Irreparably Corrupt and Permanently Incorrigible: Georgia's Procedures for Sentencing Children to Die in Prison

• Publication year: 2020

Irreparably Corrupt and Permanently Incorrigible: Georgia's Procedures for Sentencing Children to Die in Prison

Rachel Ness-Maddox

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Irreparably Corrupt and Permanently Incorrigible: Georgia's Procedures for Sentencing Children to Die in Prison^*

I. Introduction

Right now, two teenagers live in Georgia prisons, knowing they will be incarcerated for the rest of their lives.¹ Countless adults are serving sentences of life without the possibility of parole (LWOP) for crimes they, too, committed when they were teenagers. It is difficult to find in officially-reported data adults serving sentences they received for crimes they committed while children. This is because, once the two teenagers specifically noted in the Georgia Department of Corrections' Inmate Statistical Profile² turn twenty, they will move to the next data bracket for imprisoned people between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine, just as all the adults before them have.³ There is no readily-attainable public record of how many people in that row and beyond have been in prison since they were teenagers. People like that simply fade into anonymity—unless an appeal from their conviction is significant enough to result in a published opinion by the Georgia Court of Appeals or Georgia Supreme Court.

This is the case for Dakota White and Dantazias Raines. Since being sentenced to serve their lives in prison, both have aged from teenagers into young adults. They no longer occupy the first row of the page four

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table in the Inmate Statistical Profile but have instead grown into the next bracket for young adults sentenced to LWOP. Unlike most of the other 225 young men on that row, White and Raines have made long-lasting marks on Georgia's juvenile criminal procedure via their appeals to the Georgia Supreme Court. In those cases, in January 2020 and July 2020, the Georgia Supreme Court established rules and published decisions ensuring that White⁴ and Raines⁵ will stay in prison forever.

Surely White and Raines (and the two anonymous teenagers the Department of Corrections acknowledges in the Inmate Statistical Profile) deserve to live and die in prison, though. They must represent the worst of young criminals in Georgia. Of course our criminal justice system is designed to ensure that only "the rarest of juvenile offenders . . . whose crimes reflect permanent incorrigibility" are sentenced as they were.⁶ Well, sort of. This Article examines the procedures that the Supreme Court of the United States and the Supreme Court of Georgia require for the State to permanently imprison individuals based on convictions they received for crimes committed while minors.

Currently, the State must prove a child is "irreparabl[y] corrupt[]" before he can be sentenced to serve his life in prison.⁷ At face value, this appears to be a strict standard. It must mean that only the most violent minors, those who cannot be expected to grow beyond their apparent depravity, will never hope for a life outside of prison. This Article analyzes that standard—how it came into existence, how it has been interpreted federally and at the state level, and what the immediate outcomes have been—to determine its true functionality.

Over the years, the United States Supreme Court has interpreted the United States Constitution⁸ in ways that significantly limit the State's ability to punish juveniles for criminal actions. First, the Court interpreted the Eighth Amendment⁹ to mean defendants could not be sentenced to death for crimes committed under the age of sixteen.¹⁰ Then, the Court expanded that ruling to mean individuals could not be sentenced to death for crimes they committed when they were under the

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age of eighteen.¹¹ More recently, the Court ruled that homicide is the only crime for which people under the age of eighteen may be sentenced to life without parole.¹²

A few years later, the Court narrowed that rule even more. Now, when LWOP is on the table, sentencing entities must make specific determinations to decide whether a defendant is eligible to serve life without the possibility of parole for a crime committed while a child.¹³ White and Raines, both seventeen when they committed their respective crimes, were sentenced under the most recent iteration of that test.¹⁴

Most of this Article focuses on more recent rulings on juvenile LWOP sentencing, first tracking federal Supreme Court precedent to the Court's current stance, then reviewing Georgia Supreme Court precedent based on those decisions. The second portion of this Article analyzes White v. State¹⁵ and Raines v. State,¹⁶ the Georgia Supreme Court's most recent decisions regarding juvenile LWOP. This analysis exposes several procedural gaps through which defendants may fall and thus be more easily sentenced to spend their entire adult lives in prison. Specifically, the Georgia Supreme Court's rulings in White and Raines indicate a pattern through which sentencing laws designed for children tend to expand beyond their originally intended meaning.

