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TALLAHASSEE, Fla. There are just over 100 people in the world serving life sentences without the possibility of parole for crimes committed as juveniles in which no one was killed. All are in the U.S. And 77 of them are in Florida.
On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear appeals from two such offenders: Joe Sullivan, who raped a woman when he was 13, and Terrance Graham, who committed armed burglary at 16. They claim the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment forbids sentencing them to die in prison for crimes other than homicide.
Outside the context of the death penalty, the Supreme Court has generally let states decide for themselves what punishments fit what crimes. But the court barred executions of juvenile offenders in 2005 by a 5-4 vote, saying juveniles are immature, irresponsible, susceptible to peer pressure and often capable of change.
A ruling extending that reasoning beyond capital cases "could be the Brown v. Board of Education of juvenile law," said Paolo Annino, the director of the Children's Advocacy Clinic at Florida State University's law school.
Judges, legislators and prosecutors in Florida agree the state takes an exceptionally tough line on juvenile crime. But they are deeply divided about when life sentences without the possibility of release are warranted.
"Sometimes a 15-year-old has a tremendous appreciation for right and wrong," said state Rep. William Snyder, a Republican and chair of the House's Criminal and Civil Justice Policy Council. "I think it would be wrong for the Supreme Court to say that it was patently illegal or improper to send a youthful offender to life without parole. At a certain point, juveniles cross the line, and they have to be treated as adults and punished as adults."
A retired Florida appeals court judge, John Blue, differs.
"To lock them up forever seems a little barbaric to me," Blue said. "It just seems to me that if you are going to put someone who is 13 or 14 or 15 or 16 or 17 into prison, you ought to leave them some hope."
Several factors - legal, historical and cultural - help to account for Florida's disproportionate number of juvenile lifers. The state's attorney general, Bill McCollum, explained the roots of the state's approach in the first paragraph of his brief in Graham's case.
"By the 1990s, violent juvenile crime rates had reached unprecedented high levels throughout the nation," he wrote. "Florida's problem was particularly dire, compromising the safety of residents, visitors and international tourists, and threatening the state's bedrock tourism industry." Nine foreign tourists were killed over 11 months in 1992 and 1993, one of them by a 14-year-old.
In response, the state moved more juveniles into adult courts, increased sentences and eliminated parole for capital crimes.
Thomas Petersen, a semi retired judge in Miami who spent a decade hearing cases in juvenile court, said the state's reaction was out of proportion to the problem and that it had lately failed to take account of changed circumstances.
"Back in the 1990s, there were dire predictions about teenage super-predators, particularly in Florida," Petersen said. "Florida, probably more than other places because of that rash of crimes, overreacted. It was a hysterical reaction.
"People still go around saying things have never been worse," he added. "But violent juvenile crime has gone down even as the juvenile population has grown."
The state's brief in Graham's case said juvenile crime fell 30percent in the decade ended in 2004. It attributed the drop to its tough approach.
Sullivan, now 34, had committed a string of crimes by the time he was charged with raping a 72-year-old woman after a burglary in 1989 in Pensacola. Graham, 22, was sentenced to a year in jail and three years of probation for a 2003 robbery of a barbecue restaurant in Jacksonville, during which an accomplice beat the manager with a steel bar. Graham was sentenced to life in 2005 for violating his probation by committing a home invasion robbery with two others at age 17.
