As a boy from Puerto Rico raised in Detroit, Jose Burgos turned to crime at a young age. He wasn't a violent kid, he said, but life wasn't easy. His father wasn't in his life, and his mother committed suicide when he was 13. Things unraveled after that.

Burgos started losing focus at school and began hanging out with people in his neighborhood who were involved in gangs — something that he said provided him with a sense of family he could not get otherwise. In 1992, Burgos, then 16, was convicted of murdering a rival gang member during a botched drug deal and sentenced to life in prison.

"How did I end up here?" he recalled asking himself in his early years behind bars. "I had to suppress the desire to be free, because I knew that it wasn't going to happen."

Burgos was far from alone. Across the U.S., thousands of people sentenced as teenagers or young adults have served or are serving mandatory life without parole, or LWOP. According to The Sentencing Project, nearly 200,000 people are serving life sentences — including those with parole and so-called virtual life terms that all but ensure they will die in prison. Over 68,000 of them — 35% — were under 25 at the time of sentencing, and nearly 20,000 are serving LWOP.

A turning point came in 2012, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Miller v. Alabama that mandatory LWOP sentences for juveniles violate the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. In 2016, the court's decision in Montgomery v. Louisiana made Miller retroactive.

Burgos, who had already served 27 years and had taken significant steps toward reentering society, including mentoring younger prisoners, was eventually resentenced to a 30-to-60-year term. With a sentence reduction for good behavior, he was able to get released in October 2018.

In recent years, a new front has emerged in the fight against extreme youth sentencing — state courts. This shift has been driven by advances in neuroscience, advocacy efforts, and the voices of incarcerated people themselves, challenging assumptions about the legal culpability of young adults.

Michigan has been at the center of that shift as one of a handful of states that, in recent years, has expanded the reach of the Miller decision through state court rulings.

On April 10, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled in two consolidated cases, People v. Taylor and People v. Czarnecki , holding that 19- and 20-year-olds cannot be subject to mandatory life sentences under the state constitution. Rather, they are entitled to be sentenced as individuals, based on the unique factors of their situation – where they can argue for sentences of years instead of life.

Montario Taylor was 20 when he killed Montel Wright in Flint, Michigan. At age 19, Andrew Czarnecki and a co-defendant murdered Gavino Rodriguez. Attorneys say there is no set date yet for them to be resentenced.

"The Michigan Supreme Court wants the law to match the science," said Maya Menlo, an attorney with the Michigan State Appellate Defender Office who represents Taylor and Czarnecki.

The ruling built on the Michigan high court's 2022 decision in People v. Parks , which had already struck down mandatory LWOP for 18-year-olds, and People v. Poole decided in April, which made that protection retroactive.

In total, nearly 600 individuals in Michigan — sentenced to life without parole as teens or just barely into their 20s — are now eligible for resentencing, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan.

One of those people is Kent Taylor — no relation to Montario Taylor — who was released on June 4 after spending 56 years in prison for a murder he committed in the course of a robbery when he was 20 years old.

Taylor, who is now 76 and has serious chronic medical conditions, said that life since his release "has been good" and that he is slowly adapting to a world he finds alienating in many respects.

"The world I knew when I went in has disappeared," he told Law360. "Thankfully, I have a loving sister that is helping me. With time, I will adjust to it."

Kent Taylor's attorney, Mira Edmonds, said he is facing practical challenges in adjusting to life as a free man, in particular with the use of current technology.

"It's been a real shock for him. He described it as like arriving on another planet, because so much has changed," she said.

Eli Savit, a prosecuting attorney with the Washtenaw County Prosecutor's Office told Law360 that he was aware of Kent Taylor's health problems and worked swiftly to have him resentenced by a court after his attorneys presented an application on his behalf.

"We knew his history. We knew how long he'd been in. We knew what he'd been doing in prison," Savit said. "My position was, I already know everything about this individual. There's no reason to delay. Let's move quickly to get him resentenced."

Savit, a Democrat who is running for Michigan attorney general in the 2026 general election, said his office is "working diligently" on 13 other cases that became eligible for resentencing under the Michigan Supreme Court decision. Michigan prosecutors have until the end of the year to seek the reimposition of a life sentence for the prisoners affected by the ruling.

Savit acknowledged "logistical challenges" in processing the hundreds of cases involving people who are now entitled to resentencing, particularly because the legislature has yet to secure additional funding for prosecutorial offices and state defenders to comply with the ruling.

