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Massachusetts’ highest court has issued an important ruling on sentencing and modern science, banning sentences of life without parole for people younger than 21 when they committed the crime.
The decision is significant in its own right and serves as a reminder that state courts, under their own constitutions, can provide broader rights than the U.S. Supreme Court, which is especially relevant today with a conservative-dominated court that’s dubious of defendants’ claims on matters of punishment.
On Thursday, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court extended its sentencing precedent to cover “emerging adults,” meaning people who were 18, 19 or 20 at the time of the criminal offense. The court cited “contemporary standards of decency,” including a modern understanding of brain development, writing that the scientific record “strongly supports the contention that emerging adults have the same core neurological characteristics as juveniles have.”
The court also noted that the state already distinguishes these adults from older ones in other areas, such as in setting 21 as the legal age for buying and selling alcohol.
The court also noted that the state already distinguishes these adults from older ones in other areas, such as in setting 21 as the legal age for buying and selling alcohol.
The case involved Sheldon Mattis, who was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to mandatory life in prison without the possibility of parole. He was 18 at the time of the 2011 killing.
“Massachusetts is one of only ten States that currently require eighteen through twenty year old individuals who are convicted of murder in the first degree to be sentenced to life without parole,” the court further observed, adding that courts in Washington state and Michigan recently prohibited mandatory imposition of life without the possibility of parole for those who are 18-20 and 18, respectively.
It was a divided ruling, with the Massachusetts justices splitting 4-3 and one of the dissenters writing on behalf of the three: “I cannot say that society, through its elected officials, may not express its revulsion of the crime of murder in the first degree by imposing a punishment of life without the possibility of parole on adults without offending our Declaration of Rights.”
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