The court's conservatives said that a judge need not make a finding of "permanent incorrigibility" before sentencing a juvenile offender to life without parole.

Transcript

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

The Supreme Court's new conservative majority has made a U-turn in its attitude towards juvenile offenders. For two decades, it made decisions establishing more leniency for juveniles. Today, it ruled that sentencing judges do not have to make a finding of, quote, "permanent incorrigibility" prior to sentencing a juvenile to life in prison without the possibility of parole. NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg reports.

NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: Over the past two decades, the law on sentencing juvenile offenders has changed significantly. The Supreme Court, primed by research that shows the brains of kids are not fully developed and that they're likely to lack impulse control, issued a half dozen opinions holding that juveniles are less culpable than adults for their acts and that because of that, some of the harshest punishments for acts committed by children are unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment. But most of those decisions were written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, who retired in 2018. The justice who replaced Kennedy, Trump-appointee Brett Kavanaugh, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, also appointed by Trump, teamed up today to change the direction of the court's decisions on punishment and the possibility of rehabilitation and parole for juvenile murderers.

The case from Mississippi involved Brett Jones, who had just turned 15 when he stabbed his grandfather to death during a fight. When the case was argued last November, his lawyer, David Shapiro, told the court that Jones had killed his abusive grandfather for the most immature of reasons - a teenage infatuation with a girl.

DAVID SHAPIRO: I absolutely believe that Brett substantively is not permanently incorrigible. His grandmother, the wife of the victim, testified on his behalf. A correctional officer spoke of his rehabilitation.

TOTENBERG: But today, by a 6-to-3 vote, the Supreme Court ruled that as long as the judge who sentenced Jones considered his youth, that was enough. Writing for the court majority, Justice Kavanaugh said the court's prior decisions do not require a finding of incorrigibility or an explanation of the factors that led the judge to impose the penalty of life without the possibility of parole. Donald Ayer served as a prosecutor and deputy attorney general in past Republican administrations. He sees today's decision as alarmingly inconsistent with prior decisions, rulings that said life without parole should be a rare sentence for juveniles.

DONALD AYER: It's like the wind was blowing one away and now the wind is blowing in the opposite direction.

TOTENBERG: What happens next will likely not be in the Supreme Court. Twenty-five states ban life without parole for juveniles entirely, and six more states do not have anyone serving that sentence for a crime committed when a juvenile. But 19 states do allow life without parole for juvenile murderers.

Dissenting from today's ruling, Justice Sonia Sotomayor accused the majority of, quote, "contortions" and "distortions" in an attempt to circumvent the court's prior decisions. Our previous ruling, she said, require that a sentencer must decide whether the juvenile offender before it is a child whose crimes reflect transient immaturity or whether he's one of those rare children whose crimes reflect irreparable corruption. They require that most children be spared from punishments that give no chance for a fulfillment outside prison walls and no hope. And she quoted Brett Jones, now 31, as saying at a resentencing hearing, I've pretty much taken every avenue that I could possibly take to rehabilitate myself. I can't change what I've done. I can just try to show I've become a grown man.

Kathryn Miller of Cardozo Law School says today's ruling will make it more difficult for juvenile offenders like Jones to show judges that they deserve another chance at freedom somewhere down the road. In other words, a sentence that contemplates not the guarantee, but the possibility of parole.

KATHRYN MILLER: It is going to be much harder to convince judges that this type of evidence is relevant. A lot of times, these judges really want to still focus on the facts of the crime. They're not interested in the rehabilitative narrative.

TOTENBERG: The Supreme Court, too, seems uninterested in the rehabilitation narrative. Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.