Deborah LaBelle, a civil rights attorney and director of the Michigan ACLU's Juvenile Life Without Parole Initiative, told Law360 that hundreds more incarcerated people now have a path to "Miller" hearings where judges must consider the individual's circumstances, including their age and maturity, when deciding whether to impose a LWOP sentence.

"Because of their youth, they did a lot of stupid things. And that's what the court recognized," she said.

LaBelle, who first challenged the constitutionality of mandatory LWOP sentences for minors and young adults in Michigan in a class action filed in 2010, said that nearly half of the state prison population is made up of people who were convicted of crimes they committed when they were younger than 25 — the approximate age until which some neuroscientists believe a person's brain continues to develop.

Banning mandatory life sentences for people under 25 would reflect the advances of science and help reduce incarceration overall.

"What we're really looking at is the impulsivity, the lack of experience, the brain development, and all of the things that lead youth to act with impulsivity and without thinking through the consequences or potential consequences," LaBelle said. "The brain science says 25. So why aren't we doing this up to age 25?"

Key Difference in Michigan Constitution's Language

Three states have so far banned mandatory life without parole sentences for individuals under 21. Washington did so in March 2021 with a ruling by its top court. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court went further, entirely banning LWOP sentences for this age group by deciding Commonwealth v. Mattis in January 2024.

Marsha Levick, the co-founder and chief legal officer of the Juvenile Law Center, said that the decisions in Massachusetts and Michigan, in particular, signal a shift in strategy, in part as a response to a U.S. Supreme Court that became more conservative during President Donald Trump's first term.

After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in March 2021 in Jones v. Mississippi that the Eighth Amendment does not require that judges find a juvenile "permanently incorrigible" before imposing LWOP sentences, juvenile justice advocates began turning to state courts as the new front in the battle.

State constitutions in Michigan and Massachusetts prohibit punishments that are "cruel or unusual," rather than the narrower "cruel and unusual" language in the Eighth Amendment. The Pennsylvania and Washington constitutions bar "cruel" punishment. Those differences offer wider legal grounds for challenges in state courts than at the federal level.

"That is precisely what this litigation is about," Levick told Law360. "You will be seeing a very significant pivot."

Individualized Assessment Instead of Mandatory Life Sentence

As a direct result of the Miller decision, criminal defendants who committed offenses when they were younger than 18 cannot be automatically — by statute — sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole, sometimes referred to as "letter sentences" because of the LWOP acronym.

Rather, a judge is required to hold a hearing and consider all possible mitigating factors involving a defendant, for example, things like neglect or abuse, violent family background and emotional disturbance.

Levick said that available data show that of the original cohort of incarcerated individuals resentenced under Miller nationwide, only about 5% received new sentences of life without parole.

"That's not to say that they haven't received decades in prison," Levick said. "I want to note that judges may not be calling it life without parole, but we have high percentages — 30, 40, 50% in some jurisdictions — of individuals under 18 convicted of homicide who are getting 40, 50, 60, years and up. And that's concerning to me as an advocate."

Menlo said the Taylor decision in Michigan now gives 19- and 20-year-old criminal defendants and currently incarcerated people who committed crimes at those ages an opportunity to demonstrate to a judge that a sentence of life in prison is not fair in their individual cases because of circumstances surrounding their crimes, their ages and their potential for rehabilitation.

Prosecutors, on the other hand, have to prove by clear and convincing evidence that life is the appropriate penalty. To do so, they must meet a high bar — they have to call witnesses, introduce exhibits — to prove that a defendant deserves to die in prison.

"It's very difficult for — as it should be — for prosecutors to succeed in getting life imposed. So they really need to pick their battles," Menlo said.

Attorneys defending young adults can now present "Miller factors" to convince judges to impose a terms-of-years sentence, also known as "number sentences" — a minimum between 25 and 40 years with a maximum of 60 — in contrast to LWOP. Even after serving their minimum terms, individuals must face the state's parole board and demonstrate their readiness for release.

"Very often, we see that our clients have suffered abuse as children, that they have been neglected, that they did not have enough food to eat. They live in extreme poverty, that they were surrounded by people who were negative influences, that perhaps their one very special role model was killed in a violent crime when they were very young," Menlo said. "It just really seems like very many of these terribly traumatic things happen to our young clients, and that sort of sets off a chain of events that eventually results in them being incarcerated for life."

Liz Komar, a sentencing reform counsel at The Sentencing Project, said the Michigan high court's decision points to a broader movement.

"This decision reflects a growing consensus and interest in reforming sentencing laws to reflect our understanding that emerging adults share the same neurological differences as younger teenagers and they deserve the same individualized sentencing considerations," she said. "What that reform looks like may differ from state to state."

