With a conservative legal majority on the United States Supreme Court, advocates are increasingly looking to state Supreme Courts to expand the rights of criminal defendants and people behind bars, The New Yorker reports.
Although the Constitution’s supremacy clause forbids states from violating federal rights, nothing bars them from amplifying those rights.
For instance, a United States Supreme Court ruling in Miller v. Alabama held that sentencing juveniles under the age of 18 to life without parole violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Justice Elena Kagan, who wrote the majority opinion, argued that children’s “diminished culpability and heightened capacity for change” required judges to consider their age when determining their punishments.
But the Supreme Court of Washington State, in a 4–3 decision, ruled that Miller should be extended to two people who’d committed homicides when they were nineteen and twenty years old, respectively. The justices noted the prohibition on “cruel punishment” in Washington’s state constitution, and cited neuroscientific research, presented in court, showing that the brains of young adults were still developing, leaving them susceptible to the same impulsive behavior as juveniles.
Similarly, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts banned life without parole for “emerging adults”—defined as anyone between eighteen and twenty-one.
The ruling, which was made in January, cited the ban on “cruel or unusual punishment” in the Massachusetts constitution, and also the principle that Eighth Amendment jurisprudence should be informed by “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society”—a standard that the U.S. Supreme Court itself has endorsed.
Now, Lauren McLane, a professor at the University of Wyoming College of Law, is hoping to convince Wyoming to find the same thing, citing the commitment to reform that permeates the state’s constitution, which says that “the penal code shall be framed on the humane principles of reformation and prevention.” She also plans to quote an 1898 ruling by the state Supreme Court which declared that “the modern prison system, at every stage of its evolution, revolves around one central thought—the possibility of reformation. . . . The reformation of the prisoner is its one animating purpose.”
Matthew Segal, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU, secured the release of five thousand people from state prisons and jails because of health risks related to covid-19 in 2020, and was the lead attorney two cases that ended with more than sixty thousand drug charges being overturned on the ground that state-run labs had engaged in misconduct and relied on fabricated evidence.
Both of those victories occurred in state court.
“The world of state courts allows for more creativity and inventiveness than you see in federal court,” Segal said.