Liliana Segura | The Nation

On a Tuesday last March, the state of Mississippi executed Larry Matthew Puckett, a 35-year-old man convicted of sexually assaulting and killing his boss’s wife, 28-year-old Rhonda Hatten Griffis, in 1995. Matt, as his family called him, was an Eagle Scout at the time; he had just graduated from high school and was days away from leaving for basic training with the Navy before he was arrested. From the beginning he insisted on his innocence, claiming that his former employer had killed his wife in a rage upon discovering her and Matt together in her mobile home. Although his story contained inconsistencies, there were red flags. Griffis was beaten to death with a club, yet her blood was nowhere to be found on Puckett’s clothes, just on her husband’s. Nor was Puckett’s semen found on her body.

The Mississippi Innocence Project reviewed his case in 2008, primarily due to concerns over the role of one of two now-famously discredited medical examiners whose testimony had sent innocent men to death row. But neither man was central to his case. Nor was there DNA to test. No further inquiry went forward. The courts upheld his conviction.

But Puckett’s family continued to believe him, particularly his mother, Mary. When his lawyers pushed to fight for his sentence to be commuted to life without parole, she recalls, “We always protested and said no, that’s not what we want for him. We want him to come home.”

It’s not very often the concept of restorative justice gets much play outside scholarly publications or reformist criminal justice circles, so first, some credit for Max Fisher at The Atlantic for giving it an earnest look last week. In seeking to explain Norway’s seemingly measly twenty-one-year sentence for remorseless, mass-murdering white supremacist Anders Breivik—a sentence that is certain to be extended to last the rest of his life—Fisher casts a critical eye on the underlying philosophy that animates that country’s sentencing practices, finding it to be “radically different” from what we’re used to in the United States. When it comes to criminal sentencing, he notes, the United States favors a retributive model—in which an offender must be duly punished for his crimes—over a restorative model that “emphasizes healing: for the victims, for the society, and, yes, for the criminal him or herself.”

“I don’t have an answer for which is better,” he says at the outset, acknowledging that his own sense of outrage over Breivik’s sentence—like that of many Americans—“hints at not just how different the two systems are, but how deeply we may have come to internalize our understanding of justice, which, whatever its merits, doesn’t seem to be as universally applied as we might think.”

This is true, and a promising place to start. The United States is uniquely punitive when it comes to sentencing compared to much of the rest of the world, whether the crime is murder or drug possession. Putting aside the death penalty, which lands us in dubious international company, in countries with life sentences on the books, prisoners are often eligible for release after a few decades. “Mexico will not extradite defendants who face sentences of life without parole,” the New York Times’s Adam Liptak noted in 2005 (Most of Latin America has no such sentence). “And when Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish gunman who tried to kill Pope John Paul II in 1981, was pardoned in 2000, an Italian judge remarked, ‘No one stays 20 years in prison.’ ”

In May The Nation introduced readers to Trina Garnett, a woman serving life without parole in Pennsylvania for a crime she committed in 1976. A severely neglected and abused child with serious mental problems, Trina was only 14 when she was arrested for setting a fire that killed two boys, on an impoverished block in the Philadelphia suburb of Chester. Represented by a pitifully inadequate attorney who was later disbarred, Trina was convicted and given two life without parole sentences. The judge, bound by the state’s mandatory sentencing statutes, called the case “one of the saddest I’ve ever seen involving a juvenile.”

On June 25, in Miller v. Alabama, the Supreme Court struck down such punishments, ruling that mandatory sentences of life without parole for juveniles are cruel and unusual, in violation of the Eighth Amendment. In a 5-4 decision written by Justice Elena Kagan, the Court held that “such mandatory penalties, by their nature, preclude a sentencer from taking account of an offender’s age and the wealth of characteristics and circumstances attendant to it.” Such characteristics include the recklessness, immaturity and underdeveloped sense of consequences that common sense suggests—and science confirms—define all teenagers. What’s more, Kagan noted, mandatory sentences leave no room to consider the basic distinguishing features of a given case. “Under these schemes,” she wrote, “every juvenile will receive the same sentence as every other—the 17-year-old and the 14-year-old, the shooter and the accomplice, the child from a stable household and the child from a chaotic and abusive one. And still worse, each juvenile…will receive the same sentence as the vast majority of adults committing similar homicide offenses.”

The decision leaned heavily on recent Court precedent. In 2005 Roper v. Simmons banned the death penalty for juveniles based on the vast neurological differences between teens and adults, which render the former less culpable and thus “less deserving of the most severe punishments.” The same logic led the Court in 2010 to forbid life without parole for teens who commit nonhomicide offenses. That ruling, in Graham v. Florida, drew parallels between the death penalty and life without parole, which were cited by Kagan in Miller. “In part because we viewed this ultimate penalty for juveniles as akin to the death penalty, we treated it similarly...We imposed a categorical ban on the sentence’s use, in a way unprecedented for a term of imprisonment.”

Martina Correia. (AP Photo/Paul Abell)
 
When Martina Correia was first diagnosed with breast cancer, her son, DeJaun, was 6 years old. The doctors gave her only six months to live. But more than ten years later, she was still alive. Death was not an option for her. She was on a mission, not just to raise her son but to save her brother’s life, even as her own life hung in the balance.