Whether the mandatory exclusion of murder defendants between the ages of 14 and 18 from Juvenile Court precludes individualized consideration of their youth in contravention of Miller v. Alabama

QUESTIONS PRESENTED When petitioner Raymond Concepcion was fifteen years old, two adult gang members ordered him to shoot a stranger, promising that he could leave the gang if he complied. Concepcion has an IQ of 66, and functioned at a nineor ten-year-old level even nearly two years after the offense; in a death penalty state, he would be too disabled to lawfully execute. Like every other fourteento eighteen-year-old charged with murder in Massachusetts, Concepcion was automatically tried as an adult pursuant to Mass. Gen. L. ch. 119, § 74. Unlike most states, Massachusetts does not allow a judge to consider the child’s individual characteristics and determine whether Juvenile Court jurisdiction is more suitable. Adult adjudication is automatic, with no transfer hearing, opportunity for remand, or other judicial consideration of youth. If conviction follows, the judge may not choose from the range of juvenile sentences, but instead must impose a life sentence. Accordingly, like every other fourteento eighteen-year-old convicted of murder in Massachusetts, Concepcion received a mandatory life sentence. There was no consideration of his youth or intellectual disability in his sentencing. This petition presents the following questions: 1. Whether the mandatory exclusion of murder defendants between the ages of 14 and 18 from Juvenile Court precludes individualized consideration of their youth in contravention of Miller v. Alabama, 567 U.S. 460 (2012), which ii instructs that “imposition of a State’s most severe penalties on juvenile offenders cannot proceed as though they were not children.” 2. Whether the mandatory imposition of the maximum punishment of a life sentence on Concepcion was an_ unconstitutionally disproportionate punishment, where both his youth and his intellectual disability diminished his culpability.