Prosecutor Decision-Making Following Juvenile Life Without Parole Sentencing Reform

• Published date: 01 October 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/15412040231173345
• Author: Leah Ouellet,Jennifer Wareham
• Date: 01 October 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice

2023, Vol. 21(4) 325–349

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/15412040231173345

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Prosecutor Decision-Making

Following Juvenile Life Without

Parole Sentencing Reform

Leah Ouellet

1

and Jennifer Wareham

2



Abstract

Prosecutors play an integral role in implementing sentencing reform measures in the United

States. Following the Supreme Court’s recent restrictions of the use of life without parole

sentences for juveniles (JLWOP), county prosecutors in Michigan were tasked with initiating

resentencing proceedings by f‌iling sentencing motions for individuals who were currently serving

JLWOP (so-called “juvenile lifers”). These motions intimated whether, following the changes in

sentencing policy, the prosecutor sought a new life without parole sentence or if they consented

to the default term-of-years sentence that would allow a juvenile lifer an opportunity for relea se.

In this paper, we analyze the best-f‌itting characteristics predicting prosecutor f‌iling decisions.

Guided by the focal concerns framework, we ultimately f‌ind evidence that prosecutors made f‌iling

decisions in ways that were consistent with their existing decision-making schema, relying on

characteristics that aligned with typical conceptions of blameworthiness and dangerousness.

Prosecutors’decisions were not associated with characteristics ref‌lecting the new guidance or

mitigative logics provided by Supreme Court’s rulings, such as age and immaturity. We conclude

that prosecutors’implementation of sentencing reform measures is constrained by the extent that

new policy parameters overlap with existing focal concerns and provide several policy re c-

ommendations for addressing this issue.

Keywords

juvenile lifers, life without parole, prosecutors, sentencing reform, focal concerns

Introduction

The use of life without the possibility of parole sentences for juveniles, or Juvenile Life Without

Parole (JLWOP), has taken center-stage in the discourse surrounding decarceration efforts in the

United States. Since 2010, the Supreme Court has gradually restricted the use of JLWOP, ruling

1

Human Development and Social Policy, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

2

Criminal Justice, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA

Corresponding Author:

Jennifer Wareham, Criminal Justice, Wayne State University, 3278 Faculty/Administration Building, 656 Walter Reuther

Mall, Detroit, MI 48202, USA.

Email: jwareham@wayne.edu

that it is a disproportionate and excessive sentence for “all but the rarest juvenile offender whose

crime ref‌lects irreparable corruption”(Montgomery v Louisiana, 2016: 720).Subsequently, 30

states and the District of Columbia banned the use of JLWOP altogether.The remaining states still

allow for its discretionary use but most were required to reconf‌igure their sentencing policies to

ensure compliance with the rulings (Mills et al., 2016;The Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of

Youth, 2022a). These reforms are predicated on evidence from developmental and social sciences

substantiating that youth are emotionally, cognitively, and neurologically different than fully

developed adults, and as such have a constitutional right to be considered less culpable and more

capable of reform than adults for the purposes of sentencing (Miller v Alabama, 2012). In fact, the

research cited in the ruling shows that youths’brains do not fully develop until their mid-twen ties

(e.g., Cauffman & Steinberg, 2000;Huttenlocher, 2002;Keating, 2004), compelling a growing

number of states to apply this logic to youth over the legal age of majority. For example, in Illinois

resentencing mechanisms for juvenile lifers (as this special legal class is called) now extend to

youth under twenty-one (Restore Justice, 2019) and, in California, the parole process developed

for JLWOP reform applies to youth under twenty-six (Canlione & Abrams, 2021).

Despite the prevalence of these sentencing reforms, little empirical scholarship has studied how

courts are implementing new JLWOP sentencing policies. This is especially relevant considering

that some states preserved the use of JLWOP

1

and are retroactively resentencing each juvenile lifer

case one-by-one—often decades after their conviction—given the Court’s intentionally vague

language letting each state determine who qualif‌ies as “irreparably corrupt”and how this dis-

tinction should be made (see Grisso & Kavanaugh, 2016). In these states, prosecutors play a

substantial role in determining how each case will be treated and how the resentencing process will

go. This is true for most sentencing processes, as prosecutors’ability to choose how harshly or

leniently to treat cases signif‌icantly shapes the criminal justice system’s response to crime

(Heumann & Loftin, 1979;Piehl & Bushway, 2007;Shermer & Johnson, 2010;Spohn et al., 1987;

Ulmer et al., 2007). Many scholars have observed that prosecutors’discretionary power over

criminal proceedings is so robust that the formal law sometimes seems to matter little (Davis,

2007;Tonry, 2017;Wright, 2017a), making prosecutor decision-making following JLWOP

sentencing reform a critical area of study, insofar as prosecutors’discretion has the ability to

potentially undermine the intended positive impacts of the Court’s sentencing reform mandate.

The current study seeks to explore prosecutor decision-making for juvenile lifer resentencing

cases in Michigan. Though sentencing outcomes are generally a shared product of discretion of

judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys (Lynch, 2019;Ulmer, 2012), the JLWOP resentencing

process in Michigan is initiated by prosecutor f‌iling decisions. Filing decisions determine which

juvenile lifer cases in Michigan are eligible for a shorter, term-of-years sentence or which cases

prosecutors feel are deserving of a new life without parole (LWOP) sentence. As such, prosecutors

determine the upper bound of the possible sentencing outcome available to the courtroom working

group (Bjerk, 2005;Eisenstein & Jacob, 1977;Wright, 2017a). Accordingly, this study is guided

by several questions: Which defendant and offense characteristics differentiate JLWOP cases

where prosecutors sought to pursue LWOP instead of a term-of-years sentence? How do these

characteristics align with what we know about how prosecutors make decisions? And, do these

characteristics align with the principles the Supreme Court suggested should inf‌luence sentencing

decisions?

Below, we present f‌indings from analysis of 188 juvenile lifer cases in Michigan to explore if

any juvenile lifer background traits, offense characteristics, or features of their carceral records

help predict whether prosecutors submitted a f‌iling decision seeking LWOP, as opposed to al-

lowing a reduced term-of-years sentence. We invoke the focal concerns perspective introduced by

Steffensmeier et al. (1998) as a lens to understand our f‌indings, as this framework integrates

theories regarding how courtroom actors balance the central interests and goals of sentencing in

326 Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice 21(4)