In People v. Contreras, a 4-3 Supreme Court holds that sentences of 50-years-to-life and 58-years-to-life for non-homicide crimes committed by minors violate the Eighth Amendment ban against “cruel and unusual punishments.” Two years ago, the court held in People v. Franklin that denying parole eligibility for 25 years is not a constitutionally prohibited “functional equivalent” of life without parole. Today’s opinion — by Justice Goodwin Liu for himself and Justices Ming Chin, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, and Leondra Kruger — rejects a proposed rule that would allow sentences giving juvenile offenders an opportunity for parole within their natural lifetimes based on Centers for Disease Control life expectancy data. The court says that, even if it were OK to take into account gender and race differences in life expectancies, a life expectancy estimates that half the population will die before reaching the calculated age and “[a]n opportunity to obtain release does not seem ‘meaningful’ or ‘realistic’ within the meaning of [SCOTUS case law] if the chance of living long enough to meet that opportunity is roughly the same as a coin toss.”
The court leaves some important questions unanswered. There are recent statutory and regulatory changes — about which the court requested supplemental briefing — that require parole hearings after specified time periods, but the majority opinion “decline[s] to resolve whether [they] affect the validity of defendants’ sentences and instead leave these novel issues for the lower courts to address in the first instance.” The majority also declines to state what the maximum constitutional sentence can be in this or other cases, “find[ing] it prudent to follow a ‘cardinal principle of judicial restraint — if it is not necessary to decide more, it is necessary not to decide more.’”
There are two three-justice dissenting opinions, written by Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye and by pro tem Justice Sandy Kriegler. Justice Carol Corrigan signs both dissents.
Saying that the court’s decision “opens the door to ill-advised and ill-informed incursions into sentencing questions that have, to this point, properly been understood as the Legislature’s domain,” the Chief Justice’s 38-page opinion claims the majority misreads U.S. Supreme Court case law and disregards that the new statutes and regulations “take defendants’ sentences outside of [that case law’s] purview.” She says “the majority ultimately condemns as unconstitutional sentences that are materially different from the ones defendants actually will serve.” Justice Kriegler complains that the majority opinion “requires the trial court to consider issues it has already ruled on, and at the same time, provides not a whiff of direction on how the lower court is expected to cure the purported error.”
The Court affirms the Fourth District, Division One, Court of Appeal.
