In September 2018, in between screaming about his love of beer and crying over his love of calendars, Brett Kavanaugh told the Senate Judiciary Committee: “If we want to sit here and talk about whether a Supreme Court nomination should be based on a high school yearbook page, I think that’s taken us to a new level of absurdity.” In fact, lawmakers that day weren’t deciding whether or not to confirm Kavanaugh to the highest court in the land based on “a high school yearbook page” but over credible allegations of sexual assault, which he denied. Nevertheless, Kavanaugh’s position that day was that people shouldn’t be held accountable for things they do as minors. But what he apparently actually meant was that he shouldn’t be held accountable for things he allegedly did as kid, while others deserve life in prison without the possibility of parole.
On Thursday, in a 6–3 decision authored by Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court decided that judges need not determine that a juvenile convicted of a crime is incapable of being rehabilitated before sentencing him or her to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The “argument that the sentencer must make a finding of permanent incorrigibility is inconsistent with the Court’s precedents,” Kavanaugh claimed, which actually isn’t true at all. (As Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern notes, the landmark Miller v. Alabama and Montgomery v. Louisiana decisions determined, respectively, that juvenile life without parole violate the 8th Amendment and that sentences imposed at a judge’s discretion are generally unconstitutional.) The ruling resulted in the court upholding a life-without-parole sentence that a Mississippi court imposed on Brett Jones, a then 15-year-old who stabbed his grandfather to death.
In a scathing dissent, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, Justice Sonia Sotomayor responded that “the Court,” i.e. Kavanaugh and his fellow conservatives, “simply rewrites Miller and Montgomery to say what the Court now wishes they had said, and then denies that it has done any such thing. The Court knows what it is doing.” Sotomayor also reminds those reading that Jones was “the victim of violence and neglect that he was too young to escape,” with an alcoholic biological father who abused his mother and a stepfather who abused him with “belts, switches, and a paddle” and openly declared his hatred for Jones. When, per Sotomayor, Jones moved in with his grandfather—who abused him as well—he abruptly lost access to medications he was prescribed for mental health issues, including hallucinations. In 2004, when his grandfather tried to hit him, Jones says he stabbed him in self-defense.
According to NPR, Thursday was the first time in nearly two decades that the Supreme Court “deviated from rules establishing more leniency for juvenile offenders, even those convicted of murder,” noting that the court, “primed by research that shows the brains of juveniles are not fully developed, and that they are likely to lack impulse control—has issued a half dozen opinions holding that juveniles are less culpable than adults for their acts.”
As Stern writes, the Court’s “decision will prevent hundreds of other juvenile defendants from securing early release. And as Sotomayor pointed out, the burden will fall disproportionately on racial minorities,” as 70% of all youths sentenced to life without parole are children of color. Too bad these kids aren’t afforded the same policy high school Brett Kavanaugh got!
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