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Over the past 16 years, the court, often led by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, methodically limited the availability of the harshest penalties for crimes committed by juveniles, first by striking down the juvenile death penalty and then by restricting sentences of life without the possibility of parole.

Thursday’s decision, Jones v. Mississippi, No. 18-1259, concerned Brett Jones, who had recently turned 15 in 2004 when his grandfather discovered his girlfriend in his room. The two men argued and fought, and the youth, who had been making a sandwich, stabbed his grandfather eight times, killing him.

In 2005, Mr. Jones was convicted of murder and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, then the mandatory penalty under state law. That same year, the Supreme Court ruled in Roper v. Simmons that the death penalty for juvenile offenders was unconstitutional.

In Montgomery v. Louisiana in 2016, the court made the Miller decision retroactive. In the process, it seemed to read the Miller decision to ban life without parole not only for defendants who received mandatory sentences but also “for all but the rarest of juvenile offenders, those whose crimes reflect permanent incorrigibility.”

“How low this court’s respect for stare decisis has sunk,” she wrote. “Now, it seems, the court is willing to overrule precedent without even acknowledging it is doing so, much less providing any special justification.”

Justice Kavanaugh rejected the charge that the majority had twisted the earlier decisions, saying it had faithfully complied with stare decisis, the legal doctrine requiring respect for precedent.

Justice Sotomayor responded that the majority had satisfied none of the usual criteria for overturning earlier decisions.

Writing for the majority on Thursday, Justice Kavanaugh said the resentencing did not violate the Eighth Amendment, which bans cruel and unusual punishments, because the punishment imposed by the trial judge had been discretionary rather than mandatory.

Justice Kavanaugh wrote that the Supreme Court’s earlier decisions had made life-without- parole sentences for juvenile offenders uncommon. In Mississippi, he wrote, resentencings following the Miller decision have “reduced life-without-parole sentences for murderers under 18 by about 75 percent.”

The experience in states that require a finding of incorrigibility was different, she wrote. In Pennsylvania, for example, fewer than 2 percent of resentencings have resulted in the reimposition of life-without-parole sentences.

Justice Kavanaugh wrote that states had tools to address juvenile life without parole.“States may categorically prohibit life without parole for all offenders under 18,” he wrote. “Or states may require sentencers to make extra factual findings before sentencing an offender under 18 to life without parole. Or states may direct sentencers to formally explain on the record why a life-without-parole sentence is appropriate notwithstanding the defendant’s youth.”

The decision extended a 2012 ruling, which invalidated future life-without- parole sentence for juvenile murderers, to all such offenders who were given life sentences in the past.

Monday's opinion was written by Justice Anthony Kennedy and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the court's four liberals, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan.

A total of 2,341 people are now serving mandatory sentences of life without parole for juvenile offenses. Roughly 1,000 of them would be affected by a decision in this case, according to a study by The Phillips Black Project, a non-profit law group that represents prisoners facing severe sentences. The remainder, the study concluded, were imprisoned in states that have already applied the ruling retroactively.

Monday's decision said the states do not have to hold new sentencing hearings if they allow juvenile homicide offenders the opportunity to be released on parole. Such a step "ensures that juveniles whose crimes reflected only transient immaturity -- and who have since matured -- will not be forced to serve a disproportionate sentence" in violation of the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

She has served four years and nine months of her sentence so far. Concerns about her health were raised after she was taken to a hospital in Seoul, the capital, for various illnesses last month.

Mr. Moon said that Ms. Park’s declining heath had also been a factor in his government’s decision to release her.

Ms. Park was pardoned under a broad amnesty that benefited 700 other prisoners, whose remaining prison terms will be eradicated or cut in half. The South Korean president has the power to grant amnesty to prisoners under the Constitution, and has often exercised it to mark major national holidays or the beginning of a new year.

