Bright-Lines in Sentencing: A Legal and Moral Case Against Juvenile Life-Without-Parole

This paper criticizes the Supreme Court of the United States for its holding in Jones v. Mississippi (2021): the Eighth Amendment does not require a sentencing authority to find that a juvenile is "permanently incorrigible" before it may impose a sentence of life-without-parole. This ruling circumvents stare decisis as it undermines the substantive protections established in Miller v. Alabama (2012) and Montgomery v. Louisiana (2016), while purporting to preserve them. Not only is circumvention of stare decisis a failure of the Court's judicial duty, it is also a profound moral failure. This paper deploys Ronald Dworkin's law as integrity to examine how the opinions of Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas render the law incoherent regarding juvenile sentencing jurisprudence and allow for arbitrary and unjust outcomes. In addition to critiquing the jurisprudential inconsistencies in Jones, the paper analyzes bright-line rules as a solution to the epistemic and moral challenges of individualized sentencing, arguing for their necessity in both non-ideal and ideal theory. The paper concludes that life-without-parole sentences for juvenile offenders are unconstitutional and that a bright-line rule categorically prohibiting such sentences is required to uphold both legal coherence and moral integrity. Following from this, the paper suggests that the reasons that justify a categorical prohibition of life-without-parole may extend to all state-enforced punishment of juvenile offenders, raising further questions about the appropriateness of punitive incarceration for youth.