Along with his older co-defendant, 16-year-old Bobby Bostic in 1995 robbed at gunpoint six people who were delivering Christmas gifts to a needy family in St. Louis. He later helped to force a woman into her car and drove off with her. Two of the victims suffered minor physical injuries during the incident, but no one else was physically harmed. Bostic was charged with 18 non-homicide criminal offenses. The court sentenced him to 241 years, making him ineligible for parole until he is 112 years old. The judge told him, "Bobby Bostic, you will die in the Department of Corrections."
However, in Graham v. Florida (560 U.S. 48, 2010), the U.S. Supreme Court held that sentences of life without parole for juvenile non-homicide offenses violate the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. While Bostic did not receive a sentence of life without parole, his sentence is functionally life without parole. Relying in part on an APA amicus brief, the court in Graham noted the diminished moral culpability of juvenile offenders, citing their lack of maturity, underdeveloped sense of responsibility, and susceptibility to negative influences and peer pressure. Because of this, the court ruled that a state must give "some meaningful opportunity to obtain release based on demonstrated maturity and rehabilitation."
Though Graham prohibited sentencing a juvenile to a single sentence of life without parole for a non-homicide offense, it did not address sentencing for multiple non-homicide offenses. As a result, can a state, like Missouri, bypass the Graham ruling by imposing aggregate sentences? And at what point do aggregated sentences then become the equivalent of life without parole?
The state supreme courts of California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey, Ohio and Washington have all ruled that lengthy prison sentences that stretch beyond a juvenile's life expectancy are essentially life without parole sentences. In State v. Null (836 N.W. 2d 41, 2013), for example, the Iowa court considered a sentence of just 52.5 years as one not meeting the "meaningful opportunity for release" requirement of Graham. But the courts are split and Bostic's sentence would be permissible in some states. At what point—that is, after how many years—does an aggregate sentence such as Bostic's become the functional equivalent of life without parole? Though the U.S. Supreme Court recently denied Bostic's petition seeking an answer to this question, lower courts will likely continue to address whether a term-of-years sentence can violate Graham and, if so, at what point.
Data show that juveniles' cognitive capacities are not fully developed and that juveniles are less able to think about the long-term consequence of their behavior. Moreover, most juveniles who commit crimes during adolescence will desist from offending when they become adults. Sentencing juveniles to terms of years far beyond their life expectancy does not provide any real opportunity for them to rehabilitate and redeem themselves. Reporting on the large-scale Pathways to Desistance Study (2014), which followed juvenile offenders for seven years after conviction, Temple University psychologist and adolescence expert Laurence Steinberg, PhD, stated that "neither the severity nor the frequency of adolescent offending does a good job of predicting who will desist."
Instead, the process of psychosocial maturation—simply growing up—appears to be the best deterrent for committing future crimes.
"Judicial Notebook" is a project of APA Div. 9 (Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues).
