In Miller v Alabama, 567 US ; 132 S Ct 2455; 183 L Ed 2d 407 (2012), the UnitedStates Supreme Court held that "the Eighth Amendment forbids a sentencing scheme that mandates life in prison without possibility of parole for juvenile offenders." Id , 132 S Ct at 2469. Relying "not only on common sense—on what 'any parent knows'—but on science and social science as well," the Court recognized that "children are constitutionally different from adults for purposes of sentencing." Id. at 2464. Children are less culpable than adults, and theyare more capable of rehabilitation as they mature. Id. "By making youth (and all that accompanies it) irrelevant to imposition of that harshest prison sentence," the Court held that automatically sentencing youth to life imprisonment without parole "poses too great a risk of disproportionate punishment." Id. at 2469.
Miller unquestionably invalidates Michigan's sentencing scheme for juveniles, which mandates a life sentence for all first-degree murder convictions, makes prisoners serving such sentences ineligible for parole, and treats juveniles the same as adults. MCL 750.316(1), 769.1(1)(g), 791.234(6)(a). Raymond Carp, the defendant in this case, was convicted and sentenced under Michigan's unconstitutional scheme for an offense he committed when he wasonly 15 years old. He is serving a mandatory sentence of life in prison that carries no possibility of parole—precisely the type of punishment that Miller ruled unconstitutional.
Yet in its decision below, the Court of Appeals denied Carp any relief. Carp's conviction became final before Miller, and the Court of Appeals ruled that Miller applies only to judgments not yet final at the time it was decided. Under this rationale, a mere accident of timing would dictate that the vast majority of children with a mandatory life-without-parole sentence must continue to suffer this unconstitutional punishment for the rest of their lives. This includes children as young as 14 at the time of the offense, see People v Bentley, unpublished opinion per curiam of the Court of Appeals, issued April 11, 2000 (Docket No. 214170), as well as children who did not actually commit a homicide but were convicted of felony murder and/or under an aiding-and-abetting theory, see People v Maxey, unpublished opinion per curiam of the Court of Appeals, issued May 6, 2010 (Docket No. 289023) (Shapiro, J., concurring). In Michigan, there are over 360 prisoners serving mandatory life-without-parole sentences for offenses committed before the age of 18—a punishment the Supreme Court has described as "akin to the death penalty." Miller, 132 S Ct at 2466. The question for this Court is whether nearly all of these individuals must die in prison serving an unconstitutional sentence, forever denied "some meaningful opportunity to obtain release based on demonstrated maturity and rehabilitation." See id. at 2469.
The answer is no. Under both federal- and state-law retroactivity principles, Miller applies to all juveniles who were given mandatory sentences of life in prison without parole. As a matter of federal law, the Supreme Court's decision in Teague v Lane, 489 US 288; 109 S Ct 1060; 103 L Ed 2d 334 (1989), requires that new constitutional rules be applied retroactively to cases on collateral review if they are "substantive" or if they are "watershed" rules of criminalprocedure. Miller is a "substantive" rule because 1) it categorically places juveniles as a class beyond the power of the state to punish with sentences of mandatory life imprisonment without parole, thereby requiring states to expand the range of possible sentencing outcomes forjuveniles; 2) it requires sentencing courts to consider the mitigating fact of youth before they may validly condemn a child to die in prison, thereby narrowing the factual circumstances under which juveniles may receive that sentence; and 3) it does not regulate the procedures that state courts must use in considering youth during sentencing. Alternatively, even if viewed as "procedural" rather than substantive, Miller must be applied retroactively under Teague as a watershed rule because the requirement of individualized sentencing is one without which juveniles stand too great a risk of being disproportionately sentenced. Lastly, irrespective of federal law, this Court should also give Miller retroactive effect as a matter of state law under People v Maxson, 482 Mich 385; 759 NW2d 817 (2008).
To deny Miller retroactive effect would permit the dark irony that those who havesuffered the longest under Michigan's unconstitutional sentencing scheme have the least hope for relief. It would deny hundreds of youth any possibility of release from an irrevocable sentence the Supreme Court has declared should be "uncommon" and "rare." Miller, 132 S Ct at 2469.