Abstract
Response to Jeffrey Kirchmeier, Beyond Compare: A Codefendant’s Prison Sentence as a Mitigating Factor in Death Penalty Cases
The argument that the Court’s desire to eliminate arbitrariness in capital sentencing should allow juries to consider co-defendant sentences applies with equal force to juveniles sentenced to life without parole—to whom the Court has applied similar constitutional protections —or to juveniles facing a term of years effectively requiring death in prison. In our work representing juveniles, we have seen the same kinds of extreme sentencing disparities between co-defendants, which result in punishments that “smack[] of little more than a lottery system.”
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