Ms. Park, a daughter of the former military dictator Park Chung-hee, was in her fourth year in power in 2016 when hundreds of thousands of protesters began months of weekly rallies in central Seoul demanding that she be forced from office for corruption and incompetence.

In January this year, the Supreme Court approved a reduced 20-year prison term for Ms. Park and ordered her to pay 18 billion won ($15 million) in fines, saying that she and her longtime friend and confidante Choi Soon-sil had collected or demanded $19.3 million in bribes from three big businesses, including $7 million from Samsung, South Korea’s largest and most lucrative business group.

The younger Mr. Lee, who was sentenced to two and a half years in prison in the corruption scandal, was released on parole in August, when South Korea freed hundreds of prisoners to mark the Aug. 15 National Liberation Day, which commemorates the end of Japanese colonial rule of South Korea at the end of World War II.

Despite her conviction, Ms. Park still had a sizable following of die-hard supporters, mostly older conservative South Koreans, who have held rallies in downtown Seoul calling her innocent and demanding her release.

Those who have argued for her pardon have compared her case to those of the former military dictators Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo.

Mr. Moon’s government granted a special amnesty to former Prime Minister Han Myeong-sook, one of the president’s former political allies. Ms. Han was sentenced to two years in prison in 2015 on charges of collecting illegal political donations. She finished her term in 2017.

The government also released Lee Seok-ki, a progressive politician, on parole on Friday. He was arrested by Ms. Park’s government in 2013 on charges of conspiring to start an armed revolt to overthrow the Seoul government in the event of war with North Korea. He has served all but nine months of his nine-year sentence.

calling him a victim of what they saw as a political witch hunt by Ms. Park to repress her political enemies.

More recently, the government has grown skeptical of the argument that some banks are simply too big to charge, an argument that Sullivan & Cromwell often employs for its clients

The investigations, the people said, also unearthed emails showing that PricewaterhouseCoopers changed the report not only at the suggestion of the bank, but also at the behest of lawyers working on the bank’s behalf. Like many banks caught in the government’s cross hairs, the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi turned to Sullivan & Cromwell, an elite law firm as woven into the fabric of Wall Street as the banks it represents.

When punishing banks, prosecutors have favored so-called deferred-prosecution agreements, which suspend charges in exchange for the bank’s paying a fine and promising to behave. Several giant banks have reached multiple deferred or nonprosecution agreements in a short span, fueling concerns that the deals amount to little more than a slap on the wrist and enable a pattern of Wall Street recidivism.

Not every bank will have to plead guilty in future cases. Prosecutors still see benefits from deferred-prosecution agreements, which can require banks to install independent monitors and more broadly overhaul their practices than in the event of a guilty plea.

Since 2001, at least eight big banks have committed further offenses after receiving an initial deferred-prosecution agreement, according to data assembled by Brandon L. Garrett, a University of Virginia law school professor and author of the book, “Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise With Corporations.”

Regulators and prosecutors blame a culture that prioritizes profit over compliance. And as banks have grown larger, and more international, illegality can stop in one unit of a bank even as it flourishes in another.

It didn’t take long for concerns to arise. Just weeks after the bank settled in late 2012, its chairman appeared to violate a provision of the deal that forbade Standard Chartered executives from issuing “any public statement contradicting the acceptance of responsibility.” In a conference call, the chairman referred to the illicit transactions as “clerical errors” — comments he later retracted.

The ruling means the case of Timothy Lee Hurst, who was convicted of the stabbing murder of his co-worker in 1998, goes back to the lower courts.

Connie Fuselier, the mother of Hurst's victim, said she doesn't care if he is executed at this point, but she can't bear the thought of more legal proceedings. "It's been hell," she told NBC News. "When you get to thinking it's over with, it starts all over again. It's nerve-racking."

"The substance of the ruling would affect the vast majority of Florida's death row inmates," said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes capital punishment. "The remaining question would be: Will the Supreme Court consider this to have retroactive effect and retroactive to when?" He said he expects the ruling will unleash a wave of litigation.

