By: Libby Skarin, Policy Director & Lobbyist, ACLU SD
On January 1, 2016, South Dakota was one of 36 states to have laws on the books allowing children who commit crimes to be sentenced to life in prison without parole. On March 29, 2016 that all changed, and we became the 15th state to ban this cruel practice with the passage of SB 140.
SB 140 becoming law was a true victory. This simple bill ended life in prison without the possibility of parole for juvenile offenders. This means that people convicted of crimes committed when they were minors will now have the opportunity to see the parole board and show them they’ve been rehabilitated. This puts South Dakota in line with a series of rulings handed down by the Supreme Court, most recently the case of Montgomery v. Louisiana, which was decided during the legislative session.
This law doesn’t guarantee that serious offenders will be released from prison. Instead, it gives people sentenced to life in prison as children a chance to turn their lives around and seek redemption. This is vitally important because studies have shown that kids are simply not as mature as adults; they’re more vulnerable to negative influences and outside pressures, they have less of an ability to remove themselves from horrific situations at home, and their brains are not fully developed. All of these reasons show why locking up kids and throwing away the key is inappropriate.
The ACLU of South Dakota worked hard on this bill, but we didn’t do it alone. We worked closely with the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, a national organization committed to ending unfair sentencing practices applied to children. For an in-depth look at the use of life in prison without parole for kids and other criminal justice issues children face (including scientific research behind the brain development of children) take a look at the Campaign’s website: http://fairsentencingofyouth.org/.
The passage of this bill gives us hope that in the future we will see more laws in South Dakota that make our criminal justice system a fairer place – one that recognizes that even when people commit crimes and make horrible mistakes they can still be redeemed.