The final third of this Article critiques the appropriateness of the current standards for sentencing children to live in prison and offers feasible alternatives to juvenile LWOP. The Article ultimately concludes that juvenile life without parole must either be abolished entirely, as the Georgia General Assembly could easily do, or must be regulated by the legislature so the procedures to meet the irreparable corruption standard function uniformly and comply with modern understandings of juvenile psychology.

II. Overview of United States Supreme Court Rulings on Juvenile Sentencing

A. Abolition of Juvenile Death Penalty as Groundwork for Juvenile

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LWOP Litigation

Before discussing the issue of juveniles serving life without parole, an overview of death sentencing for juvenile is in order. In 1988—not even forty years ago—the Supreme Court determined that executing children under the age of sixteen "would offend civilized standards of decency" and was unconstitutional.¹⁷

Almost thirty years later, in 2005, the Court decided Roper v. Simmons¹⁸ and held that "[t]he Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments¹⁹ forbid imposition of the death penalty on offenders who were under the age of [eighteen] when their crimes were committed."²⁰ This holding hinged on combined constitutional and psychological theories that reappeared in later juvenile LWOP decisions. First, the Court noted that any logic behind the death penalty relies on a finding of extreme culpability, and even the most criminally-minded teenager is often too immature to develop that level of responsibility.²¹ Along the lines of culpability, the Court discussed how children are psychologically underdeveloped, noting that "[i]t is difficult even for expert psychologists to differentiate between the juvenile offender whose crime reflects . . . transient immaturity, and the rare juvenile offender whose crime reflects irreparable corruption."²² For these reasons, the Eighth Amendment bars the execution of individuals for crimes committed under the age of eighteen.²³

Given the psychological deficiencies juveniles have by virtue of being children, the Court determined that permitting the execution of minors constituted "disproportionate punishment" for purposes of the Eighth Amendment and, thus, was unconstitutional.²⁴ That holding rested on the theory that the Constitution bars punishment for those who cannot be reasonably held accountable for all their actions.²⁵ The Court also noted that the United States was a significant outlier in international

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law by permitting the execution of those convicted while minors.²⁶ In short, the Court introduced a new interpretation of the Constitution that complied with modern understandings of proportionality and juvenile psychology, resulting in the United States refusing to "stand[] alone in a world that has turned its face against the juvenile death penalty."²⁷

B. Juvenile LWOP litigation Post-Roper

1. Irreparably Corrupt: The Miller v. Alabama Standard

Before 2005, the major issue in juvenile justice was the death penalty. It was only after Roper that litigation in federal courts regarding juvenile life without parole began in earnest. From the beginning of juvenile LWOP litigation, courts have relied on death penalty jurisprudence in determining whether a life sentence is appropriate. Graham v. Florida²⁸ was the first major Supreme Court decision regarding juvenile LWOP post-Roper. In that 2010 case, the Court held that children cannot be sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes other than homicide.²⁹ Relying on the same psychology-based logic as in Roper, the Court noted that the theory of retribution simply does not apply to child offenders because children cannot develop the "personal culpability" necessary to render life without parole proportional to the offender's responsibility.³⁰ Furthermore, because LWOP is permanent and the most extreme sentence a juvenile may receive, the Court determined LWOP is for juveniles what the death penalty is for adults: the ultimate punishment that must be approached with extreme caution.³¹

After limiting juvenile LWOP to defendants convicted of homicide, the Court in Miller v. Alabama³² determined that states cannot make life sentences for children mandatory by statute.³³ In reaching that decision, the Court relied on the Graham logic that a life sentence for a child is analogous to death sentence for an adult, both in terms of the sentence's permanence and the findings required to satisfy the Constitution before

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imposing the sentence.³⁴ Referring back to the concepts of culpability and juvenile psychology that influenced the holdings in Graham and Roper, the Court stated that sentencers cannot impose "a State's most severe penalties on juvenile offenders . . . as though they were not children."³⁵ Because death cannot be a mandatory sentence for adults,³⁶ and because children are unique within the...