A limited win. Fear not.

Perhaps Justice Roberts did not sign on as broadly to the "no life sentences unless the child murders" meme, as is initially being reported.*

The high court ruled Monday in the case of Terrance Graham, who was implicated in armed robberies when he was 16 and 17. Graham, now 22, is in prison in Florida, which holds the vast majority - at least 98 - of juvenile defendants locked up for life for crimes other than homicide.

"The state has denied him any chance to later demonstrate that he is fit to rejoin society based solely on a nonhomicide crime that he committed while he was a child in the eyes of the law," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion. "This the Eighth Amendment does not permit."

Chief Justice John Roberts agreed with Kennedy and the court's four liberal justices about Graham. But Roberts said he does not believe the ruling should extend to all young offenders who are locked up for crimes other than murder.

And that's a key distinction, looking beyond Graham's sentence and determining how it applies to others.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS, concurring in the judgment.
I agree with the Court that Terrance Graham’s sentence of life without parole violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishments.” Unlike the majority, however, I see no need to invent a new constitutional rule of dubious provenance in reaching that conclusion.
...
So much for Graham. But what about Milagro Cunningham, a 17-year-old who beat and raped an 8-year-old girl before leaving her to die under 197 pounds of rock in arecycling bin in a remote landfill? Or Nathan Walker and Jakaris Taylor, the Florida juveniles who together with their friends gang-raped a woman and forced her toperform oral sex on her 12-year-old son? The fact that Graham cannot be sentenced to life without parole for his conduct says nothing whateverabout these offenders, or others like them who commit nonhomicide crimes far more reprehensible than the conduct at issue here.

The Court uses Graham’s case as a vehicle to proclaim a new constitutional rule —applicable well beyond the particular facts of Graham’s case — that a sentence of life without parole imposed on any juvenile for any nonhomicide offense is unconstitutional. This categorical conclusion is as unnecessary as it is unwise.

A holding this broad is unnecessary because the particular conduct and circumstances at issue in the case before us are not serious enough to justify Graham’s sentence. In reaching this conclusion, there is no need for the Court to decide whether that same sentence would be constitutional if imposed for other more heinous non-homicide crimes.

A more restrained approach is especially appropriate in light of the Court’s apparent recognition that it is perfectly legitimate for a juvenile to receive a sentence of life without parole for committing murder. This means that there is nothing inherently unconstitutional about imposing sentences of life without parole on juvenile offenders; rather, the constitutionality of such sentences depends on the particular crimes for which they are imposed. But if the constitutionality of the sentence turns on the particular crime being punished, then the Court should limit its holding to the particular offenses that Graham committed here, and should decline to consider other hypothetical crimes not presented by this case.

In any event, the Court’s categorical conclusion is also unwise. Most importantly, it ignores the fact that somenonhomicide crimes — like the ones committed by MilagroCunningham, Nathan Walker, and Jakaris Taylor — are especially heinous or grotesque, and thus may be deserving of more severe punishment.

Those under 18 years old may as a general matter have “diminished” culpability relative to adults who commit the same crimes, but that does not mean that their culpability is always insufficient to justify life sentence.

It does not take a moral sense that is fully developed in every respect to know that beating and raping an 8-year-old girl and leaving her to die under 197 pounds of rocks is horribly wrong. The single fact of being 17 years old would not afford Cunningham protection against life without parole if the young girl had died — as Cunningham surely expected she would — so why should it do so when she miraculously survived his barbaric brutality?

The Court defends its categorical approach on the grounds that a “clear line is necessary to prevent the possibility that life without parole sentences will be im-posed on juvenile nonhomicide offenders who are not sufficiently culpable to merit that punishment.”

It argues that a case-by-case approach to proportionality review is constitutionally insufficient because courtsmight not be able “with sufficient accuracy [to] distinguish the few incorrigible juvenile offenders from the many that have the capacity for change.”

The Court is of course correct that judges will never have perfect foresight — or perfect wisdom — in makingsentencing decisions. But this is true when they sentence adults no less than when they sentence juveniles. It is also true when they sentence juveniles who commit murder no less than when they sentence juveniles who commit other crimes.

Our system depends upon sentencing judges applying their reasoned judgment to each case that comes beforethem. As we explained in Solem, the whole enterprise of proportionality review is premised on the “justified” assumption that “courts are competent to judge the gravityof an offense, at least on a relative scale.”

Indeed, “courts traditionally have made these judgments” by applying “generally accepted criteria” to analyze “the harm caused or threatened to the victim or society,and the culpability of the offender.”

Terrance Graham committed serious offenses, for which he deserves serious punishment. But he was only 16 years old, and under our Court’s precedents, his youth is one factor, among others, that should be considered in deciding whether his punishment was unconstitutionally excessive. In my view, Graham’s age — together with the nature of his criminal activity and the unusual severity of his sentence —tips the constitutional balance. I thus concur in the Court’s judgment that Graham’s sentence of life without parole violated the Eighth Amendment. I would not, however, reach the same conclusion in every case involving a juvenile offender. Some crimes are so heinous, and some juvenile offenders so highly culpable, that a sentence of life without parole may be entirely justified under the Constitution. As we have said, “successful challenges” to noncapital sentences under the Eighth Amendment have been — and, in my view, should continue to be — “exceedingly rare.”

But Graham’s sentence presents the exceptional case that our precedents have recognized will come along. We should grant Graham the relief to which he is entitled under the Eighth Amendment. The Court errs, however, in using this case as a vehicle for unsettling our established jurisprudence and fashioning a categorical rule applicable to far different cases.

* The Supreme Court has ruled that teenagers may not be locked up for life without chance of parole if they haven't killed anyone. By a 5-4 vote Monday, the court says the Constitution requires that young people serving life sentences must at least be considered for release.