The Retroactivity Roadmap: How Montgomery Exposes Challenges to LWOP Mandatory Sentences
Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow.
--Aesop
Retroactivity matters. It provides a tool for righting wrongs, making amends, and correcting errors. Yet in most cases, retroactivity remains the exception to the rule. This is because retroactivity requires undoing many prior cases and finding that a new substantive rule of law applies that justifies undoing a final judgment.
At the heart of this question lies the tension between finality—the idea that criminal judgments must remain settled—and individual justice—the idea that fundamental fairness demands criminal sentences accord with constitutional requirements. Traditionally, in non-capital cases, the Supreme Court and Congress have overwhelmingly favored finality over justice. Both the federal statute—the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA)—and the applicable Supreme Court precedent—Teague v. Lane—severely limit the application of new rules of criminal law to cases on collateral appeal.
In Miller v. Alabama, the Supreme Court held that imposing a mandatory life-without-parole (“LWOP”) sentence on a juvenile of-fender constituted a cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment. Three years later, the question remains whether the holding in Miller applies retroactively. As explained below, the applicable exception to the Teague presumption of prospective application of new criminal rules concerns whether the new rule is substantive or procedural. Generally, if the rule is substantive, its application is retroactive; if the rule is procedural, its application is prospective. This term, the Court will take up that question in Montgomery v. Louisiana.
