WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday declined to place new limits on sentences of life in prison without parole for juvenile offenders, ruling against a Mississippi man convicted of killing his grandfather at age 15 in a case testing the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
The justices in a 6-3 ruling rejected arguments by the inmate, Brett Jones, that his sentence of life in prison with no chance of parole violated the Eighth Amendment because the judge in his trial had not made a separate finding that he was permanently incorrigible. The court’s six conservatives were in the majority, with the three liberal members dissenting.
Jones, now 31, was convicted of fatally stabbing his grandfather in 2004 in a dispute involving the boy’s girlfriend.
(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Will Dunham)
