Florida Justice Tough On Youths
Records show that Florida has handed out more life sentences to juveniles for non-murder crimes than have all other states combined. Report from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
Florida has sentenced 77 young men to spend their lives in prison, without any chance of release, based on non-homicide crimes they committed when they were 17 years old or younger, according to a preliminary study by Florida State University researchers. Six of those prisoners were 13 or 14 at the time of their crimes. A Herald-Tribune review of state records shows that some juveniles were given life without parole for as few as one or two convictions of non-homicide crimes.
Florida’s stance has generated protests from human rights groups and a lawsuit heading to the U.S. Supreme Court, which contends such sentences violate the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. But the state shows little sign of stopping judges from imposing life sentences on juveniles or providing a path to freedom for those already in prison. Lawmakers rejected a bill last spring that would have allowed juveniles in some non-homicide cases to eventually become eligible for parole.
The controversy in Florida stands out because it differs so greatly from policies elsewhere. Florida prisoners represent 69 percent of the 111 inmates reported nationally to be serving life without parole for their non-homicide juvenile crimes. Thirty-six states have no non-homicide juvenile lifers. Researchers are still awaiting data from six states, but they do not expect Florida’s standing to change. Other findings:
• Only Florida has sent juvenile criminals away for life for burglary, battery and carjacking.
• Forty-six juveniles in Florida were given life for armed robbery.
“Florida’s practice of sentencing juvenile offenders to life without parole for non-homicide cases is unique among American states,” said the preliminary research report directed by Paolo Annino, an FSU law professor who heads the school’s Public Interest Law Center. “It stands alone in its willingness to condemn young people for non-homicide offenses to life in prison, without a chance of a reassessment of their lives in some future time,” the report said.
The Florida juveniles have been caught in two converging criminal justice trends. The state has made it easier to try juveniles as adults at the same time it has increased the potential penalties for many crimes. Currently, Florida judges have the power to impose a life sentence without parole for more than 50 crimes. Many of the changes came in the 1990s, when Florida was hit with a highly publicized crime wave, including the killings of nine tourists in 1992 and 1993. A British tourist was killed by a group of juveniles at an Interstate 10 rest stop in 1993 in a robbery that drew international press attention. Since that time, Florida has sentenced 65 of the 77 non-homicide juvenile criminals to life without parole, according to the FSU researchers.
Other states are sending more juveniles into the adult prison system, too, although none of them have embraced the use of life without parole for non-homicide juvenile offenses as aggressively as Florida. “It’s a national problem that has just taken on very dramatic examples in Florida,” said Bryan Stevenson, the director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal aid group based in Montgomery, Ala., and a lawyer for one of the juvenile offenders in the court case. But Stevenson said the imposition of a sentence that should be reserved for unredeemable criminals is highly inappropriate for many minors given the large body of scientific evidence showing that young people are developmentally different from adults. “Our argument is not that these kids can’t be punished, can’t be sent to prison for a very long time,” Stevenson said. “But to make a judgment that their sentences can never be reviewed for possible release is inconsistent with how we deal with kids in virtually every other context.”
Florida’s stance against young criminals has become the focal point of a potentially landmark U.S. Supreme Court case. In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty for juveniles was unconstitutional and that opinion — which underscored the physical and psychological differences between a juvenile and an adult — has provided much of the legal basis for the challenge of Florida’s life-without-parole sentences for juveniles. Florida’s harsh sentencing for juvenile crimes has drawn criticism from a wide spectrum of groups, including the American Bar Association, Amnesty International, the NAACP and the American Psychiatric Association, which have all filed briefs in the case. A group of former juvenile criminals, including an actor, writers, a former federal prosecutor, a business executive and former U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson, R-Wyo., have joined the appeal, pointing out that they were able to rehabilitate their lives despite committing serious crimes as teenagers.
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