County, sentenced Mr. Sullivan to life without the possibility of parole.
Posted by Administrators on February 3, 2009 at 10:13 AM in Article Spotlight, Criminal Law, Dan Markel | Permalink
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Also see the case of Ashley Jones in the Northern District of Alabama. Her Sec. 2254 petition is, I believe, currently before the 11th Circuit.
She's represented by the Equal Justice Initiative.
Posted by: Matthew Reid Krell | Feb 3, 2009 7:02:09 PM
Simon, if the cert petition is correct, ie, that Sullivan was both 13 and mentally disabled, I would view that as sufficient to be conclusive in this case that he's not a fit interlocutor for punishment.
But I do also think that there's something important to the idea that even if Sullivan were emotionally mature and indeed an 18 or 19 year old when he committed this offense, his sentence and trial would strike me still as raising lots of questions about gross disproportionality and sufficient procedural due process, for reasons alluded to by Berman and Liptak. Brian, I'm looking forward to reading Rachel's piece. Thanks for the link.
Posted by: Dan Markel | Feb 3, 2009 1:50:24 PM
Also consider what the SCOTUS said about the differences between adults and children for the purposes of the death penalty in Roper v. Simmons (2005) (holding death penalty unconstitutional sentence for crime committed by someone under age 18). I've been involved in litigation trying to extend this case's reasoning to juvenile LWOP cases in general.
On the "death is different" argument (one we bump into often in our litigation), see this nice piece by Rachel Barkow:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1267266
I look forward to reading Dan's paper and the cert petition.
Posted by: Brian J. Foley | Feb 3, 2009 1:26:15 PM
The suggestion that a 13 year old satisfies that fitness requirement in the way that a mature adult does is difficult to accept.In the mine run of cases, certainly. But there are extraordinary cases. Is there not wisdom in Blackstone's observation that under English law at the time, "the capacity of doing ill, or contracting guilt, is not so much measured by years and days, as by the strength of the delinquent's understanding and judgment," and that while there was a strong presumption against finding one who was under fourteen (in the post's argot) "a fit interlocutor for the communicative nature of punishment," that presumption was rebuttable in extraordinary cases?
Posted by: Simon | Feb 3, 2009 1:10:12 PM
Thanks for the tip! The petition also notes that the record shows that Sullivan is mentally disabled. Depending on the nature and severity of his disability, his case would be bolstered further by my reading of Panetti and its fitness requirement for punishment.
Posted by: Dan Markel | Feb 3, 2009 10:35:26 AM
Trying again on that cert. petition link, with an html tag for the link...
Posted by: Anon | Feb 3, 2009 10:27:27 AM
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