Michigan Supreme Court rules in favor of resentencing hearings for 18-year-olds serving life sentences
In a unanimous decision, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that inmates serving mandatory life sentences for crimes they committed at age 18 have the right to a resentencing hearing.
Darryl Woods knows the power of the high court's latest ruling. When Woods was 18, he was convicted and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.
"This is not a get out of jail free card," said Woods. "I believe that we should be a state who believes in redemption and giving people a second chance."
Serving nearly three decades behind bars, Woods says he missed pivotal moments in life, including the passing of his mother and grandmother and raising his two children, who were just 6 months old and a year old when he went away.
His case was overturned in 2003, and he began the appeal process, which went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court before his sentence was commuted in 2019.
"I don't forget where I come from. I don't forget about the pain and the agony that I went through. I suffered for 29 years," said Woods.
Woods says Monday's ruling doesn't minimize the crimes committed or the victims impacted but instead ensures defendants are given fair sentences.
"We have to balance this thing out properly. I believe in redemption, and the numbers prove very vividly that we could give folks a second chance and we can punish them at the same time," he said.
Paul Draus, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan Dearborn, says the ruling, which called the original law a "violation" of Michigan's constitutional prohibition on cruel or unusual punishment, is significant.
"These individuals now actually have the chance to make amends to their community by contributing in a positive way to those communities when they return home, as many of them are doing now," said Draus, who also leads the university's Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program at Macomb Correctional Facility.
Woods hopes the 250 Michiganders who are now entitled to resentencing get the opportunity to prove why they deserve that chance.
"I trust and believe that those who have been justice impacted want a safe community, and so I believe the careful review process should take place, and we need to get the people out who need to be out," said Woods.
