Crime & punishment: the Supreme Court recently struck down mandatory sentences of life without parole for juveniles. The ruling signals a shift in how the law treats young offenders.

• Author: Smith, Patricia
• Position: Cover story

One night when she was 15, Rebecca Falcon got drunk and made the worst decision of her life. 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, Florida. 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 cabdriver lay dying of a gunshot to the head. Each of the teenagers later said the other had done the shooting.

A jury found Falcon guilty of murder, though it never sorted out precisely what happened. Under Florida law, she was automatically sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

But in June the Supreme Court ruled that mandatory sentences of life without parole for juvenile offenders are unconstitutional. The Court said they violate the Eighth Amendment ban on "cruel and unusual punishments." The ruling has opened a small window of hope for Falcon and prisoners like her.

"We'll establish her rehabilitation and ask for a fairer sentence," says her lawyer, Paolo Annino, director of the Children's Advocacy Clinic at Florida State University.

The Supreme Court ruling is the strongest indication yet of a shift in how the American judicial system views violent juvenile offenders--who, until recently, were likely to be tried and punished as adults (see Key Dates, p. 10).

Falcon, now 30, has been imprisoned at the Lowell Correctional Institution in Ocala, Florida, for the past 13 years. She wakes up early, goes to her prison job, then attends classes after dinner. Every night, she sleeps in a huge room with 85 other inmates.

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 map). The Supreme Court decision will lead to resentencing hearings for most of these prisoners--some of them now well into middle age--in more than two dozen states.

WHAT THE COURT SAID

The 5-to-4 ruling in June in the cases of Miller v. Alabama and Jackson v. Hobbs did not outlaw all life sentences without parole for juveniles. It only barred states from mandating such sentences for any crimes, including murder.

But the majority opinion by Justice Elena Kagan noted that given "children's diminished culpability and heightened capacity for change, we think appropriate occasions for sentencing juveniles to this harshest possible penalty will be uncommon."

Kent Scheidegger of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a victims' rights group, disagrees with the ruling. He thinks it means justice won't be served in the most horrific cases. "There are some truly horrible crimes committed by 17-year-olds, and those crimes deserve life without parole," he says.

But in recent years the courts have increasingly viewed juveniles in a different light from adults who commit violent crimes. The change is a result of several factors: a drop-off in the crime wave that led states to move violent juveniles into the adult system beginning in the late 1980s; new scientific research on adolescent brain development; and the frustration of juvenile court judges with mandatory sentencing.

All this, experts say, is opening a new chapter in juvenile justice.

"What we are seeing is a very stark and important rethinking of how we...