Trying juveniles as adults

Sun Sentinel, Fort Lauderdale: Florida is ground zero for a question that the U.S. Supreme Court is pondering: Is it constitutional for judges to send children to prison for the rest of their lives for crimes other than murder?

The case before the high court demonstrates how far out of the legal mainstream Florida is on this issue.

Nationally, just 109 prisoners are serving life sentences without the possibility of parole for crimes — short of homicide — that they committed as minors. But 77 of them, more than two out of three, are in Florida. No other state comes close.

Permanent threats

In Florida’s brief to the high court defending the state’s juvenile sentencing law, it argued that it has the right to imprison for life criminals who are deemed permanent threats to society. Granted.

But when the criminal is a child, it’s not realistic for a judge to conclude that the growing, changing individual standing before the bench at sentencing can never be rehabilitated.

It would make far more sense to allow a parole board sometime in the future to decide whether a child convicted of a serious crime has been rehabilitated enough to get a shot at being a productive taxpaying member of society, rather than a tax-draining prisoner.

Regardless of how the Supreme Court rules, Florida shouldn’t have to be told that its practice of forever locking away minors who don’t commit murder is as unreasonable as it is unusual.