What Miller Required and What Michigan Delivered: The Juvenile Lifer Resentencing Wave, the Standard That Varied, and the People Still Waiting

The Constitutional Foundation

The Supreme Court’s decision in Miller v. Alabama rested on a body of neuroscientific research that had accumulated over the two decades preceding the decision. The research established that the adolescent brain is structurally and functionally different from the adult brain in specific ways relevant to criminal culpability: the prefrontal cortex, which governs impulse control, risk assessment, and the ability to weigh long-term consequences, does not complete its development until the mid-twenties. Juvenile defendants who commit serious crimes do so with a brain that is measurably less capable of the deliberation and consequence-weighing that adult criminal liability assumes.

The Court in Miller did not hold that juveniles can never be sentenced to life without parole. It held that mandatory LWOP, imposed without consideration of the defendant’s age and its attendant characteristics, violated the Eighth Amendment. The sentencing court must consider the mitigating factors of youth before imposing the sentence. Those factors include immaturity, vulnerability to negative influences, and the capacity for change that youth inherently carries.

Montgomery v. Louisiana, decided in 2016, resolved a question Miller had left open: whether the holding applied retroactively to people already serving mandatory juvenile LWOP sentences. The Supreme Court held that it did, because Miller announced a substantive constitutional rule, not merely a procedural one. The practical effect was that more than 2,800 people serving mandatory juvenile LWOP sentences across the country became entitled to new sentencing hearings.

Michigan was responsible for a disproportionate share of that number.

Michigan’s Position

At the time Miller was decided, Michigan had the second-highest juvenile LWOP population in the United States, behind only Pennsylvania. The concentration was not accidental. Michigan’s sentencing structure for the most serious juvenile offenses had consistently produced mandatory LWOP in cases where adult defendants would have faced discretionary sentencing. The mandatory nature of the sentence meant that judges who believed a juvenile defendant had genuine capacity for rehabilitation could not act on that belief. The sentence was required by law.

After Miller and Montgomery, 361 Michigan defendants were identified as eligible for resentencing. The racial demographics of that pool were stark: 76 percent were youth of color, in a state where people of color make up a substantially smaller proportion of the overall population. The racial disparity that had produced the original sentences was replicated in the population waiting for constitutional remedy.

Michigan enacted two statutes to govern the process. MCL 769.25 applied to pending cases and new sentences. MCL 769.25a applied retroactively to those already serving mandatory LWOP. Together, they established that the prosecution in each county had 180 days from the date Montgomery became final to file a motion seeking reimposition of LWOP. If no such motion was filed, the defendant was entitled to a resentencing to a term of years with a minimum between 25 and 40 years and a maximum of 60 years. The statute also created a presumption: LWOP should not be reimposed unless the prosecution could overcome that presumption by clear and convincing evidence.

The presumption was a meaningful structural protection. Whether it was applied meaningfully in practice depended on factors outside the statute: the county, the judge, and the quality of the defense representation at the resentencing hearing.

The Standard That Varied

A constitutional standard applied at the individual hearing level is only as consistent as the institutional infrastructure surrounding those hearings. Miller hearings require updated presentence investigation reports, consideration of the defendant’s record while incarcerated, expert testimony about brain development, and often decades of documentation about who the defendant was at the time of the offense and who they have become since.

The quality of that presentation varies. In counties with well-resourced public defenders and established appellate practices, defendants were more likely to receive hearings where the Miller factors were genuinely developed on the record. In counties with underfunded defense systems or without attorneys experienced in Miller litigation, the constitutional hearing was more likely to be formally conducted but substantively thin.

The People v. Wines decision from the Michigan Court of Appeals in 2018 made clear that Michigan courts must consider the Miller factors even when resentencing to a term of years rather than reimposing LWOP. A court that focused only on the seriousness of the offense and the state’s interest in punishment, without weighing the attributes of youth that Miller identified as constitutionally mitigating, was committing reversible error. That ruling clarified the standard in the appellate record. Its application at the trial court level continued to vary.

People v. Poole and the Expanding Pool

In January 2024, the Michigan Court of Appeals decided People v. Poole, holding that individuals who were eighteen years old at the time of their offense and were sentenced to mandatory LWOP are also entitled to new sentencing hearings applying the Miller framework. The decision added more than 250 additional people to the pool of those entitled to resentencing. It also prompted renewed discussion of legislative solutions, as the Poole decision demonstrated that the current case-by-case hearing structure was not a stable end state.

Legislative proposals in Michigan have focused on establishing a parole review process for all those sentenced under nineteen years of age after serving a specified minimum term. The proposals have bipartisan support and support from a range of constituencies, including business leaders, faith communities, and family members of crime victims who have become advocates for the resentencing of the specific individuals involved in their cases. The legislative resolution has not yet been enacted as of the date of this article.

As of 2024, Michigan remains one of four states that have imposed juvenile LWOP sentences in the past five years. This means that new mandatory juvenile LWOP sentences, which Miller prohibits, are not occurring, but discretionary juvenile LWOP sentences are still being imposed. The constitutional floor Miller established is not a prohibition on juvenile LWOP. It is a prohibition on mandatory juvenile LWOP and a requirement that courts consider youth before imposing discretionary LWOP. Both of those requirements can be formally satisfied while still producing a life sentence for a seventeen-year-old defendant.

What the Released Population Shows

Nationally, more than 1,300 people have been released following Miller and Montgomery resentencing proceedings in the decade since Montgomery was decided. Research on this population places the recidivism rate at approximately one percent. The national average recidivism rate for the general released prison population is between 40 and 68 percent, depending on how recidivism is measured and over what timeframe.

The one percent figure is not a projection or a model. It reflects the actual documented outcomes for the people who were released. Many of them spent decades in prison for crimes they committed as teenagers. Many of them entered prison before their brains had finished developing the very capacities that criminal culpability assumes. Released into communities after twenty, thirty, or forty years of incarceration, they have demonstrated a pattern of civic engagement and community contribution that directly contradicts the “rare, irreparably corrupt juvenile” framing that the original LWOP sentences implicitly assumed.

The Nathaniel Abraham case, covered in this series, sits at the edge of this population. Abraham was sentenced as a juvenile rather than receiving adult LWOP, so his case falls outside the direct Miller framework. But the question his post-release arc raises is the same: what did the system that received him actually build, and is the outcome it produced an indictment of the individual or of the institution?