It's not yet clear how many other cases — including the 400 inmates on the state's death row — could be affected, experts said.

At one point during the many appeals the case has spawned, Fuselier said, she told the prosecutor she'd be satisfied with a sentence of life without parole.

"I just want it over with. I want to know he has no more appeals," she said. She said the case's 17-year journey through the courts, with the rehashing of the gruesome details of her daughter's death, has taken a toll on the family. "I have post-traumatic stress. I have depression," she said. "It's like the family evaporated. We're all here, but it's like we're not."

He said those convicted of killing just one person in shootings and stabbings at times face the death penalty or life in prison without parole. But, he said, someone can "kill 5,000 people with drugs because you're smuggling them in and you're making a lot of money and people are dying," and go without serious punishment.

"Our new slogan, when we start running, in -- can you believe it, two years from now -- is going to be, Keep America Great, exclamation point," Trump said.

The new application includes a series of eligibility questions that ask whether an applicant is a U.S. citizen, a resident of California, at least 18 years old, not currently in state or federal prison or on parole for a felony conviction, and whether he or she has been found mentally incompetent to vote by a court. Voter registration data received from the DMV is also checked against existing records in California's statewide voter registration database, according to Sam Mahood, press secretary for California's Secretary of State Alex Padilla.

there are policy and human-rights implications to what the president says and does. Dehumanizing rhetoric is a powerful real-world tool, especially when it’s coming from the president of the United States.

As with his remarks on Wednesday, it’s unclear whether Trump was referring specifically to gang members or to undocumented immigrants as a whole. This ambiguity could perhaps be chalked up to the president’s imprecise speech, but it’s connected to real policy. This unclarity is a key mechanism in the federal government’s targeting of immigrants across the country.

In 2017, ICE arrested and detained Daniel Ramirez Medina, a young undocumented immigrant who’d been shielded from deportation by enrolling in the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. ICE tried to strip him of his protected status and deport him, all because they claimed a tattoo of his birthplace proved his affiliation with a gang. According to criminal-justice and immigration advocates, the number of MS-13 arrests is inflated by these flimsy cases. In the Ramirez case, a federal judge criticized ICE for lying even in the court of law about Ramirez’s affiliation, saying the “agency [offered] no evidence to this Court to support its assertions.”

According to The Marshall Project, immigrants only have to meet some very loose criteria in order to fall into the gang dragnet, including hanging out where gang members usually frequent or being labeled as a gang member by a “reliable source,” such as a teacher.

the treatment of individuals caught up in the dragnet—from frigid detention centers to the separation of mothers from children—certainly still resembles what might be reserved for animals.

the combination of draconian rhetoric and the elision of nuance between real and perceived criminal elements is a crux of how racism has worked for centuries in this country and around the world.

“superpredator” originates as a zoological term for apex predatory animals—to mobilize massive public support for new criminal-justice policies and provide a moral high ground to marginalize any opponents.

any reasonable assessment of mass incarceration in black America will show that the damage has long been done. In Illinois, for example, over 80 percent of juveniles sentenced to life without parole under the superpredator dragnet were minorities. Driven to bloodlust against an ill-defined population of black youths made to be less than human, America strained against the Constitution and the basic precepts of human rights to stamp out a threat—based on a theory that has since been discredited.

The true peril of Trump’s comments on Wednesday is this: that the state will be further empowered to suspend human rights.

Dehumanization is not just a buzzword, but a descriptor of a specific and well-known psychological and sociological process, by which people are conditioned to accept inflicting increasingly inhumane conditions and punishments on other people

dehumanization means both a broadening of what’s acceptable and just who is unacceptable.

The most likely outcome of Trump’s “animals” rhetoric isn’t a return to some mythological Pax Americana, as his supporters might suggest. Quite the opposite: It could fuel more informing on neighbors, more regular harassment for people of color, a deeper and wider dragnet, and an increased acceptance of brutality and extralegal practices. That’s what happens when people stop being people.

