Nearly 2,500 juvenile offenders are serving life sentences without parole in the United States. Human rights groups say there are almost no other countries that put teenagers in prison and keep them there to die without the possibility of parole.

That number was at the core of an angry dissent written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who asserted that if something was common it could not, by definition, be “cruel and unusual.” He wrote: “Put simply, if a 17-year-old is convicted of deliberately murdering an innocent victim, it is not ‘unusual’ for the murderer to receive a mandatory sentence of life without parole. That reality should preclude finding that mandatory life imprisonment for juvenile killers violated the Eighth Amendment.”

He added, in a dissent joined by Justice Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., that the court’s notion of evolving decency was flawed and was based not on history but on the views of the five justices who signed the opinion.

“As judges, we have no basis for deciding that progress toward greater decency can move only in the direction of easing sanctions on the guilty,” he said.

Justice Alito, who wrote a separate and angrier dissent accusing the court of usurping legislative authority, took the relatively unusual step on Monday of reading parts of his dissent from the bench.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/us/justices-bar-mandatory-life-sentences-for-juveniles.html?hp

They disgust me

is a dig at scumbags all over the world.

Instead of scumbag, perhaps the term "excrementhead" would do.

for one.

mandatory life sentences for children with NO parole....

Fugg 'em

Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and Scalia. We should turn the Pit Bulls and Rotties loose on them