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Opinion: At the Supreme Court, a tale of two Bretts
Opinion by
Ruth Marcus
Deputy editorial page editor
April 23, 2021 at 5:43 p.m. EDT
Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh has enjoyed a life of comfort and privilege, the son of a Beltway lobbyist and the product of the Ivy League. Mississippi prisoner Brett Jones has endured a life of misery and abuse, the son of an alcoholic father who brutalized his mother and a stepfather who beat him.
As fate would have it, their lives converged this week: In an opinion released Thursday, Brett Kavanaugh upheld Brett Jones’s sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole for killing his grandfather just 23 days after his 15th birthday. (And, yes, let us pause here to note a certain irony in the fact that the opinion was written by a justice whose confirmation hearings featured discussion about how people can change after high school.)
The 6-to-3 ruling in Jones v. Mississippi was notable not only for the juxtaposition of the two Bretts. It offered a snapshot of a court transformed by the arrival of Kavanaugh and two other conservative justices named by President Donald Trump. And it demonstrated how a conservative majority bent on reshaping the law can do so without the showy fanfare of explicitly overruling precedents.
Until Thursday, the arc of the court’s rulings on severe punishments for juvenile offenders bent toward leniency. Driven by former justice Anthony M. Kennedy, for whom Kavanaugh clerked and whose seat he now occupies, the court repeatedly ruled that the fact of a criminal offender’s youth made all the difference in the constitutionality of the punishment. In 2005, the court banned the use of the death penalty for juvenile offenders. Five years later, calling a life sentence without any possibility of parole “an especially harsh punishment for a juvenile,” it barred such sentences for minors convicted of crimes short of murder.
More.......
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/at-the-supreme-court-a-tale-of-two-bretts/2021/04/23/61ec08b2-a45b-11eb-a7ee-949c574a09ac_story.html?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F32064a6%2F60843cb59d2fda39cec86b6e%2F602bea569bbc0f73f6ccfcfc%2F54%2F72%2F60843cb59d2fda39cec86b6e
Ruth Marcus
Deputy editorial page editor
April 23, 2021 at 5:43 p.m. EDT
Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh has enjoyed a life of comfort and privilege, the son of a Beltway lobbyist and the product of the Ivy League. Mississippi prisoner Brett Jones has endured a life of misery and abuse, the son of an alcoholic father who brutalized his mother and a stepfather who beat him.
As fate would have it, their lives converged this week: In an opinion released Thursday, Brett Kavanaugh upheld Brett Jones’s sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole for killing his grandfather just 23 days after his 15th birthday. (And, yes, let us pause here to note a certain irony in the fact that the opinion was written by a justice whose confirmation hearings featured discussion about how people can change after high school.)
The 6-to-3 ruling in Jones v. Mississippi was notable not only for the juxtaposition of the two Bretts. It offered a snapshot of a court transformed by the arrival of Kavanaugh and two other conservative justices named by President Donald Trump. And it demonstrated how a conservative majority bent on reshaping the law can do so without the showy fanfare of explicitly overruling precedents.
Until Thursday, the arc of the court’s rulings on severe punishments for juvenile offenders bent toward leniency. Driven by former justice Anthony M. Kennedy, for whom Kavanaugh clerked and whose seat he now occupies, the court repeatedly ruled that the fact of a criminal offender’s youth made all the difference in the constitutionality of the punishment. In 2005, the court banned the use of the death penalty for juvenile offenders. Five years later, calling a life sentence without any possibility of parole “an especially harsh punishment for a juvenile,” it barred such sentences for minors convicted of crimes short of murder.
More.......
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/at-the-supreme-court-a-tale-of-two-bretts/2021/04/23/61ec08b2-a45b-11eb-a7ee-949c574a09ac_story.html?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F32064a6%2F60843cb59d2fda39cec86b6e%2F602bea569bbc0f73f6ccfcfc%2F54%2F72%2F60843cb59d2fda39cec86b6e
