Next week, the U.S. Supreme Court will be told that no young man can be as bad as Joe Sullivan, not even Joe Sullivan.
Sullivan was 13 when he broke into a house in Florida to rob it and, as long as he was at it, rape the 72-year-old woman living there. This came after 17 prior convictions for burglary, assault and such. A judge decided Sullivan was impervious to rehabilitation and, to protect Florida, sentenced him to life without parole.
This, justices will hear, was unconstitutional. Sullivan's lawyer will argue that it's cruel to decide a 13-year-old must be locked up forever. Groups that campaign on behalf of young criminals hope the court will rule such sentences impermissible. "You can never make that kind of judgment about a juvenile," wrote Sullivan's lawyer.
Never? Not even after 17 prior convictions? One seldom hears so pure an expression of the viewpoint. Rather, those advocating for the worst young criminals rest their arguments on the premise that an unduly harsh America is willy-nilly discarding children.
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The numbers belie this. Nationwide, about 0.8 percent of juvenile offenders are packed off to adult court. This number generally has been declining since the mid-1990s.
As for the tinier fraction that America has put away forever, anti-incarceration groups claim it numbers more than 2,500. However, Charles Stimson, a former prosecutor (and now pro bono criminal-defense attorney) who studies the issue for the Heritage Foundation, notes that this figure is inflated with people who committed crimes at 18 or 19. A more accurate number is fewer than 1,300.
Anti-incarceration groups note that children as young as 10 in theory can be so sentenced. In practice, no child under 13 has been and, Stimson points out, the overwhelming majority are 16 or 17.
In Wisconsin, precisely one person is serving a life-without-parole sentence for a crime committed under 15.