HENRY MONTGOMERY was 17 when, in 1963, he shot and killed a white police officer in East Baton Rouge, Louisiana. With racial tensions high in America’s Deep South, the black defendant was called “Wolfman” in court and by the media and received a death sentence after his conviction for murder. Two years later, the Louisiana Supreme Court revisited Mr Montgomery’s case, noting that Ku Klux Klan activity and cross burnings had created an “atmosphere…[that] prejudiced the defendant”. After another trial, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Now the Supreme Court, nearly half a century later, is considering giving Mr Montgomery a chance to contest that sentence, too. In Montgomery v Louisiana, which the justices heard on October 13th, the question was whether a ruling three years ago banning mandatory life sentences for juveniles applies retroactively to Mr Montgomery and up to 2,000 other inmates sentenced to die in prison for crimes committed before they were 18.
Miller v Alabama, the ruling of 2012 currently under the microscope, marked the retreat of a theory that criminologists proclaimed in...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/1X6C76A
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