Should the Eighth Amendment Allow All Juvenile Murder Accomplices to Receive Life Without Parole?
No court has addressed the constitutional significance of sentencing juvenile murder accomplices who play a minimal role in the underlying killing to life in prison without parole. Indeed, no precedent makes clear whether it is cruel and unusual to impose that sentence on juvenile offenders convicted of first-degree murder pursuant to either the felony-murder doctrine or an accomplice theory of liability, notwithstanding their minimal involvement in the victims death. To investigate this unanswered question, Part I of this Article explores the imposition of life without parole sentences on juvenile non-killers convicted of murder via either the felony-murder doctrine or accomplice liability. In doing so, Part I attempts to illustrate the problematic nature of imposing these sentences on less culpable juvenile non-killers convicted of first-degree murder by offering examples at the state and federal levels of defendants who received identical sentences yet played different roles in the
No court has addressed the constitutional significance of sentencing juvenile murder accomplices who play a minimal role in the underlying killing to life in prison without parole. Indeed, no precedent makes clear whether it is cruel and unusual to impose that sentence on juvenile offenders convicted of first-degree murder pursuant to either the felony-murder doctrine or an accomplice theory of liability, notwithstanding their minimal involvement in the victim’s death. To investigate this unanswered question, Part I of this Article explores the imposition of life without parole sentences on juvenile non-killers convicted of murder via either the felony-murder doctrine or accomplice liability. In doing so, Part I attempts to illustrate the problematic nature of imposing these sentences on less culpable juvenile non-killers convicted of first-degree murder by offering examples at the state and federal levels of defendants who received identical sentences yet played different roles in the
