Letter to professor Edwin Chemerinsky
Dear professor Edwin Chemerinsky,
First, exceeding gratitude to you for your prompt reply to my letter commenting on your interesting article, “Juvenile Life-without-parole,” published last August in the ABA Law Journal. Honestly, I thought you would be like most of your other colleagues that I’ve written to over the past 30 years – that you would read my letter, deduce that it was written by a conservative – a black conservative at that – and ipso facto dismiss my comments (and the need for any response) out of hand. But you didn’t take that course; therefore, allow me to extend my sincerest gratitude to you, professor Chemerinsky, for accepting my invitation to dialogue.
Second, to answer your question: Is it that you disagree with my statement of the holding of the case or that you disagree with the Court’s opinion? It is both, because your ABA article essentially agrees with the Supreme Court holding in the Miller case, correct? I also know from reading your writings and casebook on Constitutional Law that you are a doctrinaire liberal/progressive jurist, ergo, since you are a consensus legal academic you would also embrace the primary tenants of Positive Law, i.e., legality and morality are separate, or that man-created law is the center of all things. Therefore, I deduced (but read your ABA article to be sure) that you, the majority of our academic colleagues in America’s law schools and universities and, most tragically, the majority of the members of the Supreme Court (including the so-called “conservative wing”) would not even entertain the obvious questions:
- Can the juvenile justice system genie once outside the bottle (i.e., created specifically as a trans-constitutional system) be put back inside the bottle (i.e., brought back within legitimate constitutional strictures)?
- In other words, must the entire juvenile justice system, out of necessity and fidelity to the Rule of Law, be dismantled as a classical form of the “fruit of the poisonous tree” doctrine and a new constitutional system comprehensively addressing youth crime be put in its place?
With all due respect, professor Chemerinsky, how can you agree with the Court’s 5-4 decision that there cannot be a mandatory life sentence without parole for homicides committed by juveniles? Isn’t the Court’s ruling in Miller tantamount to giving America’s endemic youth criminal class a key to their own jail cells? Perhaps my meta-analysis of juvenile law is incongruent with the macro/consensus view of your ABA article, the law Academy, and the Court. In other words, I am arguing at the sub-ground level (law as it ought to be), while you and the Miller Court majority are arguing from the tree tops (law as it is).
Professor Chemerinsky, I know firsthand about the utter failure of the liberal/progressive welfare state including its juvenile justice system. I was born in the ghettos of Detroit amongst endemic crime, ignorance, violence, prostitution, pathology and despair. I came of age during the Detroit riots of 1967. I personally am aware of youth crime and that the juvenile justice system offers no systemic solutions to those existential societal problems, which must be solved by morality, not policy.
Click here to read the article at World Net Daily
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