In Georgia, a thirteen-year-old child convicted of homicide can be sentenced to die in prison. While most states have retreated from juvenile life without parole, abolishing it through legislation or judicial decision, Georgia has moved in the opposite direction, becoming the nation’s leader in imposing the sentence. A sequence of Supreme Court decisions—four expanding protections and one dismantling them—has produced a volatile legal landscape in which the possibility of relief has been extended and withdrawn.
For children, life without parole is the harshest criminal penalty available, condemning them to spend the rest of their natural lives behind bars without any hope of release. In 2012, the United States Supreme Court recognized in Miller v. Alabama that children are constitutionally different from adults for purposes of sentencing: they have diminished culpability, greater capacity for change, and heightened vulnerability to outside pressures. Accordingly, the Court held that these differences must be taken into consideration before imposing juvenile life without parole, reserving it only for the child who is beyond rehabilitation or redemption. As trial courts found, however, determining whether a child is incapable of rehabilitation is an impossible task—but Georgia courts are no longer even asking the question.
In the wake of Jones v. Mississippi in 2021, in which the Supreme Court declared that trial courts were not required to make an explicit finding on the record that a child was irreparably corrupt before sentencing them to life without parole, Georgia’s use of the sentence has surged. Since 2023, eighteen children have been sentenced to die in prison, compared to the twenty-five individuals—total—serving the sentence before that year. Racial disparities that already plagued juvenile life without parole’s application have only become starker. And Georgia’s broken parole system denies those resentenced to life with the possibility of parole a chance for release, rendering the promise of relief illusory.
Drawing on trial court sentencing transcripts and appellate court decisions, this Note examines how Georgia’s courts have narrowed federal precedent, entrenching a sentencing scheme at odds with what modern society finds acceptable. It concludes that only statutory reforms, coupled with community-based prevention programs, can remedy these defects: abolishing life without parole for all juveniles, providing exemplary legal representation, ensuring meaningful parole opportunities for those sentenced as children, and investing in procedural protections. Without such changes, Georgia will continue to condemn children—disproportionately children of color—to die in prison.