Life Terms for Teen Killers: Neither Cruel Nor Unusual

Townhall.com ^ | July 17, 2012 | Jeff Jacoby

[Kaslin]

IN A COLORADO TOWN in 1996, Verle Mangum bludgeoned Janet and Jennifer Davis to death.

Janet, a 42-year-old nurse's aide, had come home from work and discovered Mangum, then 17, having sex with her 11-year-old daughter, Jennifer. When Janet reached for the phone to call the police, Mangum picked up a baseball bat and fatally bashed her with it. He then used the bat to murder Jennifer as she cowered in the bedroom.

A jury eventually convicted Mangum of both murders. Under Colorado law he was given a mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole. In 2007, when the convictions were upheld on appeal, the prosecutor expressed relief. "This was one of the most heinous crimes in the history of our community," District Attorney Pete Hautzinger told the Grand Junction (Col.) Free Press. "It is very gratifying to know for sure that he will be staying in prison for the rest of his life."

But that's no longer a sure thing -- not after the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling in Miller v. Alabama last month that the Eighth Amendment's ban on "cruel and unusual punishments" does not allow states to mandate life without parole for murderers who were minors when they committed their crime. Mangum, like at least 2,000 other juvenile killers serving mandatory life terms, including more than 60 in Massachusetts, will now have to be resentenced. The families of murder victims nationwide have now lost the reassurance that their loved ones' killers would never be turned loose. Survivors may be forced to testify all over again. There is no telling how many monsters like Mangum will end up serving less -- perhaps much less -- than the life sentence the judge and jury imposed.

Hautzinger, outraged by their decision, said its impact would be "inhuman." And when Mitt Romney held a town-hall meeting in Grand Junction last week, the DA showed up and asked him to comment on what the Supreme Court had done. But Romney sidestepped. He said only that he would "look at the particular case," and that he favors "swift and severe punishment" for serious crimes.

What Romney should have said was that the court's ruling was illogical and indefensible -- a textbook case of justices turning their personal preferences into constitutional commands.

There is nothing uncommon about laws requiring life without parole for juvenile murderers, so such punishment can hardly be barred by the Eighth Amendment. As Justice Elena Kagan's majority opinion concedes, legislators in 28 states plus the federal government have enacted laws mandating that penalty. Courts have meted it out thousands of times. Liberals may disapprove of mandatory "true life," but it plainly isn't unusual. By definition, therefore, it isn't "cruel and unusual."

Miller marks the third time in recent years that the Supreme Court has invoked "evolving standards of decency" to rationalize a new constitutional barrier to punishing minors convicted of terrible crimes. In Roper v. Simmons 2005), the court outlawed the death penalty for any criminal who was under 18 at the time of his offense. At the time, the majority observed that "life imprisonment without the possibility of parole" would remain an option. Yet now, in what the dissent calls "classic bait and switch," the court tells states they may not insist on that option.

In Graham v. Florida (2010), meanwhile, the court ruled that juvenile offenders could not be sentenced to a lifetime behind bars for any crime but homicide, no matter how violent. (After all, said the court, "there is a line between homicide and other serious violent offenses.") But now five justices declare that mandatory life sentences are unconstitutional for youthful killers too. And it's only a matter of time, they hint broadly, until even discretionary life-without-parole is struck down.

In all these cases, the court has leaned heavily on social science and psychiatry. Since adolescents tend by nature to be more reckless and impulsive than adults, the majority argues, they cannot be assigned quite the same "moral culpability" for their deeds.

As a general rule, that's obvious; it's why the law distinguishes between adults and minors in the first place. But why should policymakers be prohibited from recognizing exceptions to the rule, and treating juveniles as adults in certain extreme circumstances?

Suppose, to go back to that terrible day in 1996, a 17-year-old had burst in on Mangum and prevented him from murdering Janet and Jennifer Davis. If public officials then wished to reward that teen for his life-saving courage, no one would suggest that the honor be diminished on the grounds that the hero's adolescent brain didn't fully grasp the significance of his valiant behavior. Most Americans would regard it as similarly unreasonable to suggest that any juvenile who acts with criminal depravity must be too mentally immature to understand what he is doing.

Supreme Court justices may personally disagree, of course. But to turn their disagreement into a constitutional imperative? To wrap their subjective views in the authority of the Eighth Amendment? That is inexcusable, and Mitt Romney ought to say so.

[joe fonebone]

resentence is easy to do and justify...

age of victim was 11...

average life expectancy of her was, say, 82 years..

82 minus 11 equals 71 years..

Judge: You have taken 71 years away from this person. Since we cannot give her back those 71 years, we are going to take them away from you. You are sentenced to serve a minimum of 71 years in the state penitentiary.

Not a life sentence, but totally justified. I would like to see an appeals court touch this justification.

[JimRed]

Janet, a 42-year-old nurse's aide, had come home from work and discovered Mangum, then 17, having sex with raping her 11-year-old daughter... Because an 11 year old can not legally consent.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Jacoby has it exactly right. I'm mindful of the Catholic Catechism teaching that says that the state can refrain from imposing the death penalty "if they can render one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm" via, for instance, a life sentence without possibility of parole.

IF that kind of life sentence is not available, then the death penalty may be the only way to effectively defend human lives against the unjust aggressor.

So the lack of real life imprisonment as a sentencing option, re-imposes the necessity of capital punishment.

I read somewhere that every year, ~500 people are murdered by people who have already had a previous conviction for murder --- in California alone. I have never been able to fdind the source for that statistic (could any body help me out here?) -- but I have little reason to doubt that it's true. It turns out that the lenient state is a major enabler of murder.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Jacoby has it exactly right. I'm mindful of the Catholic Catechism teaching that says that the state can refrain from imposing the death penalty "if they can render one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm" via, for instance, a life sentence without possibility of parole.

