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Sentencing Law and Policy
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A severe juve sentence seeking SCOTUS attention

By Douglas Berman

How Appealing does a great job here collecting resources relating to the cert petition filed yesterday in the in Pittman v. South Carolina.  This AP article provides the basics:

Attorneys have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case of a teen sentenced to 30 years in prison for killing his grandparents when he was 12, arguing that the sentence is cruel…. In the brief submitted to the high court late Monday, attorneys from the University of Texas School of Law argued that the 30-year sentence violates Christopher Pittman’s Eighth Amendment protection from cruel and unusual punishment.

The adverse ruling from the South Carolina’s highest court, which can be found here, rejected the defendant’s constitutional challenge by stating, inter alia, that “we do not believe that evolving standards of decency in our society dictate that it is cruel and unusual to sentence a twelve-year-old convicted of double murder to a thirty-year prison term.”

The cert petition, which Howard Bashman has made available for downloading via this link, presents these three questions:

I.  Is a sentence of 30 years without possibility of parole constitutionally disproportionate as applied to a 12-year-old child?

2.  Are the mitigating qualities of youth relevant to whether a 12-year-old’s non-capital sentence is constitutionally disproportionate?

3.  Does the Eighth Amendment prohibit the imposition of a sentence of 30 years without possibility of parole on a 12-year-old child where the sentencer was absolutely precluded from considering youth as a mitigating factor justifying lesser punishment?

For lots and lots of reasons, I really hope the Supreme Court takes this case.  In fact, I think Pittman is a much more important and consequential case than the child rape capital case from Louisiana (Kennedy) that many SCOTUS watchers are watching so closely.  But, because capital cases always seem to drawn unique interest from the Justices, I’d probably bet Kennedy is a more likely grant than Pittman.  (In my perfect (and very, very unlikely) world, these cases would be consolidated for one mega-argument about the modern scope and reach of the Eighth Amendment.)