November, 17 2010, 09:23am EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Rachel Myers, ACLU national, (212) 549-2689 or 2666; media@aclu.org
Rana Elmir, ACLU of Michigan, (313) 578-6816; relmir@aclumich.org
ACLU Lawsuit Challenges Life Without Parole for Michigan Juveniles
Locking Up Children Without Possibility for Release Is Unconstitutional, Says ACLU
DETROIT, Mich.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Michigan today filed a lawsuit on behalf of nine Michigan citizens who were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for crimes committed when they were minors. The lawsuit charges that a Michigan sentencing scheme that denies the now-adult plaintiffs an opportunity for parole and a fair hearing to demonstrate their growth, maturity and rehabilitation constitutes cruel and unusual punishment and violates their constitutional rights.
"These life without parole sentences ignore the very real differences between children and adults, abandoning the concepts of redemption and second chances," said Deborah Labelle, attorney for the ACLU of Michigan's Juvenile Life Without Parole Initiative. "As a society, we believe children do not have the capacity to handle adult responsibilities, so we don't allow them to use alcohol, join the Army, serve on a jury or vote - yet we sentence them to the harshest punishment we have in this state - to die in adult prisons."
Michigan law requires that children as young as 14 who are charged with certain felonies be tried as adults and, if convicted, sentenced without judicial discretion to life without parole. Judges and juries are not allowed to take into account the fact that children bear less responsibility for their actions and have a greater capacity for change, growth and rehabilitation than adults.
The U.S. is the only country in the world that sentences youth to life without parole, and Michigan incarcerates the second highest number of people serving life sentences without parole for crimes committed when they were 17 years old or younger. Currently, there are 350 individuals serving such mandatory life sentences in Michigan. This includes more than 100 individuals who were sentenced to life without parole who were present or committed a felony when a homicide was committed by someone else.
"Sentencing children to spend the rest of their lives in prison without giving them some opportunity for parole is unfair, unconstitutional and un-American, and it completely ignores the human potential - especially in children - for rehabilitation," said Steven Watt, staff attorney with the ACLU Human Rights Program. "In America, we should not be locking children up and throwing away the key without affording them a second chance."
The ACLU's complaint asks the court to declare that denying children a meaningful opportunity for parole violates the U.S. Constitution's Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment and Fourteenth Amendment right to due process. It also alleges violations of the plaintiffs' rights under international law and treaties.
Michigan's laws run afoul of the U.S. Supreme Court's admonitions that children must be treated differently in our criminal justice system. In May, the Court ruled in Graham v. Florida that it is cruel and unusual punishment to sentence juvenile offenders who did not commit homicide to life in prison without any chance of parole. In 2005, the Court ruled similarly in Roper v. Simmons that executing juvenile offenders is unconstitutional. Both decisions recognized that juveniles bear less responsibility for their actions than adults and have a greater capacity for change, growth and rehabilitation, and that children should not be punished with the harshest sentence that can be imposed on adults.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan against Jennifer Granholm, Governor of Michigan, Patricia Caruso, Director of the Michigan Department of Corrections and Barbara Sampson, Chair of the Michigan Parole Board.
In addition to LaBelle and Watt, the plaintiffs are represented by Vanita Gupta, Robin Dahlberg, Dennis Parker and Jay Rorty of the national ACLU, Michael J. Steinberg, Dan Korobkin and Kary L. Moss of the ACLU of Michigan and Ronald Reosti.
More information about the case, including the complaint and plaintiff descriptions, are available online at: www.aclu.org/human-rights-racial-justice/hill-et-al-v-granholm
The American Civil Liberties Union was founded in 1920 and is our nation's guardian of liberty. The ACLU works in the courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to all people in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.
(212) 549-2666LATEST NEWS
Alan Greenspan, Longtime Fed Chair and Ayn Rand Disciple, Meets Ultimate ‘Invisible Hand’
"For decades, he preached that the self-interest of the predator was the invisible hand of the common good," Yanis Varoufakis said after the man who led the US central bank under four presidents died aged 100.
Jun 22, 2026
Alan Greenspan, whose policies during nearly 20 years as US Federal Reserve chair fueled soaring economic inequality and helped create the conditions for multiple economic crashes, died Monday at age 100 after a long battle with Parkinson's disease.
While many corporate media outlets published hagiographic obituaries lionizing the "Maestro" who presided over nearly two decades of low inflation, rising stock prices, and American economic confidence, critics focused on Greenspan's role in promoting dangerous deregulation and "easy money" policies that inflated financial bubbles, with sometimes disastrous results.