In its final months, the administration executed 13 inmates, more than a fifth of the prisoners that the Bureau of Prisons considered to be on death row. The inauguration of Mr. Biden — who promised during the campaign to work to end federal capital punishment — almost certainly marked the end of that string of executions.

In 2000, the state executed a man who was 17 when he murdered his girlfriend’s parents. About five years later, the Supreme Court ruled that the execution of those who were minors at the time of their crimes was unconstitutional. Additionally, a case out of Virginia prompted the Supreme Court in 2002 to abolish the death penalty for those with intellectual disabilities.

The bill, which the Virginia House and Senate passed last month, stipulates that the sentences of the remaining death row inmates be converted to life in prison without eligibility for parole. The inmates will also not qualify for good conduct allowance, sentence credits or conditional release. Where there were once dozens of prisoners on the state’s death row, now there will be none.

“People are going to be looking at them going, ‘What in the world were those people thinking doing that?’” he said. He compared Virginia’s historical use of the death penalty to the Trump administration’s spasm of executions in its final months.

If Virginia is any indication, Republican support for abolishing capital punishment at the federal level is unlikely.

“could metaphorically be heard at the grave sites of those five crime victims,” Mr. Bell said during the hearing. “We have five dead Virginians that are not, that this bill will make sure that their killers do not receive justice.”

“Ending the death penalty comes down to one fundamental question, one question: Is it fair?” said Gov. Ralph Northam, who signed the bill on Wednesday.

The bill’s signing comes as President Biden faces pressure from members of his own party to commute the sentences of the remaining inmates on federal death row.

On Wednesday, State Senator Scott Surovell, a Democrat, visited the execution chamber for the first time since the early 1990s, when he toured the facility as a governor’s fellow. The gurney was new, Mr. Surovell said, adding that the same wooden chair remained but that there were also at least two digital clocks on the white walls that he did not recall.

“It’s a long, bloody history, and it’s astonishing that a state like Virginia, a former Confederate state, a state that so enthusiastically embraced the death penalty, is abolishing it,” Mr. Peppers said. “I never thought I’d see this.”

In the summer of 1990, shortly after finishing seventh grade, I was directed by a few older kids to commit a robbery. During the botched attempt, I shot a woman. She suffered serious injuries to her jaw and mouth but survived.

For this I was arrested and charged as an adult with armed robbery and attempted murder.

I was thrown into solitary confinement the day I arrived at the Reception and Medical Center, a state prison in Lake Butler, Fla., because of my young age.

But a year and a half later, at age 15, I was put back into solitary confinement after being written up for a few minor infractions.

Florida has different levels of solitary confinement; I spent the majority of that time in one of the most restrictive. Nearly two decades caged in a roughly 7-by-10-foot room passed before I was rotated between the general population area and solitary for six more years.

Researchers have long concluded that solitary confinement causes post-traumatic stress disorder and impairs prisoners’ ability to adjust to society long after they leave their cell.

Yet the practice, even for minors, is still common in the United States, and efforts to end it have been spotty

More aggressive change is needed in state prison systems. Today, dozens of states still have little to no legislation prohibiting juvenile solitary confinement.

I also witnessed the human consequences of the harshness of solitary firsthand: Some people would resort to cutting their stomachs open with a razor and sticking a plastic spork inside their intestines just so they could spend a week in the comfort of a hospital room with a television.

I served 18 consecutive years in isolation because each minor disciplinary infraction — like having a magazine that had another prisoner’s name on the mailing label — added an additional six months to my time in solitary confinement.

It is difficult to know the exact number of children in solitary confinement today. The Liman Center at Yale Law School estimated that 61,000 Americans (adults and children) were in solitary confinement in the fall of 2017.

No matter the count, I witnessed too many people lose their minds while isolated. They’d involuntarily cross a line and simply never return to sanity.

