Sentence of life without parole is unconstitutional for adults under 21, SJC rules

The Suffolk County district attorney’s office said Thursday that it had identified about 70 inmates convicted in Suffolk County who will eventually become eligible for parole as a result of the decision, and that victim-witness advocates from the office plan to reach out to surviving family members.

The 4-3 ruling is a landmark decision in Massachusetts that juvenile justice advocates are hailing as a major step forward for the reform-minded state. Lawyers for Mattis had argued that the then-18-year-old’s mandatory life without parole sentence constituted cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the state’s Constitution.

“The Supreme Judicial Court has set the standard for the nation. We’re the first, and we won’t be the last, to recognize that people under 21 are not deserving of the punishment of life without the possibility of parole,” said Ruth Greenberg, Mattis’s attorney. “They looked at the science, they looked at the law, they considered it carefully, and they came to the right conclusion.”

Norfolk District Attorney Michael W. Morrissey echoed the position of several dissenting justices and said that, as a former state senator, he believes the question of whether to raise the age would have been “most appropriately handled legislatively rather than through the courts.”

Nevertheless, Morrissey said his office, which has 12 homicide cases affected by Thursday’s ruling, “now moves forward on all of these cases consistent with the ruling,” and has already begun contacting surviving family members of the victims in each case.

Lael Chester, director of Columbia University’s Emerging Adult Justice Project, noted that “if you had to pick some period of time where you say a young person has transitioned from adolescence into adulthood, the research is pretty clear that 21 would make the most sense. And 18 really doesn’t make much sense at all.”

In 2013, Mattis was convicted of first-degree murder under the joint venture theory and given a mandatory sentence of life without parole. Mattis was 18 in 2011 when he handed a gun to a friend, Nyasani Watt, on a Dorchester street. Watt fatally shot 16-year-old Jaivon Blake. Mattis and Watt were convicted of first-degree murder, but because Watt was 10 days shy of turning 18, he will be eligible for parole in 15 years because life sentences are banned for juveniles convicted of murder.

Of those affected by Thursday’s opinion, anyone sentenced to life without parole prior to July 2014 — when Massachusetts adopted a new parole system for children convicted of first-degree murder — will become eligible for parole after serving 15 years. Those sentenced after that date must serve between 20 and 35 years before having their first parole hearing.

“Supreme Court precedent, as well as our own, dictates that youthful characteristics must be considered in sentencing, that the brains of emerging adults are not fully developed and are more similar to those of juveniles than older adults, and that our contemporary standards of decency in the Commonwealth and elsewhere disfavor imposing the Commonwealth’s harshest sentence on this cohort,” Budd wrote.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice David A. Lowy wrote that the high court should leave the issue in the hands of the Legislature.

“The power to ‘define a crime and ordain its punishment’ is an exclusively legislative function,” he wrote. “Unless the punishment the Legislature imposes is ‘so disproportionate’ that it ‘shocks the conscience and offends fundamental notions of human dignity’ . . . we must exercise restraint and uphold it.”

First-degree murder convictions are automatically reviewed by the SJC. The court affirmed the factual basis for the convictions of Mattis and Watt in June 2020. But in a separate decision Thursday, it overturned Watt’s conviction and ordered a new trial based on evidence that his lawyer slept during critical portions of the trial, including once when a prosecutor had to awaken him to show him a photograph before presenting it to a witness.

The SJC previously sent Mattis’s case back to the Superior Court to make factual findings on emerging adult brain science. In July 2022, Superior Court Judge Robert Ullmann ruled that mandatory life sentences for defendants 18 to 20 are unconstitutional. However, on Thursday, the SJC went one step further and agreed with Mattis’s argument that a life without parole sentence for 18-to-20-year-olds is cruel and unusual punishment regardless of the circumstances.

The state, represented by Suffolk District Attorney Kevin Hayden’s office, agreed with the Superior Court’s decision, but it was his predecessor Rachael Rollins who voiced her support for Mattis’s efforts to expand the ban on life sentences in earlier court filings. Prosecutors under Hayden’s administration wrote that, because there is the possibility — however small — for certain young adults to be “irretrievably depraved,” judges should have the option to sentence someone to life with or without parole, depending on the circumstances.

Mattis’s attorneys pointed to brain science research demonstrating that young adults, like younger teenagers, “are more prone to recklessness, impulsivity, and risk-taking; are more susceptible to peer-influence; and are more capable of changing as they mature.”

Jessica Lewis, staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, hailed the ruling as a “life-changing” decision, and called on state legislators to go one step further and increase the age young people are considered adults by the court from 18 to 21.

Anthony Benedetti, chief counsel at the Committee for Public Counsel Services, called the SJC “a national leader” and said the decision “shows that ours is a legal system that believes in rehabilitation, not simply in applying draconian, die-in-prison punishments to young, vulnerable people.”

He said attorneys from the committee, which includes the state’s public defender’s office, “stand ready to represent those who are eligible for parole and give our clients a chance to be productive members of society.”

Ivy Scott can be reached at ivy.scott@globe.com. Follow her @itsivyscott.