Analyzing the Release of Juvenile Lifers: Is There a Miller Effect?

• Published date: 01 July 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/15412040231222425
• Author: Stuti S. Kokkalera,Wesley T. Smith,Beatriz Amalfi Wronski
• Date: 01 July 2024
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice

2024, Vol. 22(3) 147–166

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/15412040231222425

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Analyzing the Release of

Juvenile Lifers: Is There a Miller

Effect?

Stuti S. Kokkalera

1

, Wesley T. Smith

2

, and Beatriz Amalf‌iWronski

1

Abstract

In the 2012 decision in Miller v. Alabama, the U.S. Supreme Court directed states to provide a

“meaningful opportunity to obtain release”to juvenile lifers—one that acknowledges their lesser

culpability and rehabilitative potential. In the state examined, the parole board revised its decision-

making guidelines in 2014 by incorporating the Miller ruling. Logistic regression and survival

analyses were employed to examine parole outcomes. Hearings that took place in the post-Miller

period and the candidate’s rehabilitative status were associated with a higher likelihood of relea se.

A candidate’s rehabilitative efforts were also associated with the amount of time taken to decide

grant or denial of release, as were factors related to the candidate’s sentencing offense such as

time served and opposition at the parole hearing. Overall, the guidelines representing the Miller

ruling seem to have inf‌luenced the outcome as well as the speed at which decisions are reached by

the parole board.

Keywords

juvenile lifers, Miller v. Alabama, parole board, survival analysis

Introduction

A decade ago, the U.S. Supreme Court (“the Supreme Court”) prohibited the use of mandatory life

without the possibility of parole (LWOP) for juveniles convicted of homicide offenses (Miller v.

Alabama,2012). Previously, the Supreme Court held that the imposition of LWOP sentences for

youths convicted of non-homicide offenses is unconstitutional (Graham v. Florida,2010).

Specif‌ically, the decisions relied on adolescent developmental literature (see also Roper v.

Simmons,2005) to state that children and teenagers are less culpable than adults. In both Graham

(2010) and Miller (2012), the Supreme Court further stated the importance of a meaningful

opportunity for release—one that recognizes how adolescent development inf‌luences

1

Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX, USA

2

College of Applied Arts, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, USA

Corresponding Author:

Stuti S. Kokkalera, Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, Sam Houston State University College of Criminal

Justice, 816 17th Street, C205, Huntsville, TX 77341, USA.

Email: sxk078@shsu.edu

decision-making capacities at the time of the crime and a youth’s potential for rehabilitation

(Grisso & Kavanaugh, 2016;Marshall, 2019). Later in Montgomery v. Louisiana (2016), the

Supreme Court established that the Miller ruling would apply retroactively to individuals already

serving LWOP but left it to each state to decide what the meaningful opportunity would be. As a

result, states provide resentencing and/or parole board hearings as an opportunity for a meaningful

review of a juvenile lifer’s case (Kokkalera & Singer, 2019).

Between 2500 and 3000 of America’s convicted adolescents have been sentenced to LWOP

(Associated Press, 2017;Rovner, 2021). An estimated 8000 are serving life sentences with the

possibility of parole while an additional 2000 individuals have been sentenced to virtual or

functional life sentences, with or without parole eligibility (Nellis, 2017). Though the number of

juvenile defendants in criminal court has declined, these data are not routinely collected, and there

is no repository that contains the eventual sentences imposed on youth defendants (Nellis & King,

2009). In particular, states often do not delineate between the categories of juvenile life sentences

(Feld, 2018). In other words, a substantial segment of the incarcerated population has been

sentenced as teenagers with the opportunity for eventual release through state parole boards,

generally referred to as juvenile lifers.

In the state examined in the current study, the parole board conducts discretionary release

hearings for all individuals sentenced to life with the possibility of parole. Following Miller

(2012), the legislature removed LWOP as an option for juveniles and clarif‌ied that it is the

responsibility of the parole board to provide a meaningful opportunity for release. In 2014, the

parole board revised its decision-making guidelines acknowledging the Miller ruling and directed

its members to consider the mitigated culpability and rehabilitative efforts of all juvenile lifers—

irrespective of their original LWOP or parole eligible life sentence. Subsequent appellate rulings in

2015 provided the right to a state sponsored attorney for a juvenile lifer’s parole board hearing.

Therefore, the analyses in this study are restricted to juvenile lifers who received either life with

the possibility of parole or LWOP while under the age of 18.

This study is one of the f‌irst to examine the effect of Miller by drawing on data collected from

coded written parole decisions issued by one state parole board between 2005 and 2022 to explore

the inf‌luence of the revised guidelines on the likelihood of parole release.

1

Specif‌ically, the

analyses look at if there is a difference in the possibility of release pre- and post- the issuing of

Miller guidelines and requirement of attorney presence in the chosen state, accounting for a variety

of covariates. Additionally, the requirement to deeply acknowledge factors related to a juvenile

lifer’s reduced culpability and potential for rehabilitation could inf‌luence the time taken by the

parole board to arrive at a decision to grant or deny parole.

Recognizing Adolescence

In the last f‌ifteen years, the Supreme Court has changed the landscape on the sentencing of

juveniles in criminal court. First in Roper v. Simmons (2005), the Supreme Court held that the

death penalty is unconstitutional when applied to teenagers younger than 18 years of age per the

proportionality clause of the Eighth Amendment.

2

According to the majority, juveniles are

different from adults because of their “(1) lack of maturity and underdeveloped sense of re-

sponsibility; (2) susceptibility to negative inf‌luences and (3) their transitory personalities”(Roper,

2005, pp. 569–70).

The Roper decision inf‌luenced the Supreme Court’s reasoning in subsequent cases related to

sentencing of juveniles to LWOP. In Graham (2010), the majority opinion cited the mitigated

culpability of juveniles to rule that sentencing them to die in prison for a nonhomicide offense was

excessively punitive (Moriearty, 2017). While the Supreme Court did not prohibit states from

sentencing their juveniles to life in prison, it precluded them from determining that juveniles are

148 Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice 22(3)