Supreme Court to weigh life term for juveniles convicted of murder

— -- WASHINGTON -- Evan Miller of Alabama was 14 when he and an accomplice robbed a neighbor, bludgeoned him with a baseball bat and burned his trailer.

A Lawrence County, Ala., jury convicted him of murder for killing Cole Cannon, 52. Miller received the mandatory sentence under state law -- life in prison without parole.

The Miller case and a similar case out of Arkansas will be debated before the Supreme Court on Tuesday. The court will decide later whether sentencing juveniles as young as 14 violates the Constitution's Eighth Amendment barring "cruel and unusual punishments."

Earlier Supreme Court decisions have barred the death penalty for juveniles. Justices also have ruled that juveniles can't be sentenced to life in prison for crimes in which no one was killed.

In the Arkansas case, Kuntrell Jackson was 14 when he took part in a 1999 video-store robbery in which the clerk was shot and killed by someone else. He and Miller turned to the Supreme Court after exhausting their appeals at the state level.

Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala. will represent Miller and Jackson in Tuesday's oral arguments. Alabama Solicitor General John Neiman Jr. and Arkansas Assistant Attorney General Kent Holt will argue the states' case.

The Alabama attorney general's office says prosecutors seek life without parole -- as many state legislatures require them to -- only when adolescents commit particularly brutal crimes.

Earlier Supreme Court rulings were based on a "national consensus and widely shared moral principles" that sentencing juveniles to death or life in prison when no one was killed is excessive, the state said in court papers.

"This case presents no similar consensus and no compelling argument that these punishments are contrary to prevailing values," Alabama officials said. "These sentences are a reasonable solution to a difficult problem, and the values underlying the Constitution should allow them to stand."

Stevenson, Randall Susskind and Alicia D'Addario, all with the Equal Justice Initiative, argued in court papers that juveniles convicted of murder deserve the chance to eventually leave prison because their brains and moral awareness weren't fully developed when they committed their crimes.

They noted that previous Supreme Court rulings have said "youth and its attendant features have a critical role to play in determining an adolescent's culpability."

"To wholly disregard a 14-year-old offender's age and age-related characteristics in sentencing him to be imprisoned for the remainder of his existence makes a mockery of this fundamental precept," they wrote.

Adolescents are impulsive risk-takers whose crimes are rooted in the circumstances in which they're raised, the attorneys wrote.

For instance, Miller was physically abused by his father, raised in extreme poverty and tried to kill himself at age 5, they wrote. At the time he killed Cannon, he had been drinking and was high on marijuana.

The American Bar Association, the American Psychological Association, Amnesty International and other groups have filed legal briefs supporting Miller and Jackson.

Twenty states, the territory of Guam and the National Organization of Victims of Juvenile Lifers have written the court supporting the states.