copyright 2009, The Washington Post WASHINGTON ---- It did not take long for the judge to determine that the convicted rapist in front of him was irredeemable. 'He is beyond help,' judge Nicholas Geeker said of Joe Harris Sullivan. 'I'm going to try to send him away for as long as I can.' And then Geeker sentenced Sullivan to life in prison without the possibility of parole. At the time, Sullivan was 13 years old. Now, 20 years after that sentencing in a Pensacola, Fla., courtroom, the Supreme Court will consider whether Sullivan's prison term -- and what his supporters say is an only-in-America phenomenon of extreme sentences for juveniles -- violates the Constitution's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. The case, which has drawn widespread notice and briefs from former Sen. Alan Simpson, R-Wyo., and others describing their own youthful crimes, will likely be a cardinal criminal justice decision for the court this term. It is the natural outgrowth of the court's bitterly divided decision in 2005 that juveniles cannot be executed for murders they commit. Those challenging life without parole sentences for teenagers base their optimism on words found in Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion: 'The reality that juveniles still struggle to define their identity means it is less supportable to conclude that even a heinous crime committed by a juvenile is evidence of irretrievably depraved character. ... It would be misguided to equate the failings of a minor with those of an adult, for a greater possibility exists that a minor's character deficiencies will be reformed.' Sullivan is represented by Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Institute in Alabama, who said his client's sentence is no different from the punishment the court found unconstitutional. 'They are both effectively death sentences,' Stevenson said in an interview. 'One is death by execution and the other is death by incarceration, but they are both terminal sentences.' Only two 13-year-olds in the country have been sentenced to life without parole for nonhomicides, and both of them are in Florida. Florida officials would not discuss Sullivan's case in advance of the November arguments, but said in their brief to the court that states are within their rights to lock up forever those thought to always pose a threat to society. 'There is no consensus against life sentences for juveniles, particularly for heinous crimes such as sexual battery,' Florida Solicitor General Scott Makar wrote. Across the country, 111 juveniles are serving life sentences without parole for crimes that did not result in a death, according to one report, and 77 of them are in Florida, for crimes including armed robbery and carjacking. The state took a get-tough approach in the 1990s in response to a crime wave that was 'compromising the safety of residents, visitors, and international tourists, and threatening the state's bedrock tourism industry,' Florida's brief to the court states. That brief came in the case of Terrance Jamar Graham, a second petition the court accepted. Graham, of Jacksonville, received a life sentence after being part of a group that robbed a barbecue restaurant when he was 16; while on probation a year later, he was part of an armed burglary. Again, a judge doubted Graham's ability to ever change his ways; his accomplices served short sentences and are out. In accepting both cases and deciding to hear them separately, the court gives itself a wide range of issues to decide. Justices may rule that such sentences are acceptable for 17-year-olds, for instance, but not 13-year-olds. They could look at the relative seriousness of the crimes, or differentiate the nonhomicides both young men were convicted of with crimes in which someone is killed. Sullivan, who his lawyer said was living on the streets since he was 10, had a troubled history with the law. He had 17 prior offenses. In 1989, he and others burglarized the home of a 72-year-old woman one day while she was away, and then returned later. The woman was brutally raped by one of the juveniles; she never saw his face, identifying him only as a 'dark, colored boy.' The other boys singled out Sullivan as committing the rape. 'The conviction itself was very questionable,' Stevenson said of the one-day trial. Stevenson seeks to have Sullivan, now 33, resentenced so that at some point he becomes eligible for release. He contends that Florida made no conscious policy decision that 13-year-olds should be eligible for life without parole for a nonhomicide. No state that has debated the question has set the age that low. 'What happened is we lowered the minimum age for trying kids as adults and brought them into the adult system and we expanded the range of very harsh sentences for an adult, and these two things have collided,' Stevenson said. The National District Attorneys Association, supporting Florida, said that while life without parole for juveniles might be unusual, 'permanent incarceration for the most violent, hardened juvenile offenders is by no means `cruel.'' Sullivan and Graham are supported by a wide-ranging group of organizations: the American Bar Association, the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and academics and social scientists who argue that juveniles cannot be as responsible for their actions as adults. They also are supported in an unusual friend-of-the-court brief by former juvenile offenders such as Simpson, director and actor Charles Dutton. 'At some point, you have to look at them again and ask, `What have you done with your life?' said Simpson, who burned down an abandoned federal building, destroyed property and fought with a police officer as a youth. 'Maybe 90 percent of them you throw back in, but what about the other 10 percent?' The cases are Graham v. Florida and Sullivan v. Florida. 