More than a year has passed without a decision from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in the case of Commonwealth v. Cunningham, No. 38 EAP 2012. The decision is extremely important to the roughly 460 inmates who are serving life-without-parole sentences for offenses committed as juveniles.
In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a split 5-4 decision in Miller v. Alabama, 132 S. Ct. 2455 (2012), that a mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole for juveniles violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban against “cruel and unusual punishment.”
