IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT

Keller and the Determination that the Commission’s Parole Process for Juvenile Offenders Violated the Eighth Amendment In 2015, Judge Boyle of the Eastern District Court of North Carolina found that the Parole Commission’s parole process for juvenile offenders like Abrams violated the Eighth Amendment. [...] ¶ 23) Prior to the implementation of the Hayden Plan, the Parole Commission anticipated that these new procedures would “significantly increase” the workload of the commissioners, the commission’s case analysts, and other staff. [...] ¶ 25) In order to mitigate the commissioners’ “very heavy caseload,” the Parole Commission “asked the North Carolina General Assembly to create several new positions to help the commission comply with the new procedures for juvenile offenders,” including the creation of a fifth commissioner seat. [...] The Parole Commission does not instruct its commissioners to “consider youth and its various characteristics when assessing the nature or brutality of the underlying crime in juvenile offender cases.” It does not identify or suggest how its commissioners might evaluate or consider a juvenile offender’s age at the time of the underlying crime in the context of a parole review. [...] The Parole Process Fails to Provide a “Meaningful Opportunity” to Abrams Because the Process is Rife with Volume Issues, Material Misrepresentations, and Material Omissions The Parole Commission has failed to mitigate the Hayden court’s concerns about how the “sheer volume of work may itself preclude any consideration of the salient and constitutionally required meaningful opportunity to obtain re.