A follow-up to my brief post highlighting Solicitor General Elena Kagan’s nonparticipation in the recently decided case of Graham v. Florida, in which a 5-justice majority, in an opinion by Justice Kennedy, ruled that the Constitution forbids sentences of life without parole for nonhomicide juvenile offenders: As Jonathan Adler and Kent Scheidegger discuss more fully, the Solicitor General’s office has sent the Clerk of the Supreme Court a letter contesting Justice Kennedy’s assertion that there are six convicts in the federal prison system serving such sentences.
According to the letter, Court personnel obtained the mistaken data via a confidential request to the Bureau of Prisons that the Solicitor General’s office was unaware of. If so, that’s very strange conduct by Court personnel.