Another State Restricts Life Sentences for Young Adults

Nearly 600 Michiganders who expected to die in prison will now get a shot at a different outcome. 

Michigan’s supreme court ruled last week that it is unconstitutional to impose an automatic sentence of life without the possibility of parole on young adults up to age 20, saying they deserve an individual judgment specific to their circumstances. This protection was already in place for youth up to age 18, but the justices ruled that the cutoff should be higher, pointing to scientific research that shows people’s brain development continues into their 20s. 

The decision adds to the wave of states that are restricting life sentences for young adults. The Washington State Supreme Court issued the nation’s first ruling extending these same protections to youth under age 21 in 2021. Since then, Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., have gone further, guaranteeing a ‘second look’ to anyone who was sentenced into their early 20s. In blurring the bright line traditionally set at 18, these states are redefining the age until which people are presumed to be redeemable in the eyes of the law and shielding more people from extreme punishments. 

“In this, in the recognition that more people should be looked at and have the opportunity to at least present evidence of their rehabilitation and their ability for redemption and reform, I think Michigan is in the forefront,” said Deborah LaBelle, director of the Juvenile Life Without Parole initiative for the ACLU of Michigan. “I think it will ripple through the rest of the country in terms of how we look at youth.”

This decision also underscores this supreme court’s progressive approach to sentencing issues, as Democratic justices have banded together to deliver repeat wins for defendants and incarcerated people. In many of these rulings, including last week’s, they’ve stressed language in Michigan’s state constitution that bans “cruel or unusual punishments,” a subtle difference from the federal ban on “cruel and unusual punishments” that makes it easier for litigants to argue that their rights have been violated. (Other state constitutions have similar language.) 

Now, hundreds of people who’d been automatically sentenced to life without parole will face resentencing. Courts will consider them on a case-by-case basis and may reimpose a sentence of life without parole, or else switch to another sentence. Anyone who is eventually released because of their resentencing will have spent at least 25 years in prison, often more.

LaBelle, who has long worked to reduce life without parole sentences in Michigan, says that her team had reached out to the families of these ‘lifers’ in anticipation of the ruling, and that many have responded with “overwhelming joy” since last week. “Everyone knows that there’s no guarantees, but for the first time, there’s hope that they’ll be seen,” she says.

The cases at issue last week involved Andrew Czarnecki and Montario Taylor, who were convicted of first-degree murder for crimes they committed at ages 19 and 20, respectively. Michigan law provides that anyone convicted of first-degree murder, as well as a few other offenses such as felony murder, must be automatically sentenced to life without parole. The plaintiffs argued this is a cruel punishment to impose on youths.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a series of decisions that began in 2005, struck down laws that mandate a sentence of life without parole on people under 18. The court said minors are “constitutionally different from adults,” and so they can only be sentenced to die in prison if a judge makes an individualized judgment that they have an “irretrievably depraved character” that “reflects irreparable corruption;” basically, a judge has to say that they are beyond redemption. Today, more than two dozen states have just fully abolished life without parole for children, not even allowing a judge to consider it, but such legislation hasn’t succeeded in Michigan. 

Still, in 2022, Michigan’s supreme court took another route to going further than its federal counterpart in protecting young people against extreme sentencing. In a case known as Parks, the state court ruled that defendants who were already 18 at the time of their crime deserve the same protection as minors.

Last week, the Michigan Supreme Court applied the same logic to 19- and 20-year-olds.

“Characteristics that are intrinsic to the cognitive and social development of juveniles, such as an increased susceptibility to peer pressure, result in their having both diminished culpability and greater prospects for reform, and thus make them less deserving of the most severe punishments,” Justice Elizabeth Welch wrote for the majority. “Because 19- and 20-year-olds are more similar to juveniles in neurological terms than they are to older adults, the scientific research relied on by the Parks Court applied equally to 19- and 20-year-old individuals.” 

Welch added, “The impulsivity of the late-adolescent brain is transient and capable of change, making imposition of mandatory LWOP [life without parole] on this class of individuals particularly cruel. It also prevents trial courts from tailoring the sentence imposed to the defendant.” 

The court said its ruling applies to people who have already been sentenced to mandatory life without parole, which requires them to be resentenced. In a separate decision it issued earlier this month, the court also confirmed that its 2022 Parks decision regarding 18-year olds was meant to apply retroactively. 

Michigan went through a similar round of resentencing last decade for hundreds of people who were serving life without parole sentences for crimes they committed before age 18. The vast majority succeeded in changing their sentence to a prison term ranging from 25 to 60 years, and most have now been released, according to data compiled by the ACLU. That may bode well for people sentenced as young adults who have been given a similar opportunity by the court, though legal experts told Bolts that judges could assess matters differently for this slightly older population. 

For each person affected by last week’s ruling, the next step is for their county’s prosecutor to decide, case by case, whether to again seek a sentence of life without parole. 

Prosecutors have 180 days to decide what to do in each case, a window some of them now say is too brief. “The approximately 180-day statutory time period to assess each individual case and locate the victim’s family is untenable,” Kim Worthy, the prosecuting attorney of Wayne County, home to Detroit, said in a statement her office sent to Bolts. State Representative Ann Bollin, a Republican who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, has even said she wants to cut the supreme court’s budget and transfer funds to prosecutors to help them deal with the process. (The GOP runs the House, but Democrats control the Senate and governorship.)

