I finally sat down to read a recent U.S. Supreme Court opinion on an important issue: are all prisoners serving mandatory sentences of life without parole for crimes they committed as juveniles entitled to new sentences based on an earlier ruling that such sentences constitute unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment?
The opinion, issued in January 2016 in Montgomery v. Louisiana, answered that question: yes. Yes, children who committed crimes cannot be required to serve out a mandatory sentence that forever forecloses their opportunity to show they are rehabilitated and ready to re-enter society. Yes, every prisoner already serving that sentence is entitled to a second look.
The justices ruled 6-3 that Henry Montgomery, who was convicted at age 17 of murdering a deputy sheriff in Louisiana in 1963, must be resentenced. Montgomery is now 69 years old. He has served more than half a century of the life sentence imposed on him as a teenager.
Here's what struck me about the case, though: not the majority opinion, eloquently written by Justice Kennedy ("Henry Montgomery has spent each day of the past 46 years knowing he was condemned to die in prison. Perhaps it can be established that, due to exceptional circumstances, this fate was a just and proportionate punishment for the crime he committed as a 17-year-old boy. In light of what this Court has said... about how children are constitutionally different from adults in their level of culpability, however, prisoners like Montgomery must be given the opportunity to show their crime did not reflect irreparable corruption; and, if it did not, their hope for some years of life outside prison walls must be restored.")
What took me aback was this one line in the dissenting opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia, and joined by conservative justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas: "none of our business."
That's a direct quote. It's what Scalia wrote about the petition by Montgomery asking that he have a chance at freedom after spending most of his life behind bars: none of our business.
On one hand, I get the legal argument Scalia was making, a complicated procedural and jurisdictional one.
On the other hand, Scalia's curt dismissal called to mind its opposite: a line from Charles Dickens' novel "A Christmas Carol."
In that story, harsh, greedy Ebenezer Scrooge gets a visit on Christmas Eve from the ghost of his long-dead business partner, Jacob Marley. When Scrooge observes that Marley was always a good man of business, Marley's ghost retorts, "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearances, and benevolence, were, all, my business."
Many of us, on the issue of juvenile life sentences, have been closer to Scalia than Marley. None of our business, we think, even for someone like Henry Montgomery, who was originally sentenced to death, but then given life because of "public prejudice" at his trial. Montgomery is black. The deputy the teenaged Montgomery killed was white.
None of our business, because it doesn't concern us; it concerns someone else's child. None of our business because, after all, why should we care? Montgomery and all the others serving juvenile life sentences took a human life. Under current law, only murderers can get juvenile life sentences.
But it is our business. It is our business because the bleak, unforgiving sentence is carried out in our names. It is implemented with our money, under the authority of our government. It is imposed upon our fellow citizens, even the youngest. It is given in such numbers in our country, the United States of America, as by no other nation on earth.
It is our business because we would never want this merciless sentence for our own child--and therefore, we cannot condone it for anyone else's child. It is our business if we believe, like Sister Helen Prejean, Catholic nun and author of "Dead Man Walking," that every human being has worth, that every person is more than the worst thing he has ever done.
It is my business, in particular, because a juvenile murdered three of my family members, and is serving a mandatory life without parole sentence. Whether he should get out some day is open to question. But one thing is not: he should have a chance, like every other child locked away forever.