To: Board of County Commissioners
From: Prosecutor David Leyton
title
RE: Approval to create & fill one (1) Associate/Lead/Senior Assistant Prosecuting Attorney (APA) position & one (1) Social Service Worker-Victim Advocate position to carry out mandates of recent Supreme Court rulings on Life Without Parole cases
recommendation
BOARD ACTION REQUESTED:
We respectfully request authorization to create and fill one (1) Associate/Lead/Senior Assistant Prosecuting Attorney (APA) position and one (1) Social Service Worker-Victim Advocate position.
BACKGROUND:
As first presented to this Board in April, there have been a number of Supreme Court rulings both at the federal and state levels that have a direct and significant impact on the workload of the Prosecutor's Office. In April of 2025, the Michigan Supreme Court (MSC) decided the Czarnecki and Taylor cases extending a previous ruling (Parks) relative to individuals sentenced automatically to life without parole (LWOP) for their crimes. The controlling case precedent tracks back to the United States Supreme Court's (USSC) decisions in 2012 in Miller v Alabama and the 2016 case of Montgomery v Louisiana which declared automatic LWOP sentences for juveniles unconstitutional. The ruling was based on new developments in neuroscience relative to the age at which the human brain matures relative to its decision-making functions. The experts opined that the age of brain maturity was 25-26 years old. As a result of the Miller case, juveniles were no longer allowed to be automatically sentenced to life without parole and the Montgomery case made it retroactive to include past cases. Going forward, juveniles would need a hearing (now called a "Miller hearing") to craft an individualized sentence to determine whether the juvenile offender should receive a "term of years" or a LWOP sentence. The Miller and Montgomery rulings created our first large group (27 defendants) of cases that required resentencing; as of this date...
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