U.S. Supreme Court
Oct. 16, 2015
Juvenile life sentences were always cruel and unusualdifferent
The Supreme Court just heard argument on whether it should retroactively apply a ruling that forbids mandatory life without parole for juveniles.
Frankie Guzman
Senior Director of Youth Justice at the National Center for Youth Law, where he leads a team of attorneys, policy advocates, and community organizers to transform youth justice systemsIn the 1990s, a national hysteria over the mythical child "super-predator" resulted in zero-tolerance policies in schools, increased prosecution of children as adults and the imposition of mandatory minimum sentences. At that time, Frankie was a teen in Oxnard, California. Raised in a poor, mostly immigrant community plagued by drugs and violence, Frankie experienced his parents' divorce and his family's subsequent homelessness at age 3, the life-imprisonment of his 16-year-old brother at...
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