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Tuesday, March 19, 2024
March 19, 2024

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High court to decide on sentences for men who killed others as teens

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WASHINGTON — Sheriff’s Deputy Charles Hurt was on truant patrol when he came across a teenager in a Baton Rouge park on a cool fall morning. The teenager pulled a gun from his jacket, panicked, he said, and shot Hurt dead.

That tragic sequence took place more than a half-century ago, nine days before the Kennedy assassination in 1963. The teenager, Henry Montgomery, is now 69 years old and has been behind bars almost ever since, serving a life sentence. He wants the Supreme Court to give him a chance to get out of prison before he dies.

Three years ago, the justices struck down automatic life sentences with no chance of release for teenage killers. The question for the court in Montgomery’s case, to be argued today, is whether that decision in Miller v. Alabama should be extended retroactively to Montgomery and hundreds of other inmates whose convictions are final.

In the 5-4 decision in 2012, Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the majority that judges weighing prison terms for young offenders must take into account “the mitigating qualities of youth,” among them immaturity and the failure to understand fully the consequences of their actions.

Through legislative action or court rulings, 18 states have allowed inmates like Montgomery to be given new prison sentences or to ask for their release, according to The Sentencing Project. Louisiana is among seven states that have declined to apply the Supreme Court ruling retroactively. The issue is under review in some other state courts and legislatures.

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