State courts require juveniles sentenced to lengthy prison terms to be allowed to petition for a new sentence after 20 years. That does not apply to adults, Friday's ruling says. (Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)
A New Jersey appeals court declined Friday to expand a judicial doctrine requiring resentencing hearings for certain juvenile offenders to cover some young adults.
The three-judge panel’s opinion found ruling in favor of three long-jailed men would have exceeded the intermediate court’s authority, rejecting plaintiffs’ arguments that young adults’ incomplete cognitive development should require leniency.
“Our institutional role as an intermediate appellate court is a limited one,” Judge Lisa Rose wrote for the panel. “We are bound to follow the precedents of the United States Supreme Court and the Supreme Court of New Jersey, regardless of whether those precedents might seem outmoded.”
Earlier court decisions limiting lengthy sentences lay at the root of appeals lodged by Sean Jones, Timothy Harris, and Richard Roche, all of whom were between the ages of 18 and 20 when they committed murder and other crimes in the late 1980s or early 1990s.
A series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions issued in the last two decades limit life sentences without the possibility of parole for offenders under the age of 18, and New Jersey’s Supreme Court in 2022 ruled juvenile offenders are entitled to petition for resentencing after they spent 20 years in prison.
The state and federal court decisions shared the same rationale: Because children are less mature and more susceptible to outside pressures than adults, the law must give them some ability to demonstrate their maturity and rehabilitation.
Jones, Harris, and Roche argued that doctrine should be expanded to cover some young adults, citing research that found individuals in their early 20s, like adolescents, have less impulse control because their brains are not fully developed.
The panel rejected those arguments in Friday’s ruling, noting New Jersey’s Supreme Court said in a separate 2020 decision that the principles limiting lengthy sentences for juveniles do not apply to crimes committed by individuals 18 and older.
At the time, the high court noted 18 is indeed an arbitrary age but conceded “a line must be drawn.”
A spokesperson for the Office of the Public Defender, whose attorneys represented the three men, did not immediately return a request for comment.
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