Cruel to Be Kind

Campus Report ^ | August 27, 2009 | Brittany Fortier

[bs9021]

Cruel to Be Kind?

by: Brittany Fortier, August 27, 2009

One of the more controversial trends in the criminal justice system today is the lobbying effort currently underway to abolish life-without-parole for juvenile offenders. Anti-incarceration activists seek to extend the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roper v. Simmons, which prohibited the death penalty in the cases for juveniles.

If they are successful, the “cruel and unusual punishment” analysis used in Roper will be applied to life-without-parole sentences. A panel of legal experts discussed this issue at the Heritage Foundation on August 17, 2009.

Paul Wallace, Chief of Appeals at the Delaware Department of Justice and former prosecutor, said that “there’s no statement in any public policy discussion that can chill that discussion more quickly than when someone, especially a lawyer, says [that something is] unconstitutional.”

Wallace says that advocates are mistaken when they claim that juveniles can never constitutionally be given life without parole, or that the constitution requires that a court take youth into consideration before it can be constitutionally imposed.

“It’s just not true,” he argued.

According to Wallace, historical common law precedent held that “anyone who had the mental ability to be criminally responsible was considered an adult and could be punished as an adult.”

He further explained that the Eighth Amendment’s “cruel and unusual punishment” clause was used to “ensure that there wasn’t torture,” adding that the clause was “meant to talk about the method of punishment. It ensured that the United States did not import into our jurisprudence things like [pillory], drawing and quartering, those types of things.”

The clause was never used to look at the length of a prison sentence until the Supreme Court ruling in the case of Weems v. United States in 1910....

[divine_moment_of_facts]

Sometimes being Kind is actually Cruel.

[I Buried My Guns]

I'd agree to the abolition of life-without-parole for juvenile offenders if it was replace by the death penalty.

I do not sympathize with murderers simply because they are under 18.

I'm an avid mountain biker. I search my city for possible trails and venues to ride. I happened upon an area near a railroad trestle that gave me the creeps for some reason. It turns out a young gang member and his friends brutally gang-raped murdered two young girls there several years earlier. When the scumbag was finally put to death, (because this IS Texas, after all) the media portrayed him as a misunderstood youth. However, I read the details of his crime and minor or not, he was truly deserving of death.

Justice: served.