The ACLU recommends that states and the federal government abolish LWOP sentences for nonviolent offenses and reduce the sentences of prisoners who are already serving them.
After an exhaustive and detailed study, they concluded that the number of teens serving LWOP is closer to 1300 - not 2,574.
The authors then pointed to "The Problematics of Life Without Parole (LWOP)" as an example of expanded punishments.
Since 2005, jurors in capital cases in Texas have been given the option of imposing a sentence of life without the possibility of parole (known as LWOP), which appears to be viewed by many jurors as a satisfactory alternative.
I quoted a Human Rights Watch report that placed the number of "children" sentenced to LWOP at 2,574.
The report calculates that 3,278 prisoners were serving life without parole for drug, property and other nonviolent crimes as of 2012, comprising about 6percentt of the total life-without-parole, or LWOP, population.
The best readily available remedy to rectify such inherently unwise and unfair sentencing is for the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board to review LWOP sentences on a case-by-case basis and to recommend commutation of these sentences as they deem appropriate.
The Oklahoma Legislature's original intent in enacting LWOP was to create an alternative between life imprisonment and the death sentence in capital cases.
The column was about the number of juveniles we sentenced to life without parole (LWOP) on charges of murder or accessory to murder.
The thousands of nonviolent crimes that have resulted in LWOP sentences include possession of a crack pipe, a smudge of heroin in a bottle cap, and "a trace amount of cocaine in clothes pockets that was so minute it was invisible to the naked eye and detected only in lab tests," according to the report.
