Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review
Abstract
The Solicited Content portion of this issue is devoted to exploring the future of juvenile justice. In the landmark 2010 decision Graham v. Florida, the Supreme Court held that sentencing juveniles to life in prison without the possibility of parole for crimes other than homicide is categorically forbidden as a violation of the Eighth Amendment. But, I predict, Graham will eventually come to stand for considerably more. It is the most significant juvenile justice case advancing children’s rights since the landmark In re Gault decision in 1967. In an unprecedented way, Graham paves the way toward a new jurisprudence based on what is special about children. This Article proceeds in four parts. Part I briefly describes the Court’s opinion in Graham and explains why the ruling has broad implications well beyond the Eighth Amendment and extremely long sentences for juveniles. Part II offers a review of the history of juvenile justice in the United States, in two sections. The first section discusses the goals and hopes of the Progressives who invented the concept of a juvenile court and played the leading role of spreading it throughout the United States. The second section reveals both the judicial and legislative reaction to juvenile court during the period from 1967 through 2010. Part III contains a brief discussion of all Supreme Court children’s rights cases decided during this same period, in order to place the Graham decision in context. Finally, in Part IV, the Article sets out the constitutional claims that follow from Graham, arguing that juveniles have a substantive constitutional right to be sentenced as juveniles and that mandatory sentencing schemes designed for adults may not be automatically imposed on juveniles without courts first conducting a sentencing hearing at which prosecutors must bear the burden of proving that the juvenile deserves the sentence.
First Page
457
Volume
47
Publication Date
2012
Recommended Citation
Guggenheim, Martin, "Graham v. Florida and a Juvenile’s Right to Age-Appropriate Sentencing" (2012). Faculty Articles. 517.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-articles/517