Komar said national data shows that the number of people serving life sentences has decreased 4% from 2020 to 2024. Such decline trails a 13% downsizing of the total prison population. Life sentences are declining at a slower rate than other sentences, according to the data.

But numbers also show that people who committed their crimes when they were under age 25 represent roughly one-third of all life sentences imposed across the country.

"This is a significant issue to tackle as we tackle mass incarceration as a whole," she said.

Local and Broader Opposition

Some prosecutors, victims' advocate groups and legal scholars have opposed the expansion of the Miller decision's reach from the time the U.S. Supreme Court decided that seminal case in 2012. Concerns about banning mandatory LWOP sentences have centered on public safety, recidivism and the rights of victims' families.

The National District Attorneys Association told Law360 through its president, Summer Stephan, that it supports individualized sentencing decisions that balance a broad array of factors about a defendant — including cognitive and developmental issues — and the impact on crime victims and public safety.

"Unfortunately, young offenders have been responsible for some of the most heinous crimes, including devastating mass shootings that have ended the lives of innocent children and teens," Stephan said in an email. "We have to remember that there is no parole date for those young students who lost their lives — they are never going home."

In Michigan, even before the state high court decided the Parks and Taylor cases, the Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan, or PAAM, had expressed opposition to legislative proposals that would have outright banned LWOP sentences for defendants who were 19 and younger at the time of their crimes.

J. Dee Brooks, the president of PAAM and the elected prosecutor of Midland County, Michigan, told Law360 that he disagrees with the Michigan Supreme Court's analysis in the Taylor ruling, saying the way it considered brain science creates a "gross overgeneralization."

While rejecting the court's conclusion that imposing LWOP sentences on young adults is unconstitutional, Brooks said he supports giving prosecutors and judges discretion to seek or impose such sentences. That's why, he said, he opposes the complete ban on LWOP sought by some legislators, but not the banning of mandatory LWOP sentences.

Brooks said prosecutors already consider the underlying circumstances of a case, including the age, maturity and experience of a defendant, as well as whether they have mental health issues or substance abuse disorders.

"We understand that some people are raised in very challenging households, and that can make a difference as to how somebody develops," he said. "But again, to just categorically say that these people automatically aren't considered to have sufficient brain development or sufficient maturity and experience to be held fully accountable for their crimes, I just, I don't think it's fair."

Brooks said that, under the Miller ruling alone, prosecutors must meet an exceedingly high bar to successfully seek LWOP sentences for juveniles convicted of heinous murders. The latest Michigan high court rulings are making that process even more challenging for prosecutors.

"It's unfair to the victims and the victims' families," he said. "These are first-degree murder cases, which means they were premeditated. They had an opportunity to think about what they were doing and what the end result would be, and they chose to deliberately take part in action that ended somebody's life. And that's permanent. That's forever."

Brooks also criticized the retroactivity the court recognized in its latest rulings, which allows the reopening of cases that were finalized decades ago, sometimes requiring victims' family members to testify in court about the loved ones they lost to violence.

"It's just a horrific experience for somebody to go through having a family member who is murdered," Brooks said. "They have to relive that experience."

Some of the opposition to the expansion of the Miller ruling to cover more classes of criminal defendants has come from the courts themselves — from dissenting judges.

When the Washington Supreme Court banned mandatory LWOP sentences for offenders aged 20 and below, Justice Susan Owens, who died in March, disagreed, saying the ruling would overburden state resources and harm victims' families.

"Our court is not a legislature, and it is insufficiently equipped to decide this issue on selectively presented evidence put forth by limited parties on a constrained schedule," she wrote in her dissenting opinion. "I struggle to identify at what precise age we will stop redrawing these lines based on this brain development evidence."

Justice David A. Lowy, who sat on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court at the time it decided the Commonwealth v. Mattis case, disagreed with the majority's constitutional interpretation and said the court encroached on the legislature's power to define crimes and punishments.

"Scientific brain research, untethered to societal views expressed through legislation, can neither draw the line between childhood and adulthood nor manufacture a new category of individuals entitled to distinct constitutional treatment," Justice Lowy wrote in his dissenting opinion, joined by two other justices.

And in April, then-Chief Justice Elizabeth T. Clement in Michigan disagreed with the constitutional analysis the court employed in the Taylor decision, saying the majority downplayed the gravity of first-degree murder.

While she agreed that young offenders are still developing neurologically, she wrote in a dissenting opinion that it was up to the state legislature to prohibit LWOP for 19- and 20-year-old offenders, not the judiciary.

