By ADAM LIPTAK
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that juveniles who commit crimes in which no one is killed may not be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Five justices, in an opinion by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, agreed that the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment forbids such sentences as a categorical matter.
"A state need not guarantee the offender eventual release," Justice Kennedy wrote, "but if it imposes the sentence of life, it must provide him or her with some realistic opportunity to obtain release before the end of that term."
The ruling marked the first time that the court excluded an entire class of offenders from a given form of punishment outside the context of the death penalty. " 'Death is different' no longer," Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in dissent.
The overall vote was 6-to-3, though that is a little misleading. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. voted with the majority in saying that the inmate who brought the appeal had received a sentence so harsh that it violated the Constitution. But the chief justice endorsed only a case-by-case approach, saying that an offender's age could be considered in deciding whether a life sentence was so disproportionate to the crime as to violate the Eighth Amendment.
rest at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/us/politics/18court.html?th&emc=th
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