Clay v. Tresler, SJC-12032
This case is about the legality of a 2012 statute requiring that prisoners serving life sentences get a supermajority, rather than a majority, of the parole board to win parole. Specifically, the issue is whether this is an unconstitutional ex post facto law as applied to prisoners whose crimes occurred before the statute’s effective date. While this issue affects both adults and juveniles, it has a disproportionate impact on juveniles—like Clay—who were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life-without-parole sentences that were later found to be unconstitutional in Diatchenko v. Dist. Attorney for the Suffolk Dist., 466 Mass. 655 (2013). The Youth Advocacy Division of CPCS is going to file an amicus brief focused on this disproportionate effect.
Commonwealth v. Carter, SJC-12043
The defendant in this case was indicted as a youthful offender for manslaughter for allegedly encouraging a friend to commit suicide. The Supreme Judicial Court will consider the sufficiency of the evidence supporting this indictment. While the factual scenario presented by the case may be unusual, the case does present an issue of general significance to juvenile law in Massachusetts. The Youth Advocacy Division of CPCS will submit an amicus brief arguing that in determining whether a juvenile has committed involuntary manslaughter by engaging in wanton and reckless conduct, the Court should not ask, as it normally would, whether the juvenile acted “with knowledge of facts that would cause a reasonable person to know that a danger of serious harm existed.” Instead, the court should apply a juvenile-specific standard that asks whether a reasonable juvenile of a similar age would have known that a danger of serious harm existed. This standard is in line with recent case law acknowledging that “children are different” and that the law must take this difference into account. It is also in line with what multiple other jurisdictions have done for decades.