AS THOUGH THEY ARE CHILDREN: REPLACING MANDATORY MINIMUMS WITH INDIVIDUALIZED SENTENCING DETERMINATIONS FOR JUVENILES IN PENNSYLVANIA CRIMINAL COURT AFTER MILLER V. ALABAMA

Volume 86, No. 1, Fall 2013

By Rachael Frumin Eisenberg

In 2012, the United States Supreme Court decided Miller v. Alaba and prohibited the imposition of mandatory life without the possibility of parole (LWOP) sentences on juvenile offenders. According to the Court in Miller, state-sentencing schemes violate the Eighth Amendment if they fail to provide juvenile offenders with both a proportionate and individualized sentence. However, juveniles tried in adult court in Pennsylvania are still subjected to the same mandatory minimum sentencing statutes as their adult counterparts. In order for Pennsylvania to fully comply with Miller, all mandatory minimum sentencing statutes should be inapplicable to juveniles and be replaced with a system of individualized sentencing that takes into consideration the inherent diminished culpability of children.

This Comment proceeds in four sections. Section II discusses the current state of juvenile sentencing policy in Pennsylvania. Section III discusses the judicial precedent and social science underlying Miller’s proportionality requirement. Section IV discusses the judicial precedent underlying Miller’s individualized sentencing requirement. Lastly, Section V examines Pennsylvania’s inadequate response to Miller, the available alternatives to mandatory sentencing for juveniles in Pennsylvania, and a recommended legislative change that would bring Pennsylvania into full compliance with Miller.

READ COMMENT….Eisenberg_ForPub-1

By Fiona Burke, Temple Law Review Volume 96 Staff Editor Liberals have, as exit polls and Bernie Sanders point out, largely lost the working class and, in fact, most of America. There are many reasons for this, all of which have been dissected and analyzed ad nauseum in the past few weeks and likely will be for even years. One such […]

Author: Jasnoor Hundal In early August 2023, the Supreme Court stayed the Second Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision, In re Purdue Pharma L.P., and granted certiorari to hear oral argument in December of 2023. The parties were asked to brief and argue “[w]hether the Bankruptcy Code authorizes a court to approve, as part of a […]

Randy Kominsky is a member of Temple Law’s Class of 1979. Mr. Kominsky was a staff editor for Volume 51 and an associate research editor for Volume 52 of Temple Law Review. His case note, Housing Discrimination – The Appropriate Evidentiary Standard for Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, was published in 1978.[1] After graduating, he moved […]