Nycole Amaury Rosario Sánchez v. United States

For over 30 years this Honorable Court has emphasized in a series of cases that youth matter in sentencing. Underpinning the opinions issued by the Court was a relatively simple concept that “children are constitutionally different from adults for purposes of sentencing” because they “have diminished culpability and greater prospects for reform.” Miller v. Alabama, 567 U.S. 460, 471 (2012). More recently this High Court in Jones v. Mississippi, 593 U.S. 98, 108(2021) decided to reaffirm the holding in Miller, supra explaining that the Court in Miller “repeatedly descried youth as a sentencing factor akin to a mitigating circumstance. The First Circuit confirmed the sentence issued in this case treating Petitioner age and youth circumstances as an aggravating factor. The question is presented as follows: Whether youth (minor age) at the time of the commission of a criminal offense, with its intrinsic characteristics, is inherently a mitigating factor that must be considered in sentencing a juvenile defendant.