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Demand an End to Child Life Without Parole

Children can and do commit terrible crimes, however, when they do, they should be held accountable in a manner that reflects both their culpability and their special capacity for rehabilitation. Send a message to your Governor saying children under 18, who by law are not responsible enough to vote, live on their own, sign contracts, sit on a jury or get married without parental consent are too young to be sentenced as adults spending the rest of their lives in a prison cell without any chance of review or parole.

To learn more please visit our website.

Read the joint Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International report
The Rest of Their Lives: Life Without Parole for Child Offenders in the United States (PDF format).

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Message Recipients

Your Governor(s)

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Subject:*

Dear (recipient name),

As your constituent, I urge you to support the adoption and enactment of state legislation that eliminates the sentence of life without parole for any crime committed by a child under the age of eighteen.

Children can and do commit terrible crimes, however, when they do, they should be held accountable in a manner that reflects both their culpability and their special capacity for rehabilitation.  Children do not have adults' developed abilities to think, to weigh consequences, to make sound decisions, to control their impulses, and to resist group pressures.  Children, who by law are not responsible enough to vote, live on their own, sign contracts, sit on a jury or get married without parental consent are too young to be treated as fully responsible adults and sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in a prison cell without chance of review or any chance of parole.

Until the sentence of life without parole for children is abolished, I urge you to review clemency applications of all child offenders sentenced to life without parole and commute their sentences to terms of years or give clemency. In reviewing clemency applications, please take into account the international legal prohibition against life without parole for persons under the age of eighteen.

Justice requires a sentence commensurate with both the nature of the crime and the culpability of the offender.  To begin to address this issue, I urge you to develop and publish annual statistics on youth in the adult criminal justice system, including: demographic information (age, race, sex), data on children tried in criminal court, the manner by which each child reached criminal court (e.g., transfer, direct file), the nature of the crimes alleged, existence of prior adult record, and if convicted, the precise sentence received.

Thank you for your time and attention to this important matter.

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