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At the center of the case is Brett Jones, a Mississippi man who, at the age of 15, murdered his grandfather. In August of 2004, Jones was living with his grandparents in the small town of Shannon, Mississippi. After Jones’s grandfather, Bertis, discovered Jones’s girlfriend in Jones’s bedroom, the two family members got into a heated argument. A few hours later, the argument escalated and turned violent, and Jones stabbed his grandfather eight times with a kitchen knife, killing him. Jones then haphazardly attempted to cover up the murder before being detained at a gas station several miles from the house.

Jones was convicted of murder, and a Mississippi judge sentenced him to life-without-parole, the mandatory sentence in the state at the time. But in the years since Jones was sentenced, the Supreme Court decided two landmark cases on mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles, Miller v. Alabama in 2012, and Montgomery v. Louisiana in 2016.

In Miller, the first of those decisions, the Court held that “the Eighth Amendment permits a life-without-parole sentence for a defendant who committed a homicide when he or she was under 18, but only if the sentence is not mandatory and the sentencer therefore has discretion to impose a lesser punishment.”