Solitary confinement is cruel and unusual punishment, something prohibited by the Eighth Amendment, yet prisons continue to practice it.

When it comes to children, elimination is the only moral option. And if ending solitary confinement for adults isn’t politically viable, public officials should at least limit the length of confinement to 15 days or fewer, in compliance with the U.N. standards.

In the meantime, prisoners in Florida like Darryl Streeter, inmate No. 514988, are forced to spend their lives in long-term isolation. He recently told me by phone that he’s been in solitary confinement for 24 consecutive years.

As I try to reintegrate into society, small things often awaken painful memories from solitary. Sometimes relationships feel constraining.

I will face PTSD and challenges big and small for the rest of my life because of what I was subjected to. Some things I’ve grown accustomed to. Some things I haven’t. And some things I never will — most of all, that this country can treat human beings, especially children, as cruelly as I was treated.

The commission works closely with Russian prison authorities and has access to people in custody.

For Carter, it's about more than just social justice movements. He believes his city's leadership, especially the executive office, should reflect the population.

For Carter and other activists-turned-political candidates, making the decision to run felt like an actionable step after a year of such frustration and anger.

Tate took on criminal justice reform years before protests for Floyd took over streets across the country.

He created a name for himself while leading marches and protests following the deaths of Floyd and Breonna Taylor, a Black woman shot and killed by police in Louisville, Kentucky.

LaTonya Tate is not new to the fight to make the justice system more just. As a Black woman in the South and part of a family with a history of activism, it has been ever-present. And as a retired parole officer, she knows a good deal about the justice system and its failures.

She believes she can lead desperately needed and uncomfortable conversations if she is elected to the city council in Birmingham, Alabama.

Ossé is running for a seat on the city council representing his district in Brooklyn, New York. If elected, he would become one of the youngest, and one of the first self-described queer city council members in New York City.

Tate is advocating for community policing. She believes in reallocating funds from police to invest in the community with mental health training, health care, education, youth programs and social services.

Francois Alexandre believes that a community policing role is crucial for accountability. It's what he'd like to change when it comes to law enforcement in his district in Miami if he wins a seat on the Miami City Commission.

Charlotte, North Carolina City Council member Braxton Winston knows the path these activists are taking well. He was the subject of an iconic photo depicting the tension between police and protesters after an officer shot and killed Keith Scott, a Black Charlotte resident in 2016.

Winston's gained victories to defund chemical agents for crowd control, which he says led to a broader conversation about the overall role of government in ensuring public safety. He says he has learned that support and political will are essential and in ways he is not set up to succeed.

The Black Voters Matter organization, which aims to increase power in the black community through voter outreach and advocacy, says efforts are underway to engage black voters and to build voting power.

In June, the organization plans to launch a bus campaign to engage Black voters while commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Freedom Rides movement, bus tours taken by civil rights activists in the '60s to fight segregation in the South.

Carter hopes this can be a moment where the country looks deep into its soul and reckons with its past.

There was DNA evidence that connected McHugh to the girl, former prosecutor Todd Kuhnen told CNN. The victim was 14 years old and McHugh was 23 when the crime occurred, Kuhnen said. The victim also alleged that she was intoxicated when the incident occurred.

McHugh has been charged with eight federal crimes tied to the Capitol insurrection, including trespassing charges and the more serious counts of obstructing congressional proceedings and assaulting police officers with a dangerous weapon. He hasn't yet entered a plea in court.

He has been in jail since his May 27 arrest, a federal judge in the Eastern District of California ruled Tuesday that he should be detained before trial because he poses a threat to the public. His lawyers said in a court filing Thursday that they'll try again to secure his release.

At the time of the riot, McHugh was on probation for misdemeanor convictions for driving under the influence and driving with a suspended license, according to federal court documents.