IF that kind of life sentence is not available, then the death penalty may be the only way to effectively defend human lives against the unjust aggressor.

So the lack of real life imprisonment as a sentencing option, re-imposes the necessity of capital punishment.

I read somewhere that every year, ~500 people are murdered by people who have already had a previous conviction for murder --- in California alone. I have never been able to fdind the source for that statistic (could any body help me out here?) -- but I have little reason to doubt that it's true. It turns out that the lenient state is a major enabler of murder.

[Tax-chick]

... render one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm ...

Even if a genuine life sentence is enforceable, we are not able to prevent inmates from doing harm to others. Although I understand that one reason for religious opposition to the death penalty is that it deprives the executed person of (further) opportunity to repent, the failure to execute a criminal not only allows him to continue harming others, but also allows him to pile up sin upon sin in his own soul, hardening him against ever repenting.

I'm reminded of a case in the biography of Ven. Father McGivney, founder of the Knights of Columbus. A young man had killed another in a whiskey-fueled fight and was sentenced to death. In prison, deprived of alcohol, counseled by Father McGivney, he repented, forgave those who had harmed him in life, and died, we may presume, secure in the state of grace. If he'd remained in prison for years, subject to abuse by staff and other inmates, likely provided with bootleg whiskey, who knows what other crimes he would have committed and what harm, perhaps permanent, he might have done to his own soul.

[Karliner]

Sounds like some of my old patients and yeah I'm injured for life.< antiSocial workers are forced to relelease these little scum back in to the world but worse is those kids with no morals rarely caught or do something like this. Few have morals and many we used to call( hush hush) graduating sociopaths.

No consequences sadly. Maybe they'll get "justice " in jail I mean, correrectional facilities.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Both your points are of interest: first, that a lifer can still harm other inmates and guards; second, that an upcoming execution may yield a more secure repentance than a lifetime in a morally corrupting prison.

I have always been, in balance, against the death penalty, for one thing because we live under a regime which does not have an objective respect for life (e.g. OK's the killing of millions of you-know-who) and therefore does not possess the moral authority to impose capital punishment justly.

However I think a reasonable case can be made that if a person already serving a life sentence commits murder, aggravated assault or rape while the life sentence, he ought to be executed, because he has demonstrated that the life sentence has not in his case been effective in making society secure from his aggression.

I am mindful that the man executed next to Jesus said to the other crucified man, "Don't you fear God, since you are under the same sentence? We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong." Jesus does not contradict him ("No, you don't deserve this, nobody deserves this.") This suggests that the man's acceptance of his own painful death as being just, finds approval from Jesus.

Incidentally, the movie "Dead Man Walking" strongly pulled me towards supporting the death penalty. It's pretty clear that the murderer, Poncelet, doesn't face up to the reality of what he did until he's literally strapped to the gurney. It's only at that point that he asks forgiveness from the parents of those he killed.

[Houmatt]

Recently in Alabama, a 17-year-old black kid literally gunned down a white woman in the street while her daughter watched. He was in a car speeding through a residential neighborhood and nearly ran over the woman's dog. When the woman shouted for them to slow down, it instead came to a halt and the boy exited the vehicle with a gun, shooting the woman three times in the chest before getting back in and driving away.

The tragedy of this is thanks to SCOTUS, this soulless monster will never get a suitable punishment for his crime. Instead, assuming he is tried as an adult, he will go to prison and become eligible for parole in periodic intervals, presenting the possibility of him killing again if he were to achieve freedom.

May God help us all.

[Kaslin]

A 17 year old that drives a car and commits a horrendous crime like this criminal did is old enough to be charged as an adult and get the maximum sentence for his crime. Whether it is the death penalty or life without any chance of parole.

[Tax-chick]

... we live under a regime which does not have an objective respect for life (e.g. OK's the killing of millions of you-know-who) and therefore does not possess the moral authority to impose capital punishment justly.

I agree, and that's a key point for me, too. Additionally, and this also applies to life-without-parole, we can't know who might have a dramatic conversion and never do serious wrong again, vs. who might reoffend again and again. Even if we tried to judge each individual case, as the parole system does to some extent, people can be very deceptive, and we shouldn't trust our ability to tell the sincere from the sociopaths.

There's no easy solution. However, I don't think we can write off the possibility that in some cases - though probably not for manslaughter in a drunken brawl - swift execution is the best thing for everyone, including the one executed.

[Lurker]

"if they can render one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm"

On this issue the Catholic Church is full of crap. There's absolutely no way to do this, even in prison. It is literally impossible to make a human being "incapable" of doing harm.

[Houmatt]

I agree. But due to two separate rulings from the United States Supreme Court, they cannot.

[Mrs. Don-o]

The Catholic Church's point is not, as you suppose, to make a man incapable of doing evil in an absolute sense. Tha would require intentionally disabling his brain (which is itself forbidden).

"Incapable" is meant in a practical sense: disarmed, confined,and physically restrained.

Because some criminals remain aggressive and dangerous while in prison, presenting over the long term a severe threat to fellow prisoners and to guards and other staff, the death penalty is not forbidden in the Catechism or other Catholic teaching documents.

A reasonable person could look it up.

As for who is full of crap, let the careful reader decide.

[Lurker]

So all we have to do is put them in cages wearing leg chains and straight jackets and feed them through tubes for 30 or 40 years. Oh and keep them in solitary confinement while we are at it.

Like I said....