Stateside's conversations with Deborah LaBelle and Efren Paredes For years, states around the country had laws that made a sentence of life without the possibility of parole mandatory for children who committed serious violent offenses. In Michigan, that meant that some 360 juvenile defendants were sent to prison for life. Over the past decade, a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions found that those mandatory sentences were unconstitutional. But on April 22, the Supreme Court released a decision — with conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh penning the majority opinion — that complicates those years of reform. Back in 2012, the Supreme Court said in Miller v. Alabama that children are different from adults, and sentencing them to life without parole amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, which is unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment. The court said that only in rare cases — when the defendant displayed “permanent incorrigibility” — could they be sentenced to life without parole. Four years later, in