Opposition to U.S. Youth Life Without Parole Sentences Drives Campaign for Reform

Interview with Joshua Rovner, director of Youth Justice with The Sentencing Project, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

juvenile sentencing

On July 28, 16-year-old Colt Gray was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for killing two students and two teachers in September 2024 at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, when he was 14 years old. The judge in the case ruled that the boy showed “permanent incorrigibility,” because of his online obsession with mass shooters.  Two days later his father, Colin Gray, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for providing his son the weapon used in the mass shooting.

From a time when juveniles under 18 were permitted to be executed in the U.S., the U.S. Supreme Court has in more recent years outlawed the death penalty and imposed other restrictions on punishment for minors. Life without parole is now the most serious sentence meted out to juveniles.

Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Josh Rovner, a senior research analyst with The Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, where he focuses on youthful offenders and works to keep juveniles out of the adult court system. Here he talks about several major recent court rulings regarding juvenile sentences, and what Colt Gray can expect as he begins his lifetime behind bars.

JOSH ROVNER: The clock generally starts on this with a case in 2005, which banned the death penalty for people under the age of 18. Prior to that ruling, there were about 176 people under the age of 18 who were executed for crimes committed while they were teenagers, while they were under the age of 18. And that ruling in 2005 overruled an earlier Supreme Court ruling that in fact held that it was constitutional to execute 16- and 17-year-olds, that people under 16 were not eligible for execution. So that ruling, the one in 2005 is Roper v. Simmons. And from there, the Supreme Court went about limiting other extreme sentencing. The next ruling that came was just five years later in a case out of Florida for a young person who had been sentenced to life without parole, keeping in mind that having banned the death penalty, life without parole was the most serious sentence that you could give to a person under the age of 18.

And that case out of Florida was about someone who had not committed murder, who had committed a very serious offense nevertheless. But the court said that because the most serious punishments need to be held for the most serious crimes and things that are not murder are not the most serious crimes, that that teenager couldn’t be sentenced to life without parole. That case was Graham v. Florida.

Now having banned execution, having limited life without parole to only the most serious offenses, the question then became who could receive life without parole? And that’s the case that gets the most attention here. And this is the Miller v. Alabama decision in 2012, where the Supreme Court did not ban life without parole for people under the age of 18 in the same way that they banned the death penalty for people under the age of 18. But they did say that life without parole could not be an automatic mandatory minimum for young people who were convicted of homicide.

There had to be a separate hearing in which factors involving the youth of the offender, their maturity, their home life, their disabilities, their specific involvement in the case, factors like this had to be considered before issuing a life without parole sentence. And that was really an important change because it understood that simply knowing what crime a young person was guilty of did not define who they were.

MELINDA TUHUS: Can a state rule out the sentence of life without parole for someone convicted of a crime before they’re 18? Or do the Supreme Court decisions make that impossible?

JOSH ROVNER: No, absolutely. Many states have in fact banned life without parole for juveniles. Several of them did that before the Miller decision and the other ones that I talked about. It was only a handful of states. But having given the guidance by the Supreme Court that you couldn’t have a mandatory minimum of life without parole, most states that went about reforming their sentencing strictures for people under 18 banned life without parole entirely. So today we have 28 states. A majority of states have banned life without parole for people under the age of 18. And there’s five other states that still have life without parole on their books, but have no one serving the term because the courts, given the opportunity to issue another sentence, did not issue life without parole.
MELINDA TUHUS: What about mental health for young people? And this kid obviously was very troubled and should have had mental healthcare and obviously shouldn’t have had a father who gave him a semi-automatic weapon. Is there any hope that they could get education or mental healthcare or any kind of socialization in prison in Georgia?
JOSH ROVNER: Listen, this all starts with the mistaken belief that you can try a 14-year-old as if they’re an adult, that you can send a 14-year-old to adult court based on the horrendous crime that he committed with the assistance of his father. Sending a teenager to the adult system means that they are not provided any of the things that the juvenile system offers them. So the psychologist, the psychiatrists in the system, the teachers in the system are ones who serve teenagers who are used to doing so.
And by charging a young person as if they’re an adult and then convicting them as if they’re an adult, you have said that that person is not eligible to receive any of the services of the youth justice system at all. So no, you are not doing anything to heal him.

For more information, visit The Sentencing Project at sentencingproject.org.

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