The United States Supreme Court on January 25, 2016, extended a line of cases affording heightened constitutional protections related to the sentencing of juvenile defendants when it handed down its decision in Montgomery v. Louisiana, 193 L. Ed. 2d 599. Montgomery made retroactive the Court’s prior Eighth Amendment ban on mandatory juvenile life without parole (JLWOP) sentences imposed by Miller v. Alabama, 132 S. Ct. 2455 (2012). The Court held that the rule prohibiting mandatory JLWOP sentences was retroactive as a new substantive, rather than procedural, constitutional rule under the standard elaborated in Teague v. Lane, 489 U.S. 288 (1989).

In determining that the ban was a new substantive rule, the Court relied heavily upon the unique developmental characteristics of youth that, recent research has found, fundamentally distinguish adolescents from adults. These same developmental differences were also at the heart of the Court’s reasoning in Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551 (2005), which led to the abolition of the juvenile death penalty, and in Florida v. Graham, 560 U.S. 48 (2010), in which the Court imposed a categorical ban on JLWOP sentences for non-homicide cases. Although some state courts had already found Miller to be retroactive, the Montgomery decision affects more than 2,000 individuals nationally who were sentenced to mandatory life without parole sentences for homicides and are now entitled to new sentencing hearings, including 247 individuals in Louisiana, 227 in Florida, 78 in North Carolina and 66 in Mississippi.