State v. Lujan

Simplified, what happened in this case is this. The seventeen-year-old Defendant, a boy with a bad record and a potential for violence, received a sentence of seventeen years flat for grabbing a thirteen-year-old boy, taking him a short distance into a house, threatening to harm him, and then immediately releasing him unharmed when others told the Defendant to do so. I think the sentence imposed in this case is so disproportionate to the crime that it offends the Eighth Amendment ban against cruel and *563unusual punishment. The case merits a close look at the Defendant’s background and…