1. The new ultra-conservative Supreme Court abandons the more muscular understanding of Miller/Montgomery which demanded that a judge find a juvenile is “permanently incorrigible” before sentencing a juvenile to life without the possibility of parole. supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf…
2. The court guts 100,000s of hours of work by lawyers like me and others to end the barbarous practice of sentencing children to LWOP. It says that so long as a judge has discretion to sentence a child to less than LWOP, the constitution is satisfied.
3. This is pretty deep in the weeds, but in some ways today’s ruling by Kavanaugh is the fault of Justice Kagan whose poorly written opinion in Miller v. Alabama (as opposed to Kennedy’s broader Montgomery) makes such a retrogression easy.
4. Despite today’s gutting of Montgomery by the new ultra-conservative Supreme Court majority, LWOP sentences for juveniles are on their way out. ~25 states have passed laws abolishing JLWOP since Miller. And another ~5 have no one serving it.
5. Even some very conservative states have abandoned it like North Dakota, Utah, Arkansas, West Virginia. And in many (though not all) states where laws to abolish it have passed, it has not been a partisan issue – laws have passed near-unanimously.
6. And in states like Pennsylvania and Louisiana that have retained JLWOP, new reform District Attorneys have pledged not to seek it like Jason Williams in NOLA and Larry Krasner in Philadelphia.
7. In essence, today’s opinion removes a major constitutional hurdle to handing out a punishment that has nevertheless become vestigial because it is morally offensive. In that sense it shrinks the meaning and purpose of the 8th Amendment.
8. It should be a major siren call to those who litigate excessive punishment issues that state constitutional 8th amendment analogues are almost certainly friendly territory on which to litigate than the federal constitution’s 8th Amendment itself.
9. (I have been working on a project in anticipation of this SCOTUS abandonment of the 8th amendment. It turns out many state constitutions have texts and histories that may be friendlier to claims about cruel punishment.)
10. The main impact of today’s opinion is to ensure that the battle to abolish JLWOP will return to the states where we are winning a hard slog in legislature after legislature (and to some degree in state court under state constitutions).
11. But the ruling will likely make that work harder, more expensive, more time consuming, more partisan.
12. And it will mean that a core ~500 or so juveniles will remain in prison for life. Many will likely die there, especially in places like AL, MS, SC, TN, AZ, and rural LA where resistance to these changes has been fiercest.
13. If you care about this issue, I urge you to get involved in your own state. Bills to abolish JLWOP are pending in Louisiana, North Carolina, Illinois, among other states. Other states that seem ripe: New Mexico, New Hampshire, etc.
14. Stomach churning irony in today’s ruling.

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More from @davidminpdx

20 Apr
1. I’m going to start a thread as a way of documenting the use of the repulsive euphemism “officer involved shooting” as a way of documenting its use and shaming the reporters and news outlets that use it.
2. In April 2021 @WKBN, ostensibly a news outlet, used the euphemism “officer-involved shooting.”
3. In April 2021 @KOINNews, ostensibly a news outlet, used the euphemism “officer-involved shooting.” koin.com/news/crime/sus…
Read 9 tweets
10 Apr
1. Here I am what 10 paragraphs into this truly garbage fear-mongering piece of bullshit “journalism” and it hasn’t mentioned: the DA tried this for a year — a year when violent crime was up in many places — and in FELL in Baltimore.
2. It’s also yet to mention this new study that shows that PRECISELY the “tough on crime” behavior that the article *assumes would make crime go down ACTUALLY MAKES CRIME, INCLUDING VIOLENT CRIME GO UP. bostonglobe.com/2021/03/29/met…
3. The entire frame of the article is bad and wrong AND CONTRADICTED BY SCIENCE. This piece is akin to climate change denialism. It’s not journalism grounded in objective reality, it’s journalism grounded in false and ignorant bias.
Read 4 tweets
9 Apr
1. The desire to denigrate the “defund the police” movement – an important goal of reactionary-liberal media-commentators who enjoy punching left – erases the massive value and deep insight that "defund the police" protests last summer brought to the fore.
2. Prior to last summer police reform mostly focused on improved training, systems to hold officers accountable, using new technologies (like body cams), etc. i.e. *things that were budget neutral or even increased police funding and didn’t shrink the scope of policing.
3. The insight of the “defund the police” movement is a recognition that police play too large a role in our understanding of and approach to public safety. And reforms must go beyond “reformist reforms” and instead that *shrink the scope* of policing and/or reduce budget,
Read 11 tweets
8 Apr
1. So much of the focus on progressive prosecutors is about the “front-end” – i.e. new cases. But if you want to see what a progressive prosecutor can do on the “back-end” – i.e. bringing justice to old cases – look to New Orleans DA Jason Williams. thelensnola.org/2021/04/08/new…
2. Once you’re convicted, the legal system imposes so many barriers to getting your conviction overturned, even when your trial was clearly unjust – time bars, procedural rules, etc. It stacks the deck against you in so many ways.
3. Often innocent people, people convicted via misconduct/ineffective counsel or cases where racism infected trial cannot get relief, not because their substantive claim is insufficient, but because of a procedural bar preventing their substantive claim from being adjudicated.
Read 7 tweets
5 Apr
This piece by @ryanlcooper @TheWeek is easily the best piece I’ve read on the relationship between progressive prosecutors, policing and the pandemic-year’s violent crime spike. theweek.com/articles/97515…
As the article points out, reactionary forces blame progressive DAs like Larry Krasner for a nation-wide spike in shootings. But that’s preposterous. Krasner prosecutes more than 98% of shootings. The problem is police – who solve fewer than 20% of them. theweek.com/articles/97515…
This article smartly rejects the typical ruse that almost all crime journalists fall for: police unions blame “reform” for every spike in serious crime to distract from the fact that police are so bad at what they do that they rarely solve serious crime. theweek.com/articles/97515…
Read 4 tweets
1 Apr
1. Yesterday I watched a pretty remarkable hearing in New Orleans where thirteen men convicted by nonunanimous juries, some decades ago, were resentenced, mostly to time served. If I were a criminal law professor, I would assign it to students. nola.com/news/courts/ar…
2. It was unlike anything I had ever seen in a courtroom. In most courtrooms, one rarely sees people, defendants or otherwise, take responsibility for the harm that they caused. Our system rarely incentivizes that. But this was different.
3. All of the men were convicted by nonunanimous juries – juries that the Supreme Court has said were “racist” and violate the 6th Amendment. But that didn’t mean they were legally entitled to be retried. Law in this area is complex and “finality” is often preferred over justice.
Read 11 tweets

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