NEWSLETTER & BLOG

North Carolina and Wisconsin have the most bitterly divided state supreme courts in the country, with Republicans recently re-taking the majority in North Carolina (while trying and failing to steal an additional seat) and liberals holding a new 4-3 majority in Wisconsin. And recently far-right justices on each court have received a spate of bad press, making headlines for their hyper-partisanship, trolling Twitter posts, and even fictitious case citations.

One month after the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals invoked a “junk science” law to stop an execution in a case of alleged “shaken baby syndrome,” or “SBS,” the New Jersey Supreme Court became the nation’s first to ban evidence of the controversial diagnosis entirely. Biomechanical experts have long-criticized SBS as pseudoscience that wrongfully sends hundreds of parents and caregivers to prison every year for crimes that never happened. But SBS is hardly the only questionable science that routinely sends people to prison. Bite-mark matches, blood-splatter analysis, handwriting comparisons, tire tread compressions, and other forms of commonly-dramatized evidence have little to no empirical support, yet trial judges usher this evidence into courtrooms simply because other judges before them did the same thing. Still, state supreme courts are a promising path to reform.

Justice Mary Yu, a member of the Washington State Supreme Court for over a decade, will retire on December 31. When she joined in 2014, Yu was the court’s first Asian, the first Latina, and the first LGBTQ member. She also became a pioneer in state constitutional law, emerging as a leading voice on how state constitutions—independent of whatever the U.S. Supreme Court says about federal law—provide stronger civil rights against the excesses and abuses of our criminal legal systems. Yu helped put the Washington Supreme Court at the forefront of a legal movement to embrace state constitutionalism, and her dissents and concurring opinions leave a guide for how the court, and other state high courts around the country, should go further.

Prof. Kristen Bell's guest essay on her groundbreaking new article about 'unnecessary rigor' clauses & what they mean for excessive sentence claims

The Colorado Supreme Court of late has been a menace to personal liberty and equality, granting more power to police and prosecutors while upholding needlessly cruel criminal punishment. That may be surprising. Colorado is a blue state with a seven-member supreme court all appointed by Democratic governors. But mass incarceration has never broken neatly along party lines, and often the better tell is what judges did before they took the bench—the professional experiences and perspectives they acquired as lawyers that they now bring to the cases before them as judges. And in Colorado, five justices are former prosecutors, while all seven are either former prosecutors, corporate lawyers, or both. None is a former public defender. How this experience translates to judicial outcomes is of course imprecise, but consider this string of recent Colorado decisions:

In 2022, the Michigan Supreme Court held that imposing mandatory life without parole sentences on 18-year-olds—without considering how youthful characteristics affected their conduct or their capacity to change—is unlawful “cruel or unusual” punishment under Michigan’s state constitution. Today the court extended that rule to anyone under age 21, a decision that not only changes sentencing policy going forward, but gives the nearly 600 people serving this unlawful sentence a chance at release.

Michigan state courts remain the epicenter of developing state antipunishment jurisprudence and continue to produce good news for civil rights. In 2022, the Michigan Supreme Court issued a series of rulings that protect youth and young adults from “cruel or unusual” prison terms, including one, People v. Stovall, holding that life in prison (even with the possibility of parole) is unconstitutional when imposed on youth for second degree murder. In that opinion, the court acknowledged that judges intent on sending kids to die in prison may still have a work-around, because they “could impose a long term-of-years sentence that would theoretically deprive a defendant of any chance of being paroled during their lifetime.” On January 15, the lower state Court of Appeals closed that loophole, deciding 2-1 in People v. Eads that a 50-year minimum sentence without hope of release until age 65 is, as a constitutional matter, no different from the formal life sentences struck down in Stovall.

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. Read More to get the briefs and case summaries.

There are wrongly decided cases, and then there are wrongly decided cases that are so poorly reasoned they’re embarrassing. The Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling last week in a major sentencing case is the latter. With paper-thin analysis that is at turns lazy, incoherent, and circular, the court rejected a claim that life without parole sentences for felony murder—a crime that punishes people for murders they didn’t commit—violates the state constitution ban on “cruel and unusual punishments.” Rather than join the national trend of expanding state constitutional rights against excessive punishment (or at least acknowledging that such rights exist independent of what the U.S. Supreme Court says about federal law), the court rubber-stamped a draconian sentence and sent a disturbing message that it is indifferent to the rights of people consigned to death behind bars.

A new ruling from the Michigan Supreme Court will free about 300 people from the sex offender registry. Beyond that, it further cements the Michigan Supreme Court as a national leader in building state antipunishment jurisprudence and expanding rights against extreme and needless punishments. And that trend should continue: There are at least seven cases pending on the court’s docket that raise claims under the “cruel or unusual” clause, all touching on a common theme: will the court further limit lifetime punishments that, contrary to the state’s long constitutional history, “forswear[] altogether the rehabilitative ideal”?