Feazell v. Bean

Doneale Feazell was sentenced to death for attempted robbery and murder by the Eighth Judicial District Court of Nevada. Mr. Feazell was 18 years old at the time of the offense. Though his sentence was originally upheld on appeal by the Nevada Supreme Court, Mr. Feazell subsequently secured a resentencing hearing after successfully challenging the aggravating circumstances relating to his attempted robbery conviction. He was resentenced to life without parole. Mr. Feazell then filed another two petitions for writ of habeas corpus in the Eighth Judicial District Court where he is challenging his life without parole sentence pursuant to the Nevada state constitution’s prohibition of cruel or unusual punishment.

Juvenile Law Center and the ACLU of Nevada filed an amicus brief in support of Mr. Feazell’s petition for writ of habeas corpus, arguing life without parole sentences for older adolescents, like Mr. Feazell, are unconstitutional under Article 1, Section 6 of the Nevada Constitution. Our brief argued that based on the text and the history of Section 6 and Nevada’s general history of protecting individual rights, Nevada’s protections against cruel or unusual punishments is both broader than the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, and therefore affords greater protections against extreme sentencing for emerging adults. We argued that contemporary standards of decency reflected in current scientific research demonstrating that the defining characteristics of youth, like susceptibility to peer pressure and risk-taking, persist beyond age 18, and that states across the country, as well as the federal government, already afford older adolescents additional protections pursuant to a variety of criminal and civil laws, dictate that emerging adults like Mr. Feazell should not be subjected to life without parole sentences. We urged the Nevada District Court to follow the lead of state supreme courts in Michigan, Massachusetts, and Washington, which have all recently found that mandatory life without parole is unconstitutional for youth under 21.
 

LEGAL TEAM

Attorneys

Andrew Keats, Lia Knox-Hershey, Jessica Feierman