Five justices, in an opinion by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, agreed that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment forbids such sentences as a categorical matter.
“A state need not guarantee the offender eventual release,” Justice Kennedy wrote, “but if it imposes the sentence of life, it must provide him or her with some realistic opportunity to obtain release before the end of that term.”
The ruling marked the first time that the court excluded an entire class of offenders from a given form of punishment outside the context of the death penalty.
An NYT editorial calls it, A New Standard on Decency and their Room for Debate blog is using this ruling to attempt to understand the Supreme Court
But I think it returns the spotlight to a bigger question: How can we prevent minors from committing such heinous acts of violence? How do we allow children to actually have a childhood?
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