The Supreme Court made the U.S. the only nation that locks up children for life

The Supreme Court has made the United States the only nation that locks up children for life and calls it constitutional.

That is the operative effect of the Court’s juvenile-life-without-parole doctrine. In Miller v. Alabama, 567 U.S. 460 (2012), the Court held that mandatory life without parole for juveniles violates the Eighth Amendment. In Montgomery v. Louisiana, 577 U.S. 190 (2016), it made the ruling retroactive. The Court reasoned that children are constitutionally different — their diminished culpability and greater capacity for reform mean a sentencer must have discretion to impose a lesser penalty.

The steel-man is not hard to construct. Before Miller, seventeen states had mandatory JLWOP statutes. A judge had no choice. After Miller, every juvenile lifer gets an individualized hearing. That is a real change. The Court gave the principle a procedural form.

But the Court stopped exactly where the work gets hard. It did not ban discretionary life without parole for juveniles. It did not hold that a child cannot be sentenced to die in prison. It held only that the decision must be made by a judge, not a statute. The U.S. remains the only country in the world that allows discretionary life sentences for minors, according to the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth. Twenty-eight states and the District of Columbia have banned the practice entirely. Five more allow it but have no one serving such a sentence. The rest — including New Hampshire — continue to impose it.

Robert Tulloch, now 43, was resentenced Monday in Grafton County Superior Court to a minimum of 45 years to life for the 2001 stabbing deaths of Dartmouth professors Half and Susanne Zantop. He will be eligible for parole in 2046, when he is 62 years old — the same age Half Zantop was when he was killed. The sentence was a negotiated agreement between Tulloch’s lawyers and the state, avoiding a three-day hearing. Judge Lawrence MacLeod said he reviewed the applicable law, the circumstances, Tulloch’s prison conduct, and the victim’s daughter’s statement. The New Hampshire attorney general called it just.

The sentence is not the worst the system produces. A study published in 2024 in the Journal of Criminal Justice found that more than 75% of juvenile lifers resentenced after Miller and Montgomery received minimum sentences of less than 40 years. Tulloch’s 45-year minimum is above that mark — though the study’s sample includes a wide range of offenses, and Tulloch’s crime involved two victims and a plan to murder strangers — and above what his own lawyers requested — they argued for 30 to 40 years. But the sentence is the product of a doctrine that has not yet confronted its own implications. The judge who imposed it, Lawrence MacLeod, previously ruled that New Hampshire’s constitution categorically prohibits juvenile life without parole as “cruel or unusual” punishment. The New Hampshire Supreme Court declined to rule on the question. The legislature has rejected multiple attempts to end the practice. As I wrote earlier today, the state has no appetite for the conclusion its own constitutional finding demands.

The regime-level pattern is the Court’s defining approach. It announces a constitutional principle — children are different, their sentences must account for their capacity for change — and then leaves implementation to the same institutions that produced the practice the principle was supposed to eliminate. The state legislatures that passed mandatory JLWOP were not required to revisit their discretionary JLWOP statutes. The state courts were left to interpret the Court’s decisions case by case, without guidance on what the floor actually is. The result is a patchwork: some states have banned the practice, some have effectively banned it through non-enforcement, and some — New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Michigan — continue to impose it.

The victims’ daughter, Veronika Zantop, asked the court for the longest possible sentence. She described the killings as “sheer depravity” — planned, cold, predatory. Tulloch abandoned his prepared statement, saying he felt “disgusted” by even the thought of speaking. He has expressed remorse and shown no major disciplinary infractions since 2012. His co-defendant, James Parker, who was 16 and cooperated with prosecutors, was released on parole in 2024 after serving the minimum of his 25-years-to-life sentence.

The Court’s doctrine does not resolve the tension between the victims’ demand for accountability and the constitutional principle that children must be given a meaningful opportunity for release. It merely requires that the tension be managed through individualized hearings. That is a procedural improvement over mandatory sentencing, but it is not the structural change the Court’s own reasoning implies. The U.S. remains the only country that locks up children for life. The Court built the doctrinal architecture that makes that possible — and calls it a constitutional victory.