The Supreme Court Said Their Sentencing Was Unconstitutional. But They’re Still Behind Bars.
Art by Emmanuel Ignatius Bwibo
Efrén Paredes Jr.’s life outside prison was over before he was old enough for a driver’s license.
With no criminal record, 15-year-old Paredes worked part-time as a bagger at a Michigan grocery store. One night, after hours, his co-worker was shot and killed during a robbery. Paredes, who maintains his innocence, was charged as an adult and convicted in a widely publicized 1989 trial, in which the rap lyrics he copied into a high school notebook were used against him as evidence of premeditation. The judge gave Paredes the mandatory sentence for first-degree murder in Michigan: life without parole.
More than two decades later, the U.S. Supreme Court began a series of decisions that would all but deem that sentence unconstitutional for minors. But of the more than 2,800 people sentenced to life without parole as juveniles in the United States, approximately 2,150 remain in prison, including Paredes.
The Court decided, in 2010, that “juvenile life without parole” (JLWOP) is an unconstitutional sentence for crimes other than homicide. In 2012, in Miller v. Alabama, the Court prohibited JLWOP as a mandatory minimum sentence for any crime but did not ban it outright. Finally, in 2016, Montgomery v. Louisiana made the Miller decision retroactive, ruling that people like Paredes “must be given the opportunity to show their crime did not reflect irreparable corruption; and, if it did not, their hope for some years of life outside prison walls must be restored.”