Michigan High Court Could Break New Ground in Limiting Excessive Sentences

Kyle C. Barry is director of the State Law Research Initiative, which filed an amicus brief in People v. Langston.

The Michigan Supreme Court this year could end one of criminal law’s most shocking injustices: imposing mandatory life without the possibility parole when someone is convicted of murder based solely on their role in some other felony, like being the getaway driver in a robbery, that led to someone’s death.

For decades, the Michigan Supreme Court was an outlier. While other state courts reflexively moved in lockstep with the U.S. Supreme Court’s miserly “cruel and unusual” punishment cases under the Eighth Amendment — leading to virtually unchecked mass incarceration and the proliferation of massive prison terms — Michigan’s justices breathed life into their state constitution and its prohibition on “cruel or unusual” punishment. Building its own state-based jurisprudence, the court has repeatedly expanded rights and restrained the state’s power to condemn people to die in prison — an effort that, more recently, has turned the court from exception to national trendsetter.

That trend could continue with People v. Langston, in which the court heard argument in December. Edwin Langston was convicted in 1976 for his role in the robbery of a grocery store. During the robbery, another man shot and killed the store owner. Langston was not in the store when the murder occurred and prosecutors did not present evidence that he intended to kill anyone, yet he was sentenced to die in prison. Langston argues that Michigan’s “cruel or unusual” punishment clause prohibits the mandatory imposition of the law’s most severe punishment in “felony-murder” cases like his. In one sense, the stakes in Langston are relatively small. Michigan’s high court already narrowed the state’s felony-murder rule when, in 1980, it added a requirement to prove “malice” (i.e., intent). That means only those convicted over 45 years ago stand to directly benefit. But even setting aside the “uniquely cruel” practice (as one lawyer put it during oral argument) of forever condemning people under a sentencing practice the state has long rejected, how the court decides this constitutional question could provide a path to where it goes next. It could also reverberate across the country, influencing other state courts and opening the door to other excessive punishment claims based on reduced culpability and the nature of the offense in question — and ultimately to the demise of life-without-parole sentences entirely.

While Michigan’s “cruel or unusual” jurisprudence goes back over a century, the seminal modern case was decided in 1992, when the state supreme court overturned the life-without-parole sentence of grandmother and longtime General Motors employee Ruth Bullock. A few years earlier, Bullock drove to the Lansing airport and picked up Kenneth Hasson, who had flown in from Los Angeles with two suitcases full of cocaine. Hasson put his luggage in Bullock’s trunk before police stopped them and arrested everyone inside. Although Bullock denied any knowledge of the drugs, police found traces of cocaine in her purse and glove compartment. With that evidence, a jury convicted her of possessing more than 650 grams (just under a pound and a half) of cocaine. It was Bullock’s first and only drug conviction, but that didn’t matter. It carried a mandatory sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. 

Bullock appealed her sentence as both cruel and unusual, and her case reached the Michigan Supreme Court one year after a divided U.S. Supreme Court upheld the very same sentencing law under the Eighth Amendment. Writing for a plurality in Harmelin v. Michigan, Justice Anthony Kennedy preached deference to state legislatures while at least tacitly embracing “War on Drugs” rhetoric about the cascading harms of drug possession and who is responsible for them. “Reasonable minds may differ about the efficacy of Michigan’s sentencing scheme,” he wrote, but the “dangers flowing from drug offenses and the circumstances of the crime committed here demonstrate that the Michigan penalty scheme” is constitutional. 

In People v. Bullock, though, the Michigan Supreme Court invoked its distinct cruel or unusual clause, along with the state’s unique constitutional history, to reject Harmelin’s conclusion and strike down mandatory life without parole for drug possession. The Court recognized that the sentence was flatly inconsistent with helping people rehabilitate and return to society, a goal “rooted in Michigan’s legal traditions” and crucial to the constitutional inquiry. It also found that the sentence’s severity was not aligned with personal culpability, a cornerstone of criminal punishments. Holding people responsible for the downstream consequences of drug possession is “profoundly unfair,” the court said, and mandating death in prison on that theory is cruel and unconstitutional. 

Years later, this emphasis on rehabilitation and personal culpability led to further rights expansion for young people. In 2022, the court made a series of rulings that protected youth and emerging adults — young people over age 17 — with still-developing brains from the law’s most severe punishments. Among other holdings, the court barred mandatory life-without-parole sentences for 18 year olds; created a presumption against discretionary life without parole for youth that prosecutors must rebut with evidence; and held that even life with the possibility of parole is unconstitutionally severe for youth convicted of second-degree murder. Last year, the court went further and banned mandatory life without parole for anyone under age 21, joining both the Washington and Massachusetts state high courts in doing so. (The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has gone furthest, prohibiting all life without parole, mandatory or otherwise, for people under 21.) All these rulings followed from neuroscience showing that young people have both reduced culpability and a greater capacity to grow and change.

Today, this sort of state constitutional independence is, if not yet the norm, increasingly common. In addition to Washington and Massachusetts, state appellate courts in Alaska, California, Connecticut, Iowa, New Jersey, and elsewhere have issued major rulings expanding state constitutional anti-punishment rights, with holdings that range from prohibiting all mandatory minimums for children to banning capital punishment.

In Michigan, Langston presents the same themes. It involves a class of people with inherently reduced culpability — in this case based on the nature of felony murder and its lack of intent requirement rather than youth — who remain imprisoned without any consideration of their rehabilitation. As the MacArthur Justice Center and the State Law Research Initiative, which I direct, wrote in an amicus brief, “This case throws the universal cruelty” of mandatory life without parole “into sharp relief.” The claimants are “elderly and increasingly infirm prisoners who have all served at least 45 years and who, according to empirical social science, long-ago aged out of violent behavior (if they ever engaged in any) and now pose virtually zero public safety risk.” And of course, life sentences inevitably result in the warehousing elderly people while turning prisons into high-security, low-quality nursing homes. 

A favorable ruling in Langston, therefore, points toward further limits on life terms — both in Michigan and elsewhere. Other states still have far-reaching felony-murder laws that are ripe for constitutional challenge and could follow Langston’s lead (in Pennsylvania, the state supreme court is expected to rule any day on whether life without parole for felony murder violates the state constitution). Beyond felony murder, there are other categories of people for whom mandating the most severe punishment is facially inconsistent with culpability. That includes people sentenced under “repeat offender” laws who received life in person for a relatively minor third offense; or people with mental illness or intellectual disability, who could safely re-enter and contribute to their communities with the proper support. 

The more that the Michigan Supreme Court and other state courts provide a meaningful check on extreme criminal punishments — demanding, as a matter of constitutional law, sentencing policy that is proportionate to personal culpability and justified by a legitimate purpose, the more that mandatory life in prison for anyone becomes untenable. A favorable ruling in Langston would be the next step along that path.

Suggested Citation: Kyle C. Barry, Michigan High Court Could Break New Ground in Limiting Excessive Sentences, Sᴛᴀᴛᴇ Cᴏᴜʀᴛ Rᴇᴘᴏʀᴛ (Jan. 22, 2026), https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/michigan-high-court-could-break-new-ground-limiting-excessive-sentences