Locked away forever: almost 10,000 Americans are serving life sentences for crimes they committed before they turned 18.

• Author: Liptak, Adam
• Position: NATIONAL

One night when she was just 15, Rebecca Falcon got drunk and made the decision that derailed her life. Now, she is serving a life sentence without parole at the Lowell Correctional Institution in Ocala, Fla. Looking back, Falcon faults her choice of friends. "I was like a magnet for the wrong crowd," she says.

At the time, Falcon was living with her grandmother in Panama City, Fla. On Nov. 19, 1997, upset over an ex-boyfriend, she downed a large amount of whiskey and hailed a cab with an 18-year-old friend. He had a gun and, within minutes, the cab driver was shot in the head. The driver, Richard Todd Phillips, 25, died several days later. Each of the teenagers later said the other had done the shooting.

Falcon's jury found her guilty of murder, though it never did sort out precisely what happened. "It broke my heart," says Steven Sharp, the jury's foreman. "As tough as it is, based on the crime, I think it's appropriate. It's terrible to put a 15-year-old behind bars forever."

The U.S. is one of the few countries that does that. About 9,700 American prisoners are serving life sentences for crimes they committed before age 18. More than a fifth have no chance for parole. Life without parole is available for juvenile criminals in about a dozen countries, but a recent report by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International found only 12 juveniles--in Israel, South Africa, and Tanzania--serving such sentences. In the U.S., more than 2,200 people are serving life without parole for crimes they committed before turning 18. More than 350 are 15 or younger.

CRUEL & UNUSUAL?

Juvenile criminals are serving life terms (with or without the possibility of parole) in at least 48 states, according to a survey by The New York Times, and their numbers have increased sharply in the past decade. Of those imprisoned in 2001, 95 percent were male and 55 percent were black.

Is such punishment fair for juvenile offenders? In March 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty for crimes committed by people under 18 violates the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits "cruel and unusual punishments." That might have surprised the people who ratified the Amendment in 1791, many of whom found such executions neither cruel nor unusual. But the Court said that the meaning of the Amendment changes with "evolving standards of decency." Their decision has convinced prosecutors and activists that the next legal battleground in the U.S. will be over life sentences for juveniles.

'UNFORMED' PERSONALITIES

The Supreme Court ruled that youths under 18 who commit terrible crimes are less blameworthy than adults, at least for purposes of the death penalty: They are less mature, more susceptible to peer pressure, and their personalities are unformed. "Even a heinous crime committed by a juvenile," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy concluded, is not "evidence of irretrievably depraved character."

Most of those youthful qualities were evident in Falcon, who had trouble fitting in at school. She...