Obama’s Supreme Court Makes Stunning Move to Release Convicted Murderers Onto Our Streets
(Conservative Tribune) – The Supreme Court of the United States just handed down a ruling that could very well result in convicted murderers with life sentences being released early to return to the streets of America.
According to the Washington Examiner, the Court ruled 6-3 in favor of upholding a previous ruling outlawing life sentences without parole for juveniles convicted of murder and declared that the decision must be applied retroactively.
The ruling stemmed from Montgomery v. Louisiana, which centered on then-17-year-old Henry Montgomery’s murder of a Louisiana deputy sheriff in 1963. Montgomery was convicted and sentenced to life without parole.
However, the Court ruled in 2012 in the case of Miller v. Alabama that it was a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment to sentence juvenile murderers to mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole.
Montgomery wanted that decision applied to his case, but the Louisiana Supreme Court refused, resulting in the appeal to SCOTUS.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion, declared that the Miller decision made sentences such as Montgomery’s unconstitutional, so the prohibition on mandatory life sentences without parole must be applied retroactively.
Kennedy wrote that states extending the eligibility of parole to juvenile convicts would neither “impose an onerous burden on the states nor disturb the finality of state convictions.”
As such, Montgomery will now likely have the chance to go before a parole board some 53 years after the commission of his crime to try to convince them that he isn’t the hardened criminal or cold-blooded murderer he was in his troubled youth.
While it is unlikely that Montgomery would return to his criminal past at 70 and murder once again, the possibility of other youthful offenders being given a second chance to shed blood on the streets cannot be ignored.
It is worth noting that Chief Justice John Roberts joined his more liberal colleagues on this decision.
http://conservativetribune.com/supreme-court-release-streets/
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