Talk Radio News Service: News, Politics, Media

By Laura Woodhead - Talk Radio News Service

Life sentences without parole for juvenile murderers are justified and constitutional, a panel of legal experts said Monday during a panel discussion at the Heritage Foundation. The discussion coincided with the release of the right-leaning think tank's report "Adult Time for Adult Crimes: Exposing the Movement to Set Free Juvenile Killers and Violent Offenders," a study former Attorney General Edwin Meese III said aims to "set straight the record on this subject and to educate the public" on serious juvenile offenders' sentences.

"[The study finds that] Juvenile life without possibility of parole is reasonable, constitutional and appropriately rare," Meese said. "Contrary to what many have contended, the United States has no international obligation to ban the life without parole sentence for serious juvenile criminals."

The 2 1/2 year long study's release comes before the Supreme Court hears two cases from Florida surrounding the sentencing of juveniles.

Groups that advocate parole for juvenile offenders argue their case using "carefully crafted lies," Meese asserted. Paul Wallace, Chief of Appeals at the Delaware Department of Justice, said that the opposing view usually revolved around 8th Amendment arguments, that life without parole is a "cruel and unusual punishment" for a juvenile criminal.

"The Supreme Court has always said that you don't even look at the 8th amendment unless... the sentence is grossly disproportionate and grossly disproportionate to the crime," said Wallace.

"Outside the death penalty context, [the Supreme Court] has never found a sentence of incarceration to be disproportionate," Wallace noted."The Supreme Court has kept the line between death penalty cases and incarceration, even life without parole incarceration. The disturbing part in the current discussion is this: that certain people want to blur that line, they want to take down that wall between those sentences."

"[The blurring of this line" would give offenders] a right which [would] jeopardize all non capital sentences," said co- author of the report, Charles Stimson, Senior Legal Fellow at the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation.

Stimson said that these lobbying campaigns were filled with misleading statistics and misreadings of Supreme Court precedent that did not represent the truth behind juvenile sentencing.

"[There needs to be a debate] that is framed by a forthright, honest and direct discussion of the facts," Stimson argued.

"Most juveniles deserve to be treated in the juvenile justice system," he said. However, the juvenile offenders who received life without parole "deserved a fair trial, got a fair trial and were justly sentenced."