John Roberts

“ Determining the appropriate sentence for a teenager convicted of murder presents grave and challenging questions of morality and social policy. Our role, however, is to apply the law, not to answer such questions. The pertinent law here is the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits "cruel and unusual punishments. " Today, the Court invokes that Amendment to ban a punishment that the Court does not itself characterize as unusual, and that could not plausibly be described as such. ”

“ The principle behind today's decision seems to be only that because juveniles are different from adults, they must be sentenced differently. See ante, at 476–480. There is no clear reason that principle would not bar all mandatory sentences for juveniles, or any juvenile sentence as harsh as what a similarly situated adult would receive. Unless confined, the only stopping point for the Court's analysis would be never permitting juvenile offenders to be tried as adults. ”

“ It is a fair question whether this Court should ever assume a legislature is so ignorant of its own laws that it does not understand that two of them interact with each other, especially on an issue of such importance as the one before us. But in Graham and Thompson it was at least plausible as a practical matter. In Graham, the extreme rarity with [p498] which the sentence in question was imposed could suggest that legislatures did not really intend the inevitable result of the laws they passed. ”

“ A decent society protects the innocent from violence. A mature society may determine that this requires removing those guilty of the most heinous murders from its midst, both as protection for its other members and as a concrete expression of its standards of decency. ”

“ In a classic bait and switch, the Court now tells state legislatures that—Roper's promise notwithstanding—they do not have power to guarantee that once someone commits a heinous murder, he will never do so again. ”

“ Some of the jurisdictions that impose mandatory life without parole on juvenile murderers do so as a result of two statutes: one providing that juveniles charged with serious crimes may be tried as adults, and another generally mandating that those convicted of murder be imprisoned for life. According to the Court, our cases suggest that where the sentence results from the interaction of two such statutes, the legislature can be considered to have imposed the resulting sentences "inadvertent [ly] ." Ante, at 485–487. The Court relies on Graham and Thompson v. ”

“ A case that expressly puts an issue in a different category from its own subject, draws a line between the two, and states that the two should not be compared, cannot fairly be said to control that issue. ”