Michigan prosecutors are still asking for more time to respond to a Michigan Supreme Court decision from April.
The court found it unconstitutional to hand down mandatory life prison sentences for crimes committed when someone was 19 or 20 years old.
As a result, the state’s young adult lifers must receive a new sentence.
Prosecutors got a 180-day window to decide whether to again pursue life without parole in those cases.
Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan President J. Dee Brooks said it takes a lot of resources for offices to go back and decide what to do.
“These really need to be careful, well thought out decisions, and we want to do the right thing, we need to do what’s fair and just. And by forcing us to make hurried decisions, I don’t think that helps anybody, I really don’t,” Brooks said.
Brooks and other prosecutors are looking to the Michigan Legislature to step in and give them more time to make those calls.
But, last week, the state House of Representatives voted down legislation that would have doubled their timeline to 360 days. The bill would also have raised the minimum prison stay for people who don’t receive life without parole sentences for certain crimes.
Representative Sarah Lightner (R-Springport) sponsored the plan. She was livid after the first vote on her bill failed.
Talking to reporters, Lightner accused her colleagues of “voting no against victims” and siding with “the worst of the worst.”
“We all campaign on wanting to have safe communities and give law enforcement the tools they need in the toolbox to keep us safe, and then we vote stupidly,” Lightner told reporters.
The bill failed to gain enough votes twice, despite Republicans in the House majority begrudgingly making compromises in an effort to court some Democrats to put them over the threshold. Republicans were missing three members and unable to pass anything without at least one Democratic vote.
The original legislation would have set the maximum sentence for crimes like first degree murder at 80 years and the minimum between 35 and 50 years. It would have also required people to serve those sentences for multiple convictions consecutively, rather than concurrently as the law presently states.
The compromise softened that maximum sentence to 60 years, the minimum to between 25 and 40 years, and only required consecutive sentences in cases involving multiple deaths.
Democrats still had some concerns, however. Caucus spokesperson Tracy Wimmer said House Democrats remain open to further negotiations.
“House Democrats had concerns with the package and were hoping to be able to negotiate some changes with Lightner and the House Republicans to bring the legislation more in line with recommendations from juvenile justice organizations,” Wimmer said in a text.
Wimmer added negotiations stalled “because of the broader difficulties House Republicans were having that day.”
One concern that juvenile justice groups had raised about the legislation had to do with the tougher punishments for people being resentenced.
The Michigan Supreme Court’s ruling that banned mandatory life sentences for young adults was an expansion of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2012 Miller v. Alabama decision and the state Supreme Court’s 2022 People v. Parks ruling, which banned such punishments for minors and 18-year-olds respectively.
The rulings found such sentences were cruel and unusual punishments, in part because young people’s brains haven’t fully developed in ways that help them with impulse control and resisting peer pressure.
Andrew Keats is a senior attorney with the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center. He cautioned lawmakers against re-instating mandatory life sentences by a different means, suggesting it would open the door to legal challenges.
“Whether it’s in name or in deed, serving multiple consecutive 50-year terms or even 30-year terms quickly turns into a life without parole sentence by the sheer math,” Keats said.
It’s possible House lawmakers could try again to pass the legislation ahead of the early October deadline.
