New law tackles lengthy sentences for young offenders

A new Missouri law is now in effect that grants a potential second chance for some long-serving prison inmates who committed crimes as juveniles.

How it will be implemented, and exactly how many might benefit from it, remains to be seen.

The statutory change, effective Aug. 28, applies to offenders convicted of crimes when they were younger than 18 and who were sentenced to 15 or more years in prison, whether in a single term or in multiple terms that run consecutively, for any crime other than first-degree or capital murder. Under the statute, such offenders “may be eligible for parole after serving fifteen years of incarceration, regardless of whether the case is final for the purposes of appeal.”

The highest-profile potential beneficiary of the law is Bobby Bostic, who was sentenced to a total of 241 years in prison for his role robbing at gunpoint six people in St. Louis in 1995, when he was 16. After a jury convicted him of 18 separate counts ranging from kidnapping to possession of marijuana, Judge Evelyn Baker ordered Bostic to serve each sentence consecutively. As a result, the now-42-year-old won’t be eligible for parole until he is 112.

The bipartisan group of lawmakers who supported Missouri’s new law, which was added as an amendment to a larger bill, Senate Bill 26, made clear that Bostic was the kind of inmate they had in mind.

“Having both sides coming together on an issue like this hopefully will get it across the finish line and hopefully will result in people like Bobby Bostic coming back home,” said Rep. Nick Schroer, R- O’Fallon, said during debate on the measure on May 4. Schroer, an attorney, has long advocated for such a reform.

Baker, now retired, also has called for a lighter sentence for Bostic, writing in the Washington Post in 2018 that juvenile offenders such as Bostic “have greater capacity for reform.” However, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review Bostic’s case later that year.

Over the last decade, the Supreme Court has changed the legal landscape for youthful offenders in a series of cases that interpret the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. In 2010, the justices held in Graham v. Florida that a state could not impose a sentence of life without parole on a juvenile offender who did not commit homicide. And in 2012’s Miller v. Alabama, the court said juvenile offenders can’t be sentenced to life without parole for murder unless a jury imposes the sentence based on the offender’s individual circumstances. 

So far, those principles have not aided Missouri inmates whose consecutive sentences effectively operate as life without parole. In 2017, the Missouri Supreme Court held in State v. Nathan and Willbanks v. Missouri Department of Corrections that consecutive prison sentences for juvenile offenders were not unconstitutional, even if their sentences added up to hundreds of years.

It’s not clear how many current inmates might qualify under the new law. A fiscal note for SB 26 was unable to estimate how much the measure might cost or save the Missouri Department of Corrections.

“It is unknown how many offenders will petition the Board for a hearing review. It is also unknown how many hearings the Board will conduct and how many offenders will be granted parole if this legislation passes,” the department wrote. A spokesperson for the corrections department didn’t respond to a request for comment on implementation of the bill.

When the Miller case was issued, there were about 80 inmates in Missouri who had been sentenced to life without parole for murders committed as teenagers. But Joseph Welling, an attorney with the St. Louis office of the Phillips Black Project who has been watching the issue, said it’s far more difficult to count the inmates who might qualify under the new law.

“It gets really hairy when you’re looking at complicated sentences,” he said. “You’ve got maybe 12 different counts, and a lot of them get imposed concurrently, and then some of them are consecutive. It gets very complicated to calculate these.”

Amy Breihan, a co-director with the Missouri office of the Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center, said it remains unclear how the new statute will interact with the myriad existing laws that govern sentencing.

In particular, Missouri law also requires inmates convicted of felonies to serve a certain percentage of their sentence before attaining parole eligibility, based on their criminal history and the severity of their crime. Those convicted of a dangerous felony — a statutorily-defined term that includes crimes such as arson, rape, robbery and kidnapping — must serve at least 85 percent of their sentence.

“It’s really convoluted and confusing, even to people who do the work,” Breihan said. “It think DOC is finding itself in a position where it is trying to interpret it in conjunction with other statutes and [regulations] around mandatory minimum sentences.”