State v. Ali

Mahdi Hassan Ali was sentenced to three consecutive terms of 30 years to life for crimes he committed as a juvenile. He will only become eligible for parole after serving 90 years in prison. Juvenile Law Center filed an amicus brief in the Minnesota Supreme Court in support of Mr. Ali.

Our brief argued that Mr. Ali’s sentence violates Miller because it is the functional equivalent of life without parole and was imposed without consideration of his age and age-related characteristics as required by Miller. We further argued that a sentence, like Mr. Ali’s, that precludes a “meaningful opportunity to obtain release” is unconstitutional regardless of whether it is labeled “life without parole” or a term of years sentence.

The Minnesota Supreme Court declined to extend the Miller and Montgomery rule to Mr. Ali because “the [U.S. Supreme] Court has not squarely addressed the issue of whether consecutive sentences should be viewed separately when conducting a proportionality analysis under the Eighth Amendment.”

In his dissent, Justice Chutich states, “The majority is unwilling to extend [Montgomery’s] substantive rule to juvenile offenders . . . who, with consecutive life sentences . . . ha[ve] received the functional equivalent of life imprisonment without the possibility of release. . . . But because the force and logic behind the principle that children are ‘constitutionally different from adults in their level of culpability’ undoubtedly encompass cases in which a juvenile defendant commits multiple offenses during a single criminal episode, as happened here, I respectfully dissent.”