The Supreme Court on Thursday reversed a recent trend of leniency for minors convicted of serious crimes and said judges need not specifically find “permanent incorrigibility” before sentencing juvenile murderers to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Former president Donald Trump’s three Supreme Court nominees were key to the 6‑to‑3 ruling, which was written by one of them, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.
The “argument that the sentencer must make a finding of permanent incorrigibility is inconsistent with the Court’s precedents,” Kavanaugh wrote. The court upheld the life-without-parole sentence a Mississippi court imposed on a 15-year-old who stabbed his grandfather to death in a dispute over the boy’s girlfriend.
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