July 28, 2016
New Fair Punishment Project report laments frequent and persistent use of juve LWOP in one Michigan county
In this post earlier this year, I noted the new initiative emerging from Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston for Race & Justice and its Criminal Justice Institute called the Fair Punishment Project (FPP). And the first big project of the FPP was this interesting report highlighting the history of Philadelphia frequently using life without parole sentences for juvenile murderers. Now, as reported via this blog posting, FPP has another notabe report on this topic focused on another region another northern state. Here are the details (and links) via the start of the blog posting:
A new report [focused on Michigan juvenile sentencing realities] highlights Wayne County’s frequent use of juvenile life without parole (JLWOP) sentences, calling the county an “extreme outlier” in its use of the punishment. The report also criticizes D.A. Worthy’s decision, which was announced Friday, to again seek life sentences for at least one out of three individuals currently serving this sentence.
The report urges District Attorney Kym Worthy to adopt a new approach to dealing with juveniles in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Montgomery v. Louisiana, which determined that the court’s prior decision barring mandatory life without parole sentences for youth must be applied retroactively, and that the punishment is only appropriate in the rarest of cases where a juvenile is determined to be “irreparably corrupt.”
The report, Juvenile Life Without Parole in Wayne County: Time to Join the Growing National Consensus?, notes that Wayne County is responsible for the highest number of juvenile life without parole sentences in the country now that Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams has recently announced that he will not be seeking LWOP sentences for any of the individuals previously sentenced to JLWOP there.
Currently there are more than 150 individuals serving JLWOP in Wayne County. While Wayne County has just 18% of the statewide population, it has at least 40% of the JLWOP sentences in the state of Michigan. Most incredibly, African-Americans are 39% of Wayne County’s population, but more than 90% of the individuals serving juvenile life with parole sentences from the county are Black. D.A. Worthy’s office obtained 27 JLWOP sentences during her tenure.
July 28, 2016 at 10:30 AM | Permalink