Should a teenager be sentenced to die in prison for a pair of armed robberies committed on a single day, in which no one was seriously hurt?
According to the Missouri courts, the answer is yes. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled it’s unconstitutional to sentence a juvenile who did not commit homicide to life in prison without parole, but the Missouri courts say that rule doesn’t apply if the juvenile is sentenced for multiple non-homicide crimes (even if they all took place on the same day). On behalf of Bobby Bostic, the ACLU is taking the issue to the Supreme Court.
On Dec. 12, 1995, 16-year-old Bobby Bostic and an 18-year-old friend committed two armed robberies. Two people were shot at, but no one was seriously injured. Prosecutors charged Bostic with 18 separate counts, and a jury found him guilty.
The trial judge sentenced Bostic to 241 years and made her intention absolutely clear during sentencing: he would never be free again.
“You made your choice. You’re gonna have to live with your choice, and you’re gonna die with your choice because, Bobby Bostic, you will die in the Department of Corrections,” Circuit Judge Evelyn Baker told the teenager. “Do you understand that? Your mandatory date to go in front of the parole board will be the year 2201. Nobody in this room is going to be alive in the year 2201.”
The state probation and parole board eventually issued Bostic a parole eligibility date of 2091, when he will be 112 years old.
In 2010, in Graham v. Florida, the Supreme Court held that the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment “prohibits the imposition of a life without parole sentence on a juvenile offender who did not commit homicide.” While the decision does not guarantee that a child who has committed a non-homicide crime will eventually be released, it requires that the state provide “meaningful opportunity to obtain release based on demonstrated maturity and rehabilitation.”
Despite this clear rule, the Missouri court system has systematically denied Bostic’s appeal for relief, without ever addressing his argument that sentencing him to die in prison for non-homicide crimes he committed when he was 16 violates the Eighth Amendment. We agree with Bostic, which is why we are taking his case to the Supreme Court.
The Missouri Supreme Court and three other state high courts believe that Graham only applies when a state sentence uses the magic words “life without parole.” They argue that Graham does not prevent a state from sentencing a child who has not committed homicide to die in prison, without any chance of parole, as long as the child was convicted of more than one crime and sentenced to several term-of-year sentences to run consecutively.
But the constitutional flaw in the sentence imposed on Terrance Graham, according to the United States Supreme Court, was not that it was formally called “life in prison without parole.” It was that it denied a child who did not commit homicide “any chance to later demonstrate that he is fit to rejoin society.”
That flaw is exactly the same as in Bostic’s sentence.
State prosecutors have substantial discretion in how they charge crimes. Here, the events of a single day led to 18 separate counts for robbery, attempted robbery, armed criminal action, and other offenses. Just as states should not be allowed to evade the principle set forth in Graham by sentencing a child to “100 years without parole” instead of “life without parole,” so too states should not be able to slice one incident into multiple sub-offenses and sentence a child to several consecutive terms, which together amount to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Any other rule would be formalism at its absolute worst—formalism that can be easily manipulated by the state.
The Supreme Court has already recognized that, for practical purposes, a sentence of “life without parole” and consecutive term-of-year sentences that guarantee a person will die in prison are equivalent. That proposition should make the Bostic case an easy one to decide.
As Graham held, leaving a child to “die in prison without any meaningful opportunity to obtain release, no matter what he might do to demonstrate that the bad acts he committed as a teenager are not representative of his true character, even if he spends the next half century attempting to atone for his crimes and learn from his mistakes,” is the definition of cruel and unusual punishment.
Bobby Bostic should get a chance to show that crimes he committed at age 16 do not define him. The Eighth Amendment demands nothing less.
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