The Pendulum Swings Right: How the Roberts Court Rejected Precedent and Mobilized Federalism to the Detriment of American Youth in Jones v. Mississippi

Tori A. Shaw

In Jones v. Mississippi, the Supreme Court evaluated whether a juvenile defendant must be deemed permanently incorrigible before being sentenced to life without parole (“LWOP”). Similarly, the Court examined whether a sentencer must provide an on-the-record explanation containing an implicit finding of permanent incorrigibility before sentencing a juvenile defendant to LWOP. The Court held that a sentencer need not determine that a juvenile defendant convicted of murder is permanently incorrigible before sentencing them to LWOP; rather, a sentencer need only consider the defendant’s youth and any attendant circumstances. Furthermore, the Court held that an on-the-record sentencing explanation is unnecessary, as a discretionary sentencing procedure ensures that a defendant’s youth will be considered and is all that precedent requires.

With this ruling, the Court improperly detached a sentencer’s consideration of a juvenile defendant’s youth and any attendant circumstances from its principal purpose—to identify whether a juvenile defendant’s crimes represent permanent incorrigibility or transient immaturity. In furtherance of this, the Court disregarded the plain meaning of discretion, conflated awareness of a juvenile defendant’s youth with meaningfully analyzing its relevance as a mitigating factor, and permitted states to run roughshod over the Constitution under the guise of judicial restraint. This seemingly deferential form of activism effectively licenses disproportionate sentences for juvenile defendants and severely undermines the principle of stare decisis. When cast against the conservative backlash to the due process achievements of the Warren Court, the racially coded rhetoric of “states’ rights” and “law and order,” and the long-standing ability of right-wing political strategists to exploit these terms to forge new political coalitions, the Court’s decision in Jones epitomizes the judiciary’s mobilization of state sovereignty for the purposes of heralding a new conservative America.