Robert Reich—who served as US labor secretary under President Bill Clinton during all of Greenspan's tenure—called him "in many ways the most powerful person in America" during that era.
"If any single person was responsible for the financial crisis of 2008, it was Greenspan."
"He maintained an iron grip over the Fed, and almost single-handedly decided on interest rates," Reich wrote. "He essentially fired George H. W. Bush by raising interest rates so high (ostensibly to ward off the inflation then threatening the economy) that the economy took a dive, and voters blamed Bush. This was enough to convince my boss, Bill Clinton, to do exactly what Greenspan wanted—which was to reduce the federal budget deficit and thereby destroy much of the agenda Clinton ran on (and I helped create)."
"I don’t want to speak ill of anyone who has passed. Greenspan was an extremely charming, intelligent, and thoughtful man," Reich added. "But the truth must be told: If any single person was responsible for the financial crisis of 2008, it was Greenspan. That crisis—the worst collapse since 1929, which led to the worst recession in decades, in which millions of Americans lost their jobs, savings, and even their homes—resulted from the deregulation of Wall Street that Greenspan advocated."
Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis wrote on X: "His epitaph? A singular, glorious confession, 'I found a flaw in my model of the world.' A flaw, he said, as though it were a leaky pipe, not a total collapse of the intellectual architecture that anointed him Oracle. For decades, he preached that the self-interest of the predator was the invisible hand of the common good.
"Then, in 2008, the beast devoured the table, and to his credit, he blinked, admitting that his entire worldview—the one that central bankers canonized and the world swallowed—was a fairy tale for rentiers," Varoufakis added. "He did not, of course, admit to culpability. That would require a moral compass, a device notably absent from his Ayn Randian toolbelt. No, he merely noted the flaw, as a meteorologist might note a gust of wind, and returned to his well-earned silence."
Born 10 miles from Wall Street in Manhattan's Washington Heights during one of the most infamous economic bubbles of all time, Greenspan was a protégé of libertarian writer and philosopher Ayn Rand and was influenced by the Atlas Shrugged author's moral defense of capitalism, her fierce advocacy of deregulation, and her insidious insistence that self-interest was socially beneficial.
Their relationship cooled as Greenspan embraced more mainstream economic policies despised by Rand and gradually became a leading steward of the very sort of state-shepherded system she deeply distrusted.
After heading President Gerald Ford's Council of Economic Advisers, Greenspan was appointed chair of the Fed by President Ronald Reagan in 1987. He would remain in the post well into George W. Bush's second term.
Greenspan generally favored low interest rates, especially after crises like the 1987 stock market crash, the 1998 Long-Term Capital Management crisis, and the 2001 recession. His fame grew after he suggested that the economy might be experiencing a tech-driven “productivity miracle," language that many investors took as validation that traditional valuation limits were obsolete.
Critics would later call it a "productivity mirage."
Staunch devotion to low interest rates by Greenspan's Fed boosted stock prices and real estate values under "easy money" policies. Many investors came to believe that the Fed would intervene aggressively whenever markets fell sharply—the so-called "Greenspan Put."
However, since ownership of financial assets (and the firms that sell and promote them) is concentrated among the wealthy, it was the rich who benefited most from Greenspan's polices. When bubbles burst, as they did after the dot-com boom that ended in early 2000 and during the 2008 global financial crisis, the rich bounced back thanks to their diversified portfolios and bailouts, while middle- and lower-income households were wiped out through asset devaluation, foreclosures, and job losses.
"It is no exaggeration to say the global financial crisis of 2008 had an enormous and lasting impact on American life and the way ordinary people view elites," New York Times global economic correspondent Peter S. Goodman said on social media. "It is also no exaggeration to say that Alan Greenspan has as much responsibility for the crisis as an individual can."
"For those not old enough to remember, it is difficult to state his aura during his time of greatest influence," Goodman continued. "When he told Americans that they should buy houses and use variable-rate mortgages to do it, they listened. Much is made of his econ jargon-laden vernacular that went over the heads of nearly all listeners."
"That was central to the mystique," he added. "When he went to the Hill and spoke to Congress, most people had no idea what he was talking about but assumed that smarter kids did. And so his quasi-religious faith in the efficiency of markets as the ultimate insurance against risk went unchallenged and became dogma, and the risks kept building."
