He Committed a Double Murder at 16. Does He Deserve to Die in Prison?

Twelve years ago, the Supreme Court abolished mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juvenile offenders. Seven years ago, the justices applied that ruling retroactively. Somehow, Arizona didn’t get the memo.

A prisoner who was sentenced to die in prison for a crime he committed as a 16-year-old is asking the Supreme Court to bring the Grand Canyon State into compliance with the Eighth Amendment. The case, Bassett v. Arizona, is an opportunity for the court to clarify what counts as “cruel and unusual punishment” for juvenile offenders nowadays—and to potentially reward Arizona’s noncompliance.

The Supreme Court has spent most of the twenty-first century limiting how juvenile offenders can be punished. In 2005, the justices held in Roper v. Simmons that the Eighth Amendment forbids the execution of defendants for offenses committed before they turned 18 years old. Five years later, in Graham v. Florida, the court abolished life-without-parole sentences for juvenile offenders for crimes other than murder.

Leading the charge in these cases was Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court’s swing vote at the time. Kennedy, who was generally a moderate conservative, expanded the Eighth Amendment’s protections in multiple spheres. He took particular interest in defendants who committed crimes when they were children, writing that they deserved the chance for rehabilitation in all but the most extreme circumstances.

“By denying the defendant the right to reenter the community, the State makes an irrevocable judgment about that person’s value and place in society,” he wrote in his opinion for the court in Graham. “This judgment is not appropriate in light of a juvenile non-homicide offender’s capacity for change and limited moral culpability.”

Arizona prosecutors initially sought the death penalty against Bassett but abandoned that effort after the court’s decision in Roper. They then sought a life-without-parole sentence instead. Indeed, they had no alternative: The Arizona legislature had abolished parole for prisoners convicted of murder about a decade earlier. The trial judge acknowledged he had no choice and sentenced Bassett to a prison sentence that encompassed his “natural life.”

The Supreme Court’s rulings would later unsettle this sentence as well. In the 2012 case Miller v. Alabama, Kennedy and his colleagues began to take aim at mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juvenile offenders. Since the court had already eliminated the death penalty for them in Roper, mandatory life without parole became the harshest sentence that could be given to a juvenile defendant.

“Such a scheme prevents those meting out punishment from considering a juvenile’s ‘lessened culpability’ and greater ‘capacity for change,’ and runs afoul of our cases’ requirement of individualized sentencing for defendants facing the most serious penalties,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the majority, quoting from the court’s ruling in Graham. Kennedy provided the fifth vote for the 5–4 ruling, which otherwise fell along the usual ideological lines.

The Miller court stated that juvenile offenders could still be sentenced to life without parole, but that such a sentence could not be handed down unless the sentencing judge weighed the offender’s youth and immaturity before reaching that decision. “Although we do not foreclose a sentencer’s ability to make that judgment in homicide cases, we require it to take into account how children are different, and how those differences counsel against irrevocably sentencing them to a lifetime in prison,” Kagan wrote.

In 2016, the Supreme Court held that the Miller ruling applied retroactiv