The State Law Research Initiative (SLRI) started 2025 (and ended 2024) by filing amicus briefs in support of challenges to excessive criminal punishments in the three state supreme courts, joining state and national partners to argue for more expansive state constitutional rights in California, Michigan, and Wyoming.
In the California Supreme Court, SLRI and the University of San Francisco School of Law Racial Justice Clinic filed a brief in a statewide challenge to California’s death penalty scheme. The petitioners in Office of State Public Defender et al. v. Bonta provided a battery of studies to show that death sentences in California are the product of systemic racial discrimination: Black people are nearly nine times more likely to receive death than other defendants, and the presence of a white victim has a similar effect. As law professor John Donohue wrote in an affidavit, “[r]ace has played a substantial and significant role in determining who lives and who dies for crimes that are otherwise similar.”
Initially, the petitioners—the state public defender office along with civil rights and racial justice groups—argued that such disparities violate the California state constitution’s equal protection clause. But the court asked for additional briefing on whether the allegations, if true, would also violate the state constitutional bar on “cruel or unusual” punishments. In our amicus brief, SLRI argued that a capital punishment scheme so deeply infected with systemic racism is “both cruel and unusual punishment for three independent but related reasons: It violates California’s contemporary standards of decency; it fails to serve any legitimate penological purpose; and it is applied based on discriminatory factors without any justification.” To establish the relevant state-specific “standards of decency,” the brief highlights California’s recently enacted Racial Justice Act—which prohibits the state from seeking or obtaining a criminal conviction or sentence on the basis of race—along with other legislative enactments that demonstrate “an extraordinary and unparalleled commitment to eradicating systemic racism from the criminal legal system and ensuring greater protections against racially discriminatory practices and punishments than those afforded at the federal level.”
[Read the brief filed in OSPD v. Bonta]
In the Michigan Supreme Court, SLRI and the MacArthur Justice Center filed a brief in three separate cases arguing that all life without parole (LWOP) sentences violate Michigan’s state constitution. Together, the three cases—People v. Langston, People v. Taylor, and People v. Czarnecki—challenge LWOP for felony murder convictions (where a person neither killed nor intended to kill anyone, but participated in another felony that resulted in a homicide) and for emerging adults under age 21. But our brief went further, relying on original meaning and historical practice to argue that permanent punishments such as LWOP violate Michigan’s longstanding constitutional commitment to rehabilitation. “True life without the possibility of parole (or, ‘death-by-incarceration’) sentences are a relatively new innovation in criminal punishments,” the brief says, and for “most of Michigan’s history, they did not exist.” Instead, “Michigan maintained a constitutional commitment, made explicit in this Court’s cases, to pursue rehabilitation as the primary goal of criminal sanctions. … It is true that some people received ‘life’ terms before parole existed, and that later, people with first-degree murder convictions were technically excluded from parole eligibility. But from the time of Michigan’s first Constitution in 1850 through the 1980s, there remained a meaningful opportunity for eventual release for all life-sentenced persons—including those convicted of first-degree murder. Whether through executive clemency, parole, or those systems working in tandem, incarcerated people could demonstrate rehabilitation—could, as this Court put it over a century ago, ‘make the test’—and earn their release.”
The Michigan Supreme Court heard oral argument in these cases on January 22, 2025.
[Read the brief filed in People v. Langston] [Read the brief filed in People v. Taylor & People v. Czarnecki]
Finally, in the Wyoming Supreme Court, SLRI joined historian Robert B. Keiter (the author of The Wyoming State Constitution) to argue that mandatory LWOP sentences for young people under age 21 violate Wyoming’s “cruel or unusual” punishment prohibition. That holding already applies under the state constitutions in Washington and Massachusetts (and potentially soon in Michigan), and in Hicks v. Wyoming Christopher Hicks, who was sentenced to LWOP for crimes committed at age 19, argues that the Wyoming Supreme Court should reach the same conclusion. This brief emphasizes how related constitutional provisions enhance each other. Here, we argue that the contours of “cruel or unusual” punishment must be informed in part by two related clauses: One providing that Wyoming’s “penal code shall be framed on the humane principles of reformation and prevention,” and a second that requires “safe and comfortable prisons,” the “humane treatment of prisoners,” and protects those arrested and “confined in jail” from being treated with “unnecessary rigor.”