In a 6-3 decision, the nation’s high court, on January 25th, ruled in Montgomery v. Louisiana that its own 2012 ruling in Miller v. Alabama, holding mandatory life sentences without parole for child defenders to be unconstitutional, shall be applied retroactively. The Miller and Montgomery rulings has placed Pennsylvania’s courts and district attorneys in between a rock and a hard place, because Pennsylvania’s murder statute, mandatory life without parole imprisonment for first and second-degree murder — that child offenders have been sentenced under — is now unlawful to them.
The murder statute for child offenders, recently enacted by the state’s legislature after child offenders were sentenced originally, does not apply to them. The parole statute does not permit life sentence prisoners to receive parole release. The state’s legislatures can’t pass any new law to resentence child lifers under, as it would violate the ex post facto law of the Constitutionnd, and the Pennsylvania courts cannot craft new sentencing schemes from whole cloth. Because there is no constitutional sentencing statute that applies to Pennsylvania’s 500 child lifers, the only approach the court can take is to apply the principles of severability of statutory provisions to the murder statute provisions that were held unlawful and use the valid portion of the murder statute to impose the next most severe penalty set forth by the murder statute, which is the sentence for third-degree murder. Therefore, the only available and constitutional sentence Pennsylvania’s 500 child lifers can be resentenced to is the next most severe, lesser included, murder offense of third-degree murder, which is the imposition of 20 to 40 years imprisonment.
The problem is, Pennsylvania judges and DA’s are hell-bent on railroading the 500 child lifers at resentencing hearings by knowingly imposing new unlawful sentences, such as the 35-to-life and the 25-to-life sentences given to brothers Devon and Jovon Knox by Pittsburgh County judge; the life without parole given to Ian Seagrave by a Monroe County Judge; and the automatic life with parole sentences given to five child lifers by a Chester County judge, despite the judges’ knowing that these new sentences imposed on child lifers are unlawful. One thing is certain, judges and DA’s will continue to undermine Miller and Montgomery holdings and seek to impose life without parole, life with parole, or the highest minimum prison sentences they can on the 500 child lifers at resentencing, and as a result, there will be even more legal appeals to come.
The families of child lifers and civil rights organizations can put an end to this lunacy immediately by waging a vociferous protest pressure campaign against the courts and DA’s to demand that the 500 child lifers be resentenced to 20 to 40 years imprisonment, the punishment for third-degree murder. From the belly of the beast at Prison Radio, I am Shakaboona. Thank you for listening.
These commentaries are recorded by Noel Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
