Locked away forever: the Supreme Court is considering whether life without parole for teens who've committed murder is a "cruel and unusual" punishment.

• Author: Smith, Patricia
• Position: NATIONAL

Evan Miller was 14 years old when he committed the crime that landed him in prison for life. In a trailer park in northern in 2003, Miller, another teen, and a 52-year-old neighbor spent an evening smoking pot and playing drinking games. By the end of the night, Miller and the other teen had beaten the neighbor with a baseball bat, stolen $350 and the man's baseball card collection, and set his mobile home on fire. The man died of smoke inhalation.

Miller was tried as an adult, convicted of murder, and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Since 2008, he's been at St. Clair Correctional Facility in Springville, Alabama. As the law currently stands, Miller, now 22, will remain behind bars until he dies.

The Supreme Court will hear Miller's case this year, along with a similar one involving a 14-year-old from Arkansas. The Court will consider whether the Eighth Amendment's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment" should prohibit sentences of life without parole for juveniles involved in killings. A ruling is expected this spring.

The United States is the only country that routinely uses life-without-parole sentences for juvenile offenders. Human rights groups say more than 2,000 prisoners in the U.S. are serving life without parole for crimes committed when they were 17 or younger (see graph, page 11).

That includes about 70 serving sentences of life without parole for homicides committed when they were 14 or younger, according to the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit legal group in Alabama.

Judges, lawmakers, and prosecutors are divided about whether sentencing juveniles to life without parole is ever appropriate.

Bryan Stevenson, the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, believes it's not.

"To say to any child of 13 that you are only fit to die in prison is cruel," he says. "It can't be reconciled with what we know about the nature of children."

But Kent Scheidegger of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a victims' rights group in California, sees things differently.

"It certainly is fair in some cases--we're talking about the worst cases," Scheidegger says. "Age is something to take into consideration in sentencing, but that one factor should not trump everything else."

No Death Penalty for Juveniles

Over the last decade, the Supreme Court has whittled away at the two harshest sentences available in the criminal justice system: the death penalty and life without parole (see timeline, above). In 2005, the Court ruled...