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All Michigan inmates serving no-parole sentences for murder committed as juveniles are entitled to a fair and meaningful possibility of release, a federal judge ruled Wednesday, declaring that a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision applies retroactively.

The decision by U.S. District Judge John Corbett O'Meara in Ann Arbor trumps a ruling last fall by the state appeals court, which said retroactivity would not apply for most people already behind bars.

At issue in Michigan is how to apply a 2012 Supreme Court decision that struck down mandatory no-parole sentences for those who were not adults when they were convicted of crimes, mostly murder. The state has more than 350 prisoners in that category.

Compliance with the Supreme Court decision "requires providing a fair and meaningful possibility of parole to each and every Michigan prisoner who was sentenced to life for a crime committed as a juvenile," O'Meara said.

He told the state attorney general and lawyers for inmates to propose a way to hold parole hearings. Those next steps will be litigated for months.

"If there was ever a legal rule that should - as a matter of law and morality - be given retroactive effect, it is the rule announced in Miller," the judge said, referring to the Supreme Court decision in Miller v. Alabama.

"To hold otherwise would allow the state to impose unconstitutional punishment on some persons but not others, an intolerable miscarriage of justice," he said.

A message seeking comment was left with the attorney general's office.

The ruling comes on the same day as a scheduled hearing in the case of Bosie Smith Smith, who was sentenced to life in prison when he was 17 in 1992, filed a motion for relief from judgment. There are seven other juvenile lifers who are filing similar motions in Washtenaw County, according to Ann Arbor attorney Deb LaBelle.

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There was, sadly, nothing particularly unusual about the original trial and conviction of Robert Lewis: tried by an all-white jury for crimes against white victims, in which all the defendants were black, Lewis was sentenced on July 9, 1964, to a term of 50 - 57 years, and entered Trenton State Prison the following day.

Mr. Lewis, officially age 19 at the time of sentencing for his first conviction of any kind (in reality, Mr. Lewis was probably 16 at most; no birth certificate was ever produced, and he feigned being older in order to avoid what he had been told was a worse juvenile system) was found guilty of atrocious assault, kidnapping and rape, and carrying a concealed weapon—despite the testimony of the victim herself that he was not among the defendants who had kidnapped and raped her, the arresting officer's testimony that Lewis was not among those arrested at or near the scene on the evening of the crime, the fact that the "concealed weapon" was discovered in the car of the other defendants while Robert Lewis was not present, and the prosecutor's own remarks at trial seeming to exculpate, rather than implicate, him.

His case was continually appealed, to no avail. After repeated parole denials for vague and insubstantial "reasons," Robert Lewis, assisted by two law students who had developed an interest in his case, sought relief in the courts. Denied more traditional forms of post-conviction relief, such as habeus corpus, Robert Lewis and his legal advisors began researching another type of post-conviction relief—parole criteria—and began to understand the extent of the inequities, arbitrariness, and apparently unchecked power of the Parole Board in determining the actual amount of time a convict must serve.

Following this investigation, Andrew Vachss submitted an Affidavit to the Parole Board in the form of an amicus brief on Lewis' behalf; Robert Lewis was finally granted his parole and walked out of Trenton on September 18, 1973, having spent nearly ten years of his life incarcerated for crimes that not only he, but the victim, continually maintained he had never committed.

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In 1949, the U.S. Supreme Court stated: "Retribution is no longer the dominant objective of the criminal law. Reformation and rehabilitation of offenders have become important goals of criminal jurisprudence."

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