“A Life Term for Rape at 13: Cruel and Unusual?”
The question in the title of this post is the headline of this latest piece by Adam Liptak in the New York Times. The article is focused on this case of Joe Sullivan, whose cert petition I posted in this recent entry. Here are excerpts from the Times article:
In 1989, someone raped a 72-year-old woman in Pensacola, Fla. Joe Sullivan was 13 at the time, and he admitted that he and two older friends had burglarized the woman’s home earlier that day. But he denied that he had returned to commit the rape….
The trial lasted a day and ended in conviction. Then Judge Nicholas Geeker, of the circuit court in Escambia County, sentenced Mr. Sullivan to life without the possibility of parole. “I’m going to send him away for as long as I can,” Judge Geeker said.
Mr. Sullivan is 33 now, and his lawyers have asked the United States Supreme Court to consider the question of whether the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment extends to sentencing someone who was barely a teenager to die in prison for a crime that did not involve a killing.
People can argue about whether the punishment in Mr. Sullivan’s case is cruel. There is no question that it is unusual. According to court papers and a report from the Equal Justice Initiative, which now represents Mr. Sullivan, there are only eight people in the world who are serving sentences of life without parole for crimes they committed when they were 13. All are in the United States.
And there are only two people in that group whose crimes did not involve a killing. Both are in Florida, and both are black. Joe Sullivan is one; Ian Manuel, who is in for a 1990 robbery and attempted murder, is the other.
Some related posts on juve LWOP and the Sullivan case: