Hey, kids! Wanna kill somebody?

Then the US Supreme Court has good news for you! If you're convicted of murder, not only can you not be given the death penalty, you can't even be given life in prison without parole:

Extending its ever-evolving, and ever less coherent, Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, the Supreme Court ruled today, by a 5-4 vote in Miller v. Alabama, that it is unconstitutional to establish a mandatory life-without-parole sentence for any category of murder committed by a person younger than 18 (otherwise known, if only in this context, as a “juvenile”). The Court’s ruling—majority opinion by Justice Kagan, joined by Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor—invalidated contrary aspects of sentencing regimes established by 28 States and the federal government.
The majority declined to address the argument that the Eighth Amendment requires a categorical bar on the discretionary imposition on a juvenile of life without parole, but it volunteered that “appropriate occasions for sentencing juveniles to this harshest possible penalty” (the death penalty already having been categorically deemed off limits) “will be uncommon.”

The emphasis is in Ed Whelan's original, but that distinction will not stand. Just watch. With Miller, SCOTUS continues down its road from the 8th Amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment to the 8th Amendment prohibiting any punishment. Justice Alito's dissent is epic:
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