Young guns

LITTLE ROCK — Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

-Eighth Amendment to the United States Contitution WHAT WERE YOU up to when you were 14 years old? Had video games come along yet? Some of us can remember Pong, the black-and-white table-tennis video game that wowed our 14-yearold world in the 1970s. Or maybe you were into comic books. Mama probably didn’t allow Mad magazine until you had turned 15 or 16. Or maybe dancing was your thing. Disco? Or theTwist?

Or were you just trying to fit in, as high school freshmen tend to do? And admiring the older kids with driver’s licenses who were practicing backing Dad’s car out of the drive on Saturdays. (Mom, do you need me to run to the store for anything?)

Imagine your world at age 14. The things you cared about. The things you knew. The many things you didn’t.

Now, according to the Supreme Court of the United States, mandatory life sentences for kids who commit murder is cruel and unusual. Therefore unconstitutional.

The ruling tied together a couple of different cases on appeal-one of them out of Arkansas. It seems that a Kuntrell Jackson is now serving a life sentence at the Tucker Maximum Security Prison for a killing in 1999 when he was just 14. To be more exact, he participated in a robbery that resulted in a killing. He was convicted of capital murder, but not given the death penalty. Under state law, that meant he had to be sentenced to life.

It would be more than understandable if the family of the woman who was killed in this robbery-Kuntrell Jackson wasn’t the shooter-took exception to our saying he was “just” 14. Or that he “just” took part in a murder. There is no gainsaying the terrible thing he did.

The court’s ruling Monday did not rule out a 14-year-old’s still being sentenced to life in prison. What it said was that such a decision should be made by a judge and jury, taking individual circumstances into account. Not by a law on the statute books that automatically goes into operation in all such cases. Without taking other factors into account. Like the defendant’s youth. Or as Her Honor Elena Kagan wrote for the court, “Youth matters.”

Indeed it does. When deciding whether to send somebody barely into his teens off to prison for the rest of his life, that decision should be made by living, breathing, reasoning people. Not by a statute that can neither see,hear nor feel.

The great advantage of such draconian laws that provide no leeway for the exercise of human judgment is that they spare judges and jurors the burden of thinking. Or feeling. The life sentence just clicks into place, as if handed down by a machine. How convenient. Jurors don’t have to expend countless hours deliberating over the defendant’s fate.

The great disadvantage of such mandatory-sentencing laws is that they may save time but not a state’s conscience. When little details like justice, and mercy, compassion and reason are considered expendable, the results can weigh heavy on a state’s conscience. Orshould.

According to reports, and we have no reason to doubt them because they appeared in this paper, there are 57 inmates in Arkansas who are serving life without the possibility of parole for crimes they committed when they were juveniles. No, we probably don’t want to meet some of them in a dark alley one night any more than you’d like to.

But what about the kid who gets what education he can behind bars, wants to make something of himself, and hopes for a second chance at a real life? Should the law compel the State of Arkansas to keep him locked up forever, no matter what? Or till 30? 40? 50? For a crime he committed before he may ever have got up the courage to ask a girl out on his first date.

That’s cruel. If not unusual. But with the Supreme Court’s ruling Monday, life sentences for juveniles will surely become more unusual.

CRITICS OF THIS 5-to-4 decision, including some who sit on the high court itself, said the court’s decision usurps a state legislature’s ability to reflect the wishes of its electorate.

Oh, please. If the law was there just to let a state reflect the wishes of its electorate, we’d still have Jim Crow laws. We’d still have slavery.

In his written dissent, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that it was not within the court’s authority to roll back mandatory sentencing laws passed by state legislatures.

In that case, how explain the Court’s ruling not too long ago against the death penalty for juveniles? And against life sentences for under-age defendants when a murder isn’t involved.

Both rulings were made in the past 10 years.

The court made the right decision Monday. Now let’s trust it is making the right one in another case of some national interest that you could be reading about on the front page tomorrow morning.