In cases where prosecutors decide to not ask for a new sentence of life without parole, then the person will be resentenced to a prison term with a defined length—with a minimum of 25 years and a maximum of 60 years. In cases where prosecutors want to impose a new sentence of life without parole, a judge will review the person’s case for mitigating factors, including their age, and decide whether to reimpose a sentence that effectively condemns them to die behind bars; this is known as a “Miller” hearing, after the 2005 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down mandatory life without parole sentences for minors.

Maya Menlo, a lawyer with the State Appellate Defender Office, expects that her office will be very involved in these hearings, since people facing resentencing will be entitled to legal counsel. 

Menlo, who helped argue the recent cases against mandatory life without parole, said Michigan case law now requires prosecutors to meet a high burden in order to reimpose a sentence of life without parole for young people. “It’s a really extensive proceeding that takes place,” she said. “There’s a lot of development of the record, facts, psychological evaluation: There are witnesses who testify about an individual’s correctional record, there are witnesses who testify about the crime itself.” 

Due to prosecutors’ linchpin role in these proceedings, the next step may vary greatly for each prisoner depending on where they were originally prosecuted. County officials may take wildly different approaches from one place to another. 

The Michigan Prosecuting Attorneys Association, a group that lobbies on prosecutors’ behalf, released a statement critical of the court’s decision last week, saying the ruling would reopen old wounds for victims’ families. “We’ve listened to survivors say they need certainty and finality in the sentences of the convicted criminals who took the lives of their loved ones,” said the association’s president, Midland County Prosecutor J. Dee Brooks. “They have described the retraumatization that results from the never-ending litigation of these cases.” 

Worthy, Detroit’s prosecuting attorney, echoed this sentiment in her statement to Bolts. “It is tragically ironic that this ruling occurred during National Victims’ Rights Week,” she said. 

Worthy could influence how the ruling will be implemented more than any other prosecutor in the state: Nearly half of the roughly 600 incarcerated Michiganders who will now have resentencing hearings because of last week’s court ruling are from her county, according to data collected by the ACLU. She has taken a relatively hardline approach in the past, and her office declined to respond to Bolts’ questions about what criteria they’ve used to decide whether or not to seek a new life sentence, and how they’ll approach future cases.

Carol Siemon, who from 2017 to 2022 served as the chief prosecutor of Ingham County, home to the capital city of Lansing, says she disagrees with her former colleagues. During her tenure as prosecuting attorney, Siemon opposed life without parole as a sentence, prompting backlash. Her departure in 2022 left Washtenaw County’s Eli Savit, who won reelection last year, as Michigan’s most prominent reform prosecutor. (Savit did not respond to Bolts’ questions on how he will approach resentencing of cases from his county.)

Siemon told Bolts that many countries don’t ever impose life without parole sentences (the U.S. is particularly isolated when it comes to harsh sentencing of children), a fact that the state supreme court focused on at some length in its recent ruling. 

She says prosecutors elsewhere prepare victims for the idea that someone “will be returned to the community eventually after she/he has served time as a punishment and has also had services for true rehabilitation,” whereas U.S. prosecutors set the “expectation of long, stiff sentences.” She added, “that sets the stage for people to legitimately feel that anything less than a very harsh sentence is coddling defendants and not justice.”

The supreme court’s ruling last week broke down along party lines, with five Democratic justices siding with the majority and two Republican justices dissenting. Democratic judges nationwide often break with progressives on decisions around criminal punishment, which is in part a byproduct of the dominance of prosecutors on the bench. But that hasn’t been the case in Michigan, where some of the Democratic justices championed criminal justice reforms before their time on the court: Kimberly Thomas led the University of Michigan’s Juvenile Justice Clinic before joining the court in January, and Kyra Harris Bolden, who joined it in 2023, is a former lawmaker who advocated for reform legislation.

Thomas and Bolden won Michigan’s two supreme court elections in November. (Bolts covered an event inside the Flint jail that Bolden attended alongside other judicial candidates.) The GOP could have flipped the court had it swept those two seats, but it lost them by large margins.

One of the two Republicans on the court, Elizabeth Clement, announced last month that she is retiring at the end of April. Her departure is poised to increase Democrats’ edge on this court to a commanding 6-to-1 once Governor Gretchen Whitmer appoints a replacement for her. 

Clemens has occasionally sided with Democrats, including on criminal justice cases, but last week she took issue with the majority’s approach. She said the court’s search for the exact age at which to draw a bright line was best left to lawmakers. 

She also accused the majority of “invoking a parade of neuroscientific studies” to produce an opinion that “reads less like a judicial decision interpreting our Constitution and more like an amicus brief from a behavioral science institute.”

Richard Bernstein, a Democratic justice, took the opposite approach: He wrote his own opinion to say the court should have been even more deferential to the scientific research that shows brains keep developing well into the mid-20s. 

“If drawing any line were necessary,” Bernstein wrote, “I would instead follow the consensus of the relevant scientific studies and draw such a line at age 25.”

LaBelle is looking forward to that conversation. “Well, we know the brain science development takes us to the mid-20s, so that’s an issue for the future,” she told Bolts when asked about Bernstein’s opinion. But for now, she is preparing for the cases that have already been affected, saying, “Families have been waiting decades for the opportunity to welcome back their loved ones.”