US condemned for jailing children for life
At least 2,225 child offenders are serving life sentences without parole in the US, compared to a total of 12 elsewhere in the world, two leading human rights groups said in urging the US government to abolish a practice that violates international law.
In the first study to investigate the US practice of jailing youths for life in adult prisons without the possibility of parole, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International found the rate at which the sentence is imposed on children nationwide is about three times higher than it was 15 years ago.
The groups urged state and federal lawmakers to abolish the sentence, which is barred by international law and is currently practised in only three other countries – South Africa, Tanzania and Israel.
“We’re asking for a recognition that these are child offenders and they should have access to parole hearings,” said the report’s author, Alison Parker, senior researcher with the New York-based Human Rights Watch.
“This would bring us in line with the rest of the world and make the US act in accordance with human rights laws,” Parker said, adding that such sentences are a violation of international human rights laws and reject the well-established criminal justice principle that children are less culpable than adults for the crimes they commit.
The 157-page study released today found that 42 US states currently have laws that allow youth offenders to receive life without parole sentences for crimes they committed as juveniles.
The report, entitled “The Rest of their Lives: Life without Parole for Child Offenders in the United States,” found Virginia, Louisiana and Michigan were the most aggressive in imposing the sentence on juveniles.
Out of the 154 countries for which researchers were able to obtain data, 14 countries have laws allowing for the imposition of life sentences on youth offenders.
The sentence is explicitly prohibited by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child – a treaty which only the US and Somalia have not ratified.
The groups are calling on US President George Bush and state governors to support the enactment of legislation that would abolish life without parole sentences for juveniles.
They also want all youth offenders to be tried in juvenile court instead of having some charged in criminal court.
But altering US law to ban the practice is likely to meet with resistance.
While 93% of youth offenders serving life sentences without parole were convicted of murder, an estimated 26% were convicted of felony murder, the report said.
Under that charge, anyone involved in a crime during which a death results is guilty of murder, regardless of whether they committed the killing.
As a result, some juvenile offenders are being jailed for life simply for being present at the crime scene.
It found that while many of the child offenders in prison are now over 18, 16% were between 13 and 15 years old when they committed their crimes.
The groups, citing a US Supreme Court ruling in March that banned the execution of juvenile offenders, said the high court found that juveniles are “categorically less culpable” than adults.
Such a ruling should highlight to the American public that youth offenders should also not be subjected to a life sentence without parole, they argued.
The study also found that black youth offenders are sentenced at a rate 10 times higher than that of white youth.
