Patrick Jaicomo and Jon Muth are being honored for an Amicus Curiae Brief they submitted to the Michigan Supreme Court on the 2014 hearing of People v. Carp. The brief was filed on behalf of the Students of Father Gabriel Richard High School, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
The honor comes from The Green Bag on their 2014 list for Exemplary Legal Writing. Only 23 honorees were selected nation-wide and include Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Judge Richard A. Posner, and Bryan Garner. Green Bag, in cooperation with George Mason University School of Law, publishes a quarterly journal and annual Almanac and Reader and selects “exemplars of good legal writing from the year just passed” for its list.
Its advisory and editorial boards boast esteemed members from law schools, state and federal judiciaries, law firms and news media.
Although Jaicomo and Muth signed and submitted the brief, its substantive author was Matilyn Sarosi, an honor student at Father Gabriel Richard High School. Jaicomo and Muth lent support by writing the introduction and handling citations and formatting. The submitted brief included the signatures of 452 fellow students (85% of student body).
Ms. Sarosi argued that the 2012 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Miller v. Alabama, holding that juveniles cannot be automatically sentenced to non-parolable life imprisonment, should be retroactively applied to those
individuals already in prison for crimes committed as juveniles.
(Raymond Carp was convicted of participating in a murder when he was 16.)
She thoughtfully made her case through citation to legal precedent, the Bible, and messages from Pope Francis in addition to scientific research on child development, peer pressure, impulsive behavior, and, perhaps most importantly, the experience of being a juvenile herself.
The State Bar of Michigan presented Sarosi with the Liberty Bell Award, given to a non-lawyer citizen who has given of his or her time and energy to strengthen the effectiveness of the American system of freedom under law, at the SBM Annual Meeting in 2014.
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