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‘Time to Sue This Liar’: Trillionaire Elon Musk Threatens Ro Khanna for Warning of 4.5 Million Child Deaths From DOGE Cuts
"The Dems should have a leader who Elon Musk is threatening to sue and wants imprisoned," said one political observer. "That's the right guy."
Jun 22, 2026
The recently crowned world's first trillionaire Elon Musk threatened Rep. Ro Khanna with legal action on Monday after the California Democrat pointed out the life-ending potential of foreign aid cuts made by the Department of Government Efficiency.
During an appearance on the "I've Had It" podcast on Saturday, Khanna (D-Calif.) said that there must be consequences for Musk, who in February 2025 used DOGE to curtail programs and cut funding for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
"There needs to be accountability for Elon Musk," Khanna emphasized. "You know, they’re celebrating that he created 4,400 millionaires, but they don’t talk about the 4.5 million children around the world who he possibly sentenced to death by dismantling USAID.”
A peer-reviewed study published by The Lancet in July 2025 estimated that proposed cuts to USAID could lead to as many as 14 million preventable deaths by 2030 worldwide, including the deaths of 4.5 million children under the ages of five years old.
Musk, who earlier this month became the world's first trillionaire, wrote in response to Khanna's interview that it was "time to sue this liar."
It's not clear how Khanna's statement could be defamatory given that it was based on research published by a prestigious medical journal.
Musk, in a separate reaction to Khanna's remarks about USAID, later added that the US lawmaker "should be in prison."
On Monday afternoon, Khanna posted a video in which he challenged Musk to debate him on the impact the DOGE cuts have had on people throughout the Global South who had previously benefited from USAID.
"The world's richest person has spent all day... going after me," Khanna said. "Why? Because I cited an academic study that his DOGE cuts may lead to the deaths of millions of children overseas. You know, Elon, I thought you were a free speech guy. Why not debate me on these issues instead of threatening lawfare?"
"You're not going to be able to intimidate me," Khanna added.
.@elonmusk let's debate. You game?
I am for free speech, not lawfare. pic.twitter.com/gThLggxiOW
— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) June 22, 2026
Mehdi Hasan, editor-in-chief of Zeteo News, said that Khanna’s willingness to directly take on Musk exhibited qualities that Democrats could use more of in leadership positions.
"He is picking/making the right enemies on the right, and really pissing them off," Hasan wrote of Khanna. "The Dems should have a leader who Elon Musk is threatening to sue and wants imprisoned. That's the right guy."
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'There Will Come a Day When He Faces Prosecution': Trump Condemned After US Murders Two More at Sea
"The summary execution of two more in an alleged drug boat brings the number of murders ordered by Trump to more than 210," noted one human rights defender.
Jun 22, 2026
Two people were killed, and six others survived, a strike on Sunday that the US military claimed—without providing evidence—targeted a boat full of "narco-terrorists," but that human rights defenders called another summary execution worthy of prosecution.
"On June 21, at the direction of the commander of US Southern Command, Gen. Francis L. Donovan, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations," USSOUTHCOM said in a statement. "Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Caribbean and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations."
"Two male narco-terrorists were killed during this action, and there were six male survivors," the statement added. "Following the engagement, USSOUTHCOM immediately notified US Coast Guard to activate the Search and Rescue system for the survivors."
More lawless killing in the Trump administration’s boat bombing campaign.Real killing in a phony armed conflict with “narco-terrorists.”This strike reportedly left 6 survivors.US record for rescuing survivors alive is…not great.
[image or embed]
— Brian Finucane (@bcfinucane.bsky.social) June 21, 2026 at 11:28 PM
According to The Intercept's Nick Turse, who has tracked all of the reported US boat bombings in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, there have now been 66 such strikes, which have killed 215 people and left 12 survivors, based on USSOUTHCOM data.
The fate of previous boat strike survivors is not completely clear. After one April bombing, the US Coast Guard told UPI that search-and-rescue operations were called off after no signs of survivors were found. Last October, President Donald Trump said two strike survivors were repatriated to their home countries of Ecuador and Colombia, where they faced prosecution.
Survivors of some of the strikes have accused US forces of torturing them.
Relatives of people killed in previous US boat bombings, as well as officials in Venezuela and Colombia, have said that numerous victims were fishers who were not involved in the illicit drug trade.
In January, relatives of two Trinidadian fishers killed in the strikes filed a federal wrongful death lawsuit in Massachusetts.
"The summary execution of two more in an alleged drug boat brings the number of murders ordered by Trump to more than 210," former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth said on social media. "There will come a day when he faces prosecution for these crimes."
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