Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Oct 11 2005 (IPS) — Two of the world’s most prominent human rights groups are calling on the United States to immediately halt the practice of sentencing children convicted of serious crimes to life imprisonment without parole.

In a joint 157-page report released Wednesday, Amnesty International and New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said they had been able to confirm that at least 2,225 people are currently serving such sentences around the United States for crimes they had committed before their 18th birthday.

The report, “The Rest of Their Lives: Life Without Parole for Child Offenders in the United States”, also found that such sentences are handed down with far greater frequency for black and Hispanic children than for white youths.

Nationwide, black youth are given life-without-parole (LWOP) sentences 10 times more often than their white counterparts. In California, the ratio is even more dramatic: black youth are 22.5 times more likely to receive such a sentence.

LWOP sentences for children under 18 violates the longstanding criminal justice principle that children are less culpable than adults for crimes they commit, according to the two human rights groups.

That principle was most recently asserted by the U.S. Supreme Court in a landmark decision last March that capital punishment against individuals for crimes committed before they turned 18 violated the constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishments”..

“Kids who commit serious crimes shouldn’t go scot-free,” said HRW’s Alison Parker, the report’s main author. “But if they are too young to vote or buy cigarettes, they are too young to spend the rest of their lives behind bars.”

The United States, according to the report, is one of just a handful of countries that sentences children to life without parole, which also violates the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). The Convention has been ratified by every country in the world except the United States and Somalia.

In their research, Amnesty and HRW could find only 12 cases outside the United States where young offenders are serving LWOP sentences – in Tanzania, South Africa, and Israel. At least 132 countries have explicitly rejected such a sentence, according to the report, which also found that it is permitted under the laws of 13 countries, most of which have not imposed it.

LWOP sentences for crimes committed by children were very rare in the U.S. until the 1970’s, when growing public concern about “law and order” resulted in a growing number of serious cases being diverted from juvenile court, which placed on emphasis on rehabilitation, to the adult criminal system.

LWOP sentences grew increasingly common between the early 1980s and 1996, when they reached their peak at 152 in that year. Since then, the number of LWOP sentences has dropped, as have the number of serious crimes committed by children.

Although the number has fallen, however, the rate at which LWOP sentences have been imposed has exploded. In 1990, for example, 2.9 percent of the 2,234 children who were convicted of murder in the U.S. that year received LWOP sentences. By 2000, the rate had tripled: only 1,006 children were convicted of murder, but LWOP sentences were imposed in nine percent of those cases.

Indeed, in 11 out of the 17 years between 1985 and 2001, the study found that a youth convicted of murder in the United States was actually more likely to receive a LWOP sentence than adults convicted of murder.

In 26 states, the LWOP sentence is mandatory for anyone convicted of committing first-degree murder, regardless of their actual age. Ninety-three percent of the 2,225 youth offenders currently serving those sentences were convicted of murder.

But 26 percent of those offenders were convicted of “felony-murder”, a criminal-law rule that holds anyone responsible for murder if it is committed in the course of a serious crime, such as armed robbery, whether or not he or she was directly responsible for the victim’s death.

The report cites the example of a 15-year-old boy who was given a LWOP sentence for his part in a botched robbery that resulted in a double murder. He was waiting in a van outside the house where the murder was committed, but, because he had stolen the van and driven there with the two robbers, he was found guilty of the killings under the felony-murder rule and received a mandatory life sentence.

While LWOP became popular in reaction to growing media attention beginning in the mid-1980s to “super-predators” – youths with long records of vicious crimes – the Amnesty-HRW study found that 59 percent of children who have received such sentences had no previous criminal record. It also found that 16 percent were only between 13 and 15 years old at the time that they committed the crime for which they were sentenced.

Ten states set no minimum age for sentencing children to life without parole, and the groups’ researchers found at least six children who are currently serving the sentence who were 13 when they committed the crimes.

“‘Adult time for adult crime’ may be a catchy phrase,” according to the report, “but it reflects a poor understanding of criminal justice principles. If the punishment is to fit the crime, both the nature of the offence and the culpability or moral responsibility of the offender must be taken into account,” it noted, citing the 2005 Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling that juveniles are “categorically less culpable” than adult criminals.

The Court argued that juveniles lack the “well-formed” identities of adults, are susceptible to “immature and irresponsible behaviour”, and vulnerable to “negative influences and outside pressures”. Some of these behavioural characteristics can be explained by differences between children and adults in their brain anatomies, according to recent discoveries by neuroscientists.

Youth offenders should not be treated as if they are irredeemable, according to the two groups. “Children who commit serious crimes still have the ability to change their lives for the better,” according to David Berger, an attorney and Amnesty’s chief researcher on the project. “It is now time for state and federal officials to take positive steps by enacting policies that seek to redeem children, instead of throwing them in prison for the rest of their lives.”

The two groups also called for those who are already serving LWOP sentences to be given access to parole procedures.