"It is one thing for scientific evidence to justify a change in policy from the Legislature, and another thing for that same evidence to support a judicial finding that mandatory LWOP violates our Constitution," she wrote. "The bar for the latter is much higher, and I do not believe it has been met."

But opposition to LWOP sentencing reform has also taken the form of wrenches in the gears of the court bureaucracy tasked with executing that reform.

Formerly incarcerated people and state appellate defenders told Law360 that following the Michigan Supreme Court rulings in Parks and Taylor, some prosecutorial offices have been slow in processing motions for resentencing, and in some cases even delayed the release of people who had already been resentenced.

Edmonds praised Savit for securing Kent Taylor's release, but said other offices have been much less willing to move forward in cases involving defendants who have spent decades in prison, in some cases, for "relatively minimal" roles in the offenses for which they were convicted.

Brain Science Fueling Sentencing Reform

Leroy Harris, a Michigan lifer who was released in May 2023, after the Michigan Supreme Court decision in Parks, told Law360 a childhood marred by physical, emotional, verbal and sexual abuse led him to the streets at age 14, when he started selling drugs. That took him on a path of violence, and ultimately, to kill a man six months after his 18th birthday.

Convicted of first-degree premeditated murder and conspiracy to murder, he was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, a sentence he believed would define the rest of his life. For 35 years, it did.

But in 2022, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled in Parks that mandatory life sentences for 18-year-olds were unconstitutional without a mitigating hearing.

Represented by attorneys with the Michigan State Appellate Defender Office, Harris was resentenced and released at age 53 after spending 35 years behind bars. He now lives in Washtenaw County and works for a reentry organization that contracts with the local government to clean highways and help people transition after incarceration.

"I went in so young that I spent most of my time in prison just trying to protect myself," Harris said. "Most of us went in there saying we're never going home."

On the day of his resentencing on Sept. 9, 2022, Harris, who was one of the first beneficiaries of the Parks decision, was ready to go home. But the state attorney general objected to his sentence and prison officials delayed his release for months.

"I was sitting in prison, supposedly getting released," Harris said. "But nothing was happening."

He ultimately was released in May 2023, after the court amended his final sentence.

Many lifers lose any hope they will ever see freedom again, and that mindset makes them prone to commit crimes while incarcerated, including selling drugs or assaulting other inmates, Harris said. Even behind bars, Harris said he felt driven by peer pressure until he was well into his 30s. The desire to be liked by others pushed him to risky behaviors and even violence while in prison.

A turning point for Harris came through education and reflection. He began taking classes in critical thinking, conflict resolution classes, and mediation, gradually realizing he had power he never considered.

"I began to really start maturing and was able to understand that I didn't have to choose the type of peers I was choosing, and I didn't have to do the things that I had to do that I thought I had to do in order to survive or to get by," he said. "I had to switch from using my fist to using my mind, and it was hard at first, because, you know, I had developed a reputation in prison that I was a guy that didn't mind hurting you if you got in my way."

Harris says his own story illustrates the crucial role maturity plays in a person's actions — one that Michigan judges must now consider when considering life sentences for young adults.

Nicole McKenna, an assistant professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who studies the intersection between trauma and incarceration among youth and adults, said that scientific research showing that the brain is not really developed until about the age of 25 opened a legal debate on whether it's fair — and constitutional — to sentence adolescents and younger adults to long prison terms.

"We know that youth are more impulsive than adults, and that makes sense because of their development. We know that they don't necessarily think through long-term consequences, or even immediate consequences of their actions," she said. "We look at culpability differently and also this belief within the system that youth are more amenable to change because they're younger."

High courts in Washington, Massachusetts and Michigan largely draw from the same scientific consensus the U.S. Supreme Court relied on in 2012 when deciding Miller with a 5-to-4 vote.

The Miller decision itself is the progeny of two seminal rulings, Roper v. Simmons in 2005, and Graham v. Florida in 2010, which established that children are constitutionally different from adults for purposes of sentencing under the framing of the Eighth Amendment. Roper abolished the death penalty for offenders who were under 18 at the time of their crime, while Graham prohibited sentencing juvenile offenders to life imprisonment without parole for nonhomicide crimes.

In the majority opinion in the Miller ruling, Justice Elena Kagan said state laws essentially tied judges' hands, precluding them from considering "hallmark features" of a juvenile, such as immaturity, impetuosity, and failure to appreciate risks and consequences, but also family and home environment that surrounds him, as well as the circumstances of the crime, including peer pressure.

After the Miller decision, litigation in state courts began producing the first expansions of that ruling.