McHugh has a long rap sheet of misdemeanor convictions, including multiple DUIs and trespassing offenses, according to Negin and a CNN review of California state court records. He is one of many rioters with criminal records, and he is one of a few rioters who were on probation or parole for other unrelated crimes when they went to the Capitol on January 6.

This undercuts recent false claims from some Republicans, who have whitewashed the violent attack and claimed that the rioters were well-meaning patriotic Americans with clean records. Republicans pushed this lie at a recent House hearing about Capitol security failures. Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar complained that "the FBI is fishing through homes of veterans and citizens with no criminal records" and claimed "law-abiding citizens" were being targeted.

Abolishing the death penalty statute through Congress would prevent a future administration from restarting federal executions -- as former President Donald Trump did -- but members of Congress, former and current law enforcement as well as civil and human rights groups are urging Biden to use his executive pen to pause the federal death penalty.

Former Attorney General William Barr lifted a moratorium on the federal death penalty in July 2019, setting off a cascade of lethal injection executions -- 13 in total -- at the Terre Haute, Indiana, federal prison.

The President only has the power to pause the federal death penalty, according to Daniel S. Medwed, a University Distinguished Professor of Law and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University.

Biden's Attorney General Merrick Garland reaffirmed at his confirmation hearings in February that the new administration is committed to reversing Trump's approach. "The data is clear that it has been enormously disparate impact on Black Americans and members of communities of color, and exonerations also that something like half of the exonerations had to do with Black men. So all of this has given me pause," Garland said.

"I don't think citizens want the death penalty anymore or a moratorium. Now, it's a matter of dismantling the system so it cannot come back and function in a knee jerk reaction where 13 people can get executed like under Trump,"

"would come with great resistance." The CJLF is a nonprofit organization that advocates for equal justice for victims of crimes including pursuing the death penalty.

I don't want someone killed in my name," Mikey Bogart, a Boston Marathon bombing survivor, wrote in a statement after the Supreme Court decided in March to review whether to reinstate Tsarnaev's death sentence. "I hope the Biden Administration will reconsider pursuing a death sentence. Mr. Tsarnaev will spend the rest of his life in prison no matter what."

Todd C. Peppers, a professor at Roanoke College who has written extensively about the death penalty in Virginia, said the Supreme Court had long served as a more significant check on the state’s use of the death penalty than any change in public opinion. In 2000, the state executed a man who was 17 when he murdered his girlfriend’s parents. About five years later, the Supreme Court ruled that the execution of those who were minors at the time of their crimes was unconstitutional. Additionally, a case out of Virginia prompted the Supreme Court in 2002 to abolish the death penalty for those with intellectual disabilities.

Mr. Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said he was being taken to the Matrosskaya Tishina federal prison, where Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian oligarch-turned-politician, served much of his prison sentence before he was pardoned in 2013.

And in a signal that Mr. Navalny’s detention could be an irritant for President-elect Joe Biden’s ties with Russia, incoming national security adviser Jake Sullivan also called for Mr. Navalny’s release. Lawmakers have already called for measures to be taken against Moscow for Russia’s alleged hack of U.S. government computer systems, revealed last month.

“Judging by everything it allows Western politicians to think that they can distract attention from the deep crisis the liberal model of development has found itself in,” he said.

Moscow says it hasn’t received sufficient proof from European laboratories that the opposition leader had traces of a nerve agent in his system and says he could have been suffering from what Russian doctors called a metabolic imbalance, akin to a low-blood sugar attack.

Going by “Jay Y. Lee” in the West, he has led the Samsung conglomerate since his father was incapacitated by a 2014 heart attack. But with his father’s death in October, Mr. Lee was expected to formally take the Samsung chairmanship, a transfer he will now have to navigate from behind bars.

His father’s death triggered a hefty inheritance tax under South Korean law. It puts Mr. Lee, his mother and two sisters on the hook for more than 11 trillion South Korean won, or roughly $10 billion, to inherit the patriarch’s shares in various Samsung companies. The tax must be paid over the next five years.