After Lymon, what might be next major Michigan state constitutional ruling limiting severe punishments?

I blogged here last week on the intriguing divided Michigan Supreme Court ruling in Michigan v. Lymon, No. 164685 (Mich. July 29, 2024) (available here), which held that Michigan’s state constitution precluded putting people convicted of non-sexual crimes on the state’s sex-offender registry.  The Behind the Bench Newsletter features that ruling in this new posting, titled “Will The Michigan Supreme Court Ban Death By Incarceration?”, which merits reading in full.  Prompting the question in the title of this post, the entry noted that there are now “at least seven cases pending” on the Michigan Supreme Court’s docket “that raise claims under the ‘cruel or unusual’ clause” in the Michigan consituttion.  Here is an extended excerpt (with links from the original):

In another win for state constitutional rights, the Michigan Supreme Court last week held that requiring someone without any sex-related convictions to register as a sex offender — something that, remarkably, most states do to some extent —violates the state’s ban on “cruel or unusual” punishment.  Central to the ruling were both the text of Michigan’s antipunishment clause — which, with its disjunctive formulation, is broader than the federal 8th Amendment’s “cruel and unusual” prohibition — and the state’s tradition of prioritizing rehabilitation as the primary goal of criminal sentencing….

The ruling in People v. Lymon will free about 300 people from the sex offender registry.  Beyond that, it further cements the Michigan Supreme Court as a national leader in building state antipunishment jurisprudence and expanding rights against extreme and needless punishments.  And that trend should continue: There are at least seven cases pending on the court’s docket that raise claims under the “cruel or unusual” clause, all touching on a common theme: will the court further limit lifetime punishments that, contrary to the state’s long constitutional history, “forswear[] altogether the rehabilitative ideal”?…

But in 2022, the Michigan Supreme Court revived its “cruel or unusual” jurisprudence with a series of rulings that protected youth and young adults from lifelong prison terms. In People v. Parks, the court banned mandatory life without parole sentences for people 18 and younger (raising the age under federal law by one year); in other cases it banned all life sentences for youth convicted of second degree murder and specified that there is always a presumption against life without parole sentences for youth — one that prosecutors must overcome with specific evidence. In each case, Michigan’s constitutional commitment to rehabilitation was central. “Rehabilitation is a specific goal of our criminal-punishment system,” the court said in Parks. “Indeed, it is the only penological goal enshrined in our proportionality test as a criterion rooted in Michigan’s legal traditions.”  

With last week’s decision in Lymon, the court reaffirmed and built on these cases, and it’s poised to do more in the next year.  The court’s docket includes more challenges to Michigan’s draconian sex offender registration law, including claims that lifetime sex offender registration and lifetime electronic monitoring constitute “cruel or unusual” punishment.  It will also consider further limits on death-by-incarceration sentencing—a practice that is by definition incompatible with rehabilitation.  It could apply Parks retroactively, to people with final convictions, and to all people under age 21for youth under 18ban mandatory life without parole for people convicted under the so-called “felony murder rule” — an archaic legal doctrine that allows murder convictions and the most severe punishments even when there is no intent to kill. 

Collectively, these cases could restore hope to thousands — more than 1,000 people are serving life without parole for felony murder alone.  But they also raise a question: Will the court ultimately do with one clear holding what it has started to do piecemeal?  Will it recognize that, whatever their crime or age, sending people to die in prison without even the hope of release is cruel and conflicts with fundamental state constitutional rights? This year the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court made history by banning all life without parole sentences for anyone under age 21. The Michigan Supreme Court could be the first to ban them entirely.