In November, 2020, Lauren McLane, a professor at the University of Wyoming College of Law, was forwarded a letter from Christopher Hicks, an incarcerated man who’d been sentenced to life without parole for his role in a murder. The letter was part of a petition, prepared by Hicks, laying out “all the pertinent information, charges and reasons” that he deserved consideration for a pardon. The murder, he wrote, had been carried out fifteen years earlier by another man, who entered the victim’s house while Hicks remained in the back seat of a car, intoxicated.
Noting that he was a teen-ager at the time, Hicks claimed that he’d been pressured into participating in the crime by a third, older man, who lived in the trailer where Hicks had been residing. McLane runs a clinic that regularly helps indigent clients in Wyoming file motions to reduce their sentences. Yet, when she finished Hicks’s petition, she said to herself, “This is an absolute lost cause.
” In part, she felt this way because of the notorious reputation of Kent Proffit, Sr., the older man who’d orchestrated the murder: Proffit, an alleged child molester, had wanted to prevent the victim, a sixteen-year-old boy, from testifying against him in a sexual-assault trial. Another problem was that Hicks had been nineteen when the crime occurred.
In a 2012 Supreme Court case, Miller v. Alabama, the Justices had barred judges from sentencing juveniles to mandatory life without parole, on the ground that doing .
