USA: no child deserves a life sentence. But try telling prosecutors that

In 2012, the Supreme Court took a step toward righting a terrible wrong by banning mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole for children. Last year, the court said that ban should apply retroactively: It told prosecutors to conduct resentencing hearings for the approximately 2,500 people who were serving life sentences for crimes they committed as adolescents. Many of them had been in prison for decades.

But if you walked into many courthouses today, you wouldn’t know that the Supreme Court had called for resentencing these juvenile offenders, the majority of them black. That’s because prosecutors are choosing to pursue life-without-parole sentences for these cases again.

Part of the problem is that the court kept the door open for overreach when it allowed prosecutors to impose a life sentence on the rare defendant who is “irreparably corrupt” and “permanently incorrigible.”

Consider Michigan, where prosecutors are denying parole or shorter sentences for 60 percent of juvenile lifers, even in cases where parole boards have recommended them. In Oakland County, northwest of Detroit, the share is a whopping 90 percent.

While nearly half of all juvenile lifers are concentrated in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Louisiana, prosecutors elsewhere, like Scott Shellenberger in Baltimore County, Md., who has opposed ending such sentences for children, have also effectively thumbed their nose at the court’s ruling.

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