Henry Montgomery was arrested in 1963 for fatally shooting a man when he was 17. Now 75, he is awaiting a Louisiana board’s decision on whether to grant him parole. Recent Supreme Court rulings have determined that life sentences without parole in cases against juveniles were considered cruel and unusual punishment. Montgomery’s case was used as an example in those rulings, allowing hundreds of juvenile lifers to be freed.

However, Montgomery was not one of them. In 2019, the three-member board did not come to a unanimous decision when determining whether to parole him. This might change due to the Louisiana parole board now being allowed to grant parole on a majority vote. The Louisiana Parole Project, a nonprofit organization that helps former convicts that served long sentences re-enter society, hopes to take Montgomery as its new client.

“The state has gotten about fifty-eight years of Henry Montgomery’s life. He doesn’t have much left,” Louisiana Parole Project founder Andrew Hundley said. “What’s the value in making him spend a couple more years there? I, for one, cannot see it.”

Montgomery is hard of hearing and has had trouble understanding what has been said at previous parole hearings, said his lawyer, Keith Nordyke. His contact with the outside world was also severely limited due to COVID-19. Some fear that he will die in prison if he is not granted parole. When asked about what he wants to do if he gets out, Hundley said he wants to “look at sunrise without looking at it through razor wire.”

For more reporting from the Associated Press, see below.

Montgomery was arrested after fatally shooting Charles Hurt, an East Baton Rouge sheriff’s deputy, who caught him skipping school. Montgomery was 17 at the time.

He was initially sentenced to death but the state’s Supreme Court threw out his conviction in 1966, saying he didn’t get a fair trial. The case was retried, Montgomery convicted again but this time sentenced to life in prison.

When Montgomery went to prison, and for decades afterward, the “lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key” attitude dominated law enforcement and society—especially in Louisiana where the incarceration rate has consistently been the highest in the country. Juvenile offenders, often portrayed as irredeemable “super-predators,” were no exception.

In 2012, in Miller v. Alabama, the court ruled that mandatory sentencing of life without parole for juvenile offenders was “cruel and unusual” punishment. The court’s decision was based on the idea that children’s minds and impulse controls are still developing, and they often act recklessly. The court found that juveniles are capable of growth and change and, except in the most severe cases, should be given the opportunity to get out of prison.

Since the court’s Montgomery decision, about 800 people who had been sentenced to life without parole as juveniles have been released, according to the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth. About 656 people are serving life without parole for crimes they committed as children—down from 2,800 about five years ago—the organization said.

Advocates also point to the sweeping changes that have happened in the near-decade since Miller was decided. Twenty-five states and the District of Columbia have completely banned the use of life without parole for juveniles offenders—compared to five states in 2012. In another six states, the sentence still exists but no juveniles are serving life without parole.

In Louisiana, about 96 out of roughly 300 former juvenile lifers incarcerated at the time of the Montgomery decision have been freed, according to data compiled by the Parole Project and the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights, which represents kids going through the justice system.

But Louisiana has not done away with the life without parole sentence for juveniles, and advocates at the LCCR say just as many children are being sentenced to life without parole in the years after the Supreme Court’s pivotal 2012 ruling as after it—usually children of color.

When Montgomery started serving his time at Angola it was a violent place, where attacks on inmates and guards were commonplace. There was little in the way of rehabilitative programs, especially not for prisoners who were never expected to experience freedom again.

Some of the programs like the boxing club were ones that Montgomery himself helped start, say supporters. He has worked for years at the prison’s silk screen shop where one of his lawyers during the last parole board hearing said he’d been named employee of the month more times that she could count.

Hurt, the sheriff’s deputy who Montgomery killed, was married and had three children. Two of his daughters have met with Montgomery in prison and forgiven him, but family members have opposed his release. Hurt’s grandson J.P. deGravelles, who is also in law enforcement, said the family is not acting out of vindictiveness and if Montgomery is granted parole, deGravelles wishes him well. But his grandfather will never get such an opportunity at life again.

“This is not a witch hunt for us. We just we think he was given a sentence, and he was given a just sentence and he should carry it out,” deGravelles said. “The killing of a police officer is a direct assault on the very fabric of society.”

The Louisiana Parole Project plans to provide Montgomery with a place to stay and help him with important steps to re-entering society such as getting an ID card, signing up for health insurance, learning how to use a cellphone or computer and making sure he has his medications.