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Should We Sentence Teens to Life in Prison? This week, the Supreme Court will hear a case testing whether the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment prohibits sentencing a teen to life in prison without parole for a nonhomicide crime. Punishment is generally deemed "cruel" if it's more than "graduated and proportional." It is constitutionally "unusual" if imposed so infrequently "that a national consensus has developed against it." (). The seeds for this particular constitutional challenge were sown in Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion in a 2005 case, Roper v. Simmons, By Dahlia Lithwick Thursday, November 5, 2009 Read more...(2 Pages)
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