The United States is the only country in the world that sentences children to life without the possibility of parole, according to The Atlantic. One of those children was a boy named Henry Montgomery. In 1963, Montgomery was 17 years old, and was convicted of shooting and killing a plainclothes police officer in East Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He was initially sentenced to death, but the Louisiana Supreme Court decided that racial tensions, including Ku Klux Klan activity in the area, had influenced the jury’s decision. Instead, the court resentenced him to life in prison. There is hope, however, that soon he’ll be coming home.
Montgomery is now a long way removed from the
teenager he once was. He is 75 years old. He has been in prison at the
Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola, for 57 years.
Sometimes numbers like this exist as abstractions.
What does 57 years mean? What are 57 years spent living inside a cage? What
they are is a lifetime.
When Montgomery was sent to prison, the Civil Rights
Act and Voting Rights Act had yet to be signed. Both Martin Luther King Jr. and
Malcolm X were still alive. Ruby Bridges was 9 years old. Four little girls had
just been killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. A
gallon of gas was 30 cents and a loaf of bread was 20. The Beatles had yet to
come to America. “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” by the Beach Boys, was Billboard’s No.
1 song of the year. My own parents, now in their 60s, had yet to begin
kindergarten.
Today, according to the Sentencing Project, a
research and advocacy organization that works to reduce incarceration in the
U.S., more
than 53,000 people are serving life-without-parole sentences. The state of
Louisiana, where 70 percent of people serving life sentences are Black, has
more people serving life sentences per capita than any other state in the
country. Until recently that number included thousands of children, but two
relatively recent Supreme Court cases, one of which had Henry Montgomery at its
center, changed that. More than 50 years after his original sentence,
Montgomery became the petitioner in a 2016 case, Montgomery v. Louisiana,
in which the Court ruled that its 2012 decision, Miller v. Alabama—which
banned mandatory life without parole for children—could be applied
retroactively. The Miller decision was based on research
demonstrating that children’s brains are not as fully developed as adults’.
This seems obvious and intuitive, but new neuroscientific evidence made clear
that children who commit crimes cannot be held culpable to the same extent as
adults, and that they have even more of an opportunity to change.
The decisions affected more than 2,600 people who
had been sentenced to life without parole, who could now be resentenced.
But simply because someone has had the opportunity
to be resentenced doesn’t mean that they will be released. Miller banned
juvenile life without parole as a mandatory sentence, but did not ban
it outright. So although 800 people who had been previously sentenced to life
without the possibility of parole have been released since the Montgomery ruling,
more than 1,700 people sentenced as juveniles to life without parole across the
country still remain behind bars. And despite the Supreme Court’s assertion
that he is “an example of one kind of evidence that prisoners might use to
demonstrate rehabilitation,” the petitioner of the case, Henry Montgomery, has
remained in prison as well.
One person who is free because of Montgomery’s case
is Andrew Hundley, a co-founder and the executive director of the Louisiana Parole Project. Originally
sent to prison at 15 years old, Hundley served nearly 20 years in state prisons
across Louisiana until 2016, when he became the first juvenile lifer in
Louisiana released from prison following the Montgomery ruling. Since
his own release, he has been working to get Montgomery and others out of
prison. “I feel like it’s my life’s work,” he told me. He was grateful to have
been released, but thought that Montgomery should have been the first one
allowed to come home. “Henry was in prison for 18 years before I was born. And
I’ve been home five and a half years now.”
Soon, Montgomery could join Hundley and the hundreds
of other people who became free because of his 2016 case. Next Wednesday,
Montgomery is scheduled to go in front of a three-person parole board that will
decide whether he will be released or remain incarcerated. This will not be the
first time that Montgomery has gone in front of a parole board. He has been
denied parole on two occasions, mostly recently in April 2019. In each case,
two of the parole-board members voted in favor of release, and one did not. In
Louisiana, at that time, parole decisions had to be unanimous.
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