In 2021, when deciding whether the constitutional protections of the Miller decision applied to two youthful offenders who were older than 17 — William Monschke and Dwayne Bartholomew — the Washington Supreme Court scrutinized whether the state constitution's prohibition on cruel punishment permitted distinguishing defendants who are 17 years old from those who are 19 and 20. The court's answer was no.

"Neuroscience does not provide any such distinction," the court ruled. "The petitioners have shown that many youthful defendants older than 18 share the same developing brains and impulsive behavioral attributes as those under 18."

In 2024, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court said it considered "updated research on the brains of emerging adults" in concluding that sentencing a person younger than 21 to life without parole violated the standards of decency prescribed by the state constitution. The ruling — which came with a 5-to-4 vote and two judges issuing dissenting opinions — banned LWOP for those defendants entirely.

"The scientific record strongly supports the contention that emerging adults have the same core neurological characteristics as juveniles have," the court wrote in the majority opinion.

More recently, when ruling in the Taylor case, the Michigan Supreme Court looked at "undisputed scientific research regarding the late-adolescent brain" and concluded, with a 5-to-2 majority, that condemning 19- and 20-year-old offenders to die in prison without first considering the attributes of youth that late adolescents and juveniles share did not align with the "evolving standards of decency" as required by the state constitution.

"As a class, 19- and 20-year-old late adolescents are more similar to juveniles in neurological terms than they are to older adults," Justice Elizabeth M. Welch wrote in the majority opinion.

Notably, in concurring with the majority overall, Justice Richard H. Bernstein wrote in a separate opinion that while he questioned the effectiveness of a bright-line age rule, he would "follow the consensus of the relevant scientific studies and draw such a line at age 25."

Justice reform advocates in Michigan and beyond are now pushing for courts to extend the conclusions reached by these courts to defendants who are convicted for crimes they carry out when they're younger than 25.

"It's hard to justify treating that 18-to-21, or 18-to-25 population just like adults, when in fact, they look a whole lot more like teenagers," Levick said.

Menlo said the Michigan State Appellate Defender Office litigation involving people who were in their early 20s at the time of their offenses began after the Parks ruling and are still pending. Because the Taylor decision is recent, there aren't any cases involving offenders aged 20 and above who are seeking to broaden the ruling.

"We don't know that the Michigan Supreme Court is going to even consider further expansion," she said.

Challenges After Going Home

One day, Joshua Puckett walked back to his home in Detroit to find his mother and her female partner being carried away in body bags, slain by the next-door neighbor because they were gay. Six months prior, his father had died of HIV in Seattle. Puckett was 14 at the time.

Suddenly deprived of a family, he soon sought comfort in gang life in southwest Detroit. When he was 18, he helped plan — and later conceal — a drive-by shooting at the apartment building where members of a rival gang lived. As the crew circled the block spraying bullets at the building, a 12-year-old girl sitting in a parked car was hit in the head and died.

Despite not being the one who pulled the trigger, under Michigan law, Puckett was convicted for aiding and abetting the murder, eventually receiving a sentence of life without parole.

"I don't make any excuses," Puckett said. "I carved a hole in another family, just like mine had, through gun violence."

In prison, Puckett spent his first 15 years in gangs and disciplinary trouble. But the next 15 were different. He earned three college degrees, completed vocational certifications, wrote three books, and developed a gang-intervention program that Michigan's Department of Corrections still uses today.

Nearly 30 years after being locked up, Puckett walked free on July 17, 2024, as one of the first beneficiaries of the Michigan Supreme Court's 2022 ruling in People v. Parks.

Despite turning his life around while incarcerated, reentry into society hit hard. The stigma of a murder conviction, and the barriers attached to it, followed him everywhere. He quickly discovered that even "felony-friendly" employers and landlords were unwilling to overlook a homicide conviction. Unable to find housing or employment, Puckett lived on couches, worked under the table at construction jobs, and kept quiet about his past as a felon.

His experience shows how even the most profound personal transformation behind bars can be overshadowed by the weight of a life sentence, even long after release. The lack of resources and the obstacles they face put lifers in a difficult position, even when they have a deep desire to do good as atonement for their crimes, Puckett said.

Looking at the hundreds of people who are now eligible for resentencing — and possibly, release — under the Taylor decision, Puckett said society as a whole needs to find ways to ensure their reentry is positive.

"People have the ability to change," he said. "You have an opportunity to really help people be assets to the community, or to be detriments to the community. So why don't we set people up to be successful assets and be supported so that they can support us?"

--Editing by Orlando Lorenzo.

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