Vox Sentences: The Supreme Court gives a second chance to 1,500 prisoners

Making it harder to sentence children to life without parole; Bloomberg vs. Sanders vs. Trump, oh my; and it's only a matter of time before the Zika virus reaches the continental US.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Life without parole for teens? Only for the "irreparably corrupt."

(Lyn Alweis/Denver Post via Getty Images)

• The Supreme Court ruled today that 1,500 prisoners who were sentenced to life without parole before they turned 18 should now be given a chance at parole or release.

  [AP / Mark Sherman]

• Today's ruling builds on a 2012 decision, Miller v. Alabama, that said it was unconstitutional for sentencing policies to require that all juveniles who committed certain crimes be given life without parole.

  [Bloomberg / Matt Stroud]

• In most states, the 2012 ruling was interpreted to allow current prisoners to apply for new sentences. Today's ruling, in Montgomery v. Louisiana, makes it retroactive even in the six states that had held out.

  [Equal Justice Initiative]

• The 6-3 decision (written by Justice Kennedy) also went a little further than the earlier case had — by saying that giving life without parole to juveniles is itself generally unconstitutional, not just giving life without parole as a mandatory sentence.

  [New York Times / Adam Liptak]

• Under Kennedy's ruling, a juvenile offender should only get life without parole if he is "irreparably corrupt" or "patently incorrigible."

  [SCOTUSBlog / Lyle Denniston]

• For both current and future prisoners, though, this puts a lot of power in the hands of parole boards to determine when someone is safe to release — and their decisions can be capricious.

  [The Marshall Project / Beth Schwartzapfel]

Forget it, Bloomberg, New York billionaires don't run for president

(Thierry Chesnot/Getty Images)

• Former New York City Mayor and very rich person Michael Bloomberg is letting it be known that he's considering a third-party run for president.

  [New York Times / Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman]

• To be clear: This is a possibility that he's been alternately considering and swatting down for the past 10 years. But in the age of Trump, maybe he means it!

  [Quartz / Hanna Kozlowska]

• The flirtation is at least real enough that reporters at Bloomberg's eponymous media outlet are being told not to write about the potential candidacy without running it by their corporate bosses first (which bodes very poorly for Bloomberg's coverage if its owner does step into the race).

  [Politico / Hadas Gold]

• The biggest problem of a Bloomberg '16 run (other than the total lack of national get-out-the-vote organization) is that most of America doesn't know who Michael Bloomberg is.

  [Vox / Michelle Hackman]

• In practice, it could very well hand 2016 to President Donald J. Trump by splitting the Democratic vote.

  [New York Times / Paul Krugman]

• But frankly, a Bloomberg run — especially against Trump and Democrat Bernie Sanders — might actually result in more Americans being able to vote for a candidate who reflected their views than the current two-party system.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• And just imagine what would happen if Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol goes through with his threat to run a fourth candidate who is "pro-life" and hawkish against Sanders, Bloomberg, and Trump.

  [The Daily Beast / Tim Mak]

The spread of Zika virus

(Universal Images Group/Getty)

• A World Health Organization report released Monday predicts that the Zika virus will spread to nearly every country in the Western Hemisphere — including the US.

  [Reuters / Tom Miles and Ben Hirschler]

• Zika, a mosquito-borne virus that has been linked to the birth defect called microcephaly, has been spreading throughout South America and the Caribbean after a serious outbreak in Brazil.

  [Vox / Julia Belluz]

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning pregnant American women not to travel to countries where Zika is being transmitted.

  [Washington Post / Ariana Eunjung Cha]

• Here's a map of all the countries where Zika has been detected.

  [Vox / Julia Belluz, Javier Zarracina, and Matt Moore]

• And the government of El Salvador, among other Zika-affected countries, is encouraging women to avoid getting pregnant until 2018 for public health reasons.

  [USA Today / Josh Hafner]

• Zika hasn't hit the US yet, but it's only a matter of time — scientists predict that due to climate change, the southern US will become more hospitable to tropical-disease-bearing mosquitoes.

  [Washington Post / Chelsea Harvey]

MISCELLANEOUS

Donald Rumsfeld has developed an app called "Churchill Solitaire." He announced this in a characteristically Rumsfeldian Medium post. Be sure to read the comments. [Medium / Donald Rumsfeld]

• Defense attorney J.W. Carney represents some of the most notorious criminals in Massachusetts — terrorists, murderers, even Whitey Bulger. Here's why he thinks that work is so important.

  [Boston.com / Allison Manning]

• A Minnesotan friend recently had to explain to me (Dylan) that meat raffles are real things that actually happen in that state. The Minneapolis Star Tribune has more.

  [Minneapolis Star-Tribune / Sharyn Jackson]

• Ted Cruz was famously unpopular at Princeton, but he did have one very close friend: David Panton, a future Rhodes Scholar who former Jamaican Prime Minister Edward Seaga pegged as a possible successor.

  [Washington Post / Rosalind Helderman and Tom Hamburger]

• Atheism is on the rise in rich countries. But the barriers to it becoming a majority remain huge.

  [BBC / Rachel Nuwer]

VERBATIM

"Notably, more than just the snow, it was the storms’ intersection with neoliberalism that made the winter so unbearable." [Jacobin / Owen Hill]

• "There is another way we can handle our phones, one that doesn’t call for a misguided 'mindfulness' that misperceives technology as inherently toxic: Don’t be rude to others, with or without your phone. Be mindful of people rather than screens. Focus less on your relationship to your device and more on your relationship to human beings."

  [The New Inquiry / Nathan Jurgensen]

• "The thumbscrew and the rack may also be useful tools for fighting crime, but we don’t use them."

  [Roger Pilon to Bloomberg Businessweek / Josh Eidelson]

• "[Trevor] Noah’s problem is not that he makes bad jokes but that he doesn’t take more chances to make great ones."

  [Slate / Willa Paskin]

• "So 'divisive' was Ulysses S. Grant’s defense of black civil rights and war upon the Klan, that American historians spent the better part of a century destroying his reputation."

  [The Atlantic / Ta-Nehisi Coates]

WATCH THIS

How the Iowa caucus works [YouTube / Carlos Waters]

(RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post via Getty)

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