In 2019, the ACLU of Wisconsin and attorneys Issa Kohler-Hausmann and Avery Gilbert, with pro-bono assistance from Wisconsin law firms Quarles & Brady LLP and Foley & Lardner LLP, filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court in Madison seeking to halt unconstitutional refusals to release parole-eligible people sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes they committed while they were children.
The United States Supreme Court has held that states must give most juveniles sentenced to life in prison a chance to earn parole release based on a standard of rehabilitation and reform. The suit reveals that the current parole system, which gives parole commissioners unchecked discretion to deny release, fails to provide a meaningful second chance of freedom for people who committed crimes as children.
Despite clear evidence of maturation and rehabilitation by the plaintiffs, the parole commission has denied their release, often repeatedly, well after the dates, they were made eligible for parole by the sentencing judges under Wisconsin law. The Parole Commission systematically denies release to juvenile lifers, even though, in many cases, parole commissioners explicitly recognize that the plaintiffs have reformed.
More recently, the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin ruled in 2021 that a lawsuit alleging that Wisconsin is unconstitutionally denying the possibility of parole to juveniles sentenced to life in prison can proceed.
The court said that the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Jones v. Mississippi, which dealt with what a judge must do before sentencing a juvenile to life without parole, does not bar this case, which deals with the separate question of what standard and procedures should be used when considering life-sentenced juveniles eligible for release to parole supervision after the minimum term of imprisonment has been served.
In November 2022, the court ruled that the proposed Eighth Amendment standard for making parole decisions related to juvenile offenders is not supported by Supreme Court precedent. The court granted summary judgment to the defendants on all of our Eighth Amendment claims, and rejected due process claims, and dismissed the Sixth Amendment claims, stating that parole decisions do not increase an offender’s original sentence, and therefore, do not implicate the Sixth Amendment right to a jury.
