Editorials of The Times

Carlos Flores was 17 when he and three accomplices tried to rob a bar in Queens, New York, in 1981. An off-duty police officer named Robert Walsh intervened, and he was shot and killed. Flores was convicted of second-degree murder, a conviction that carried a maximum sentence of 25 years to life in prison. But because he was not the shooter, the judge gave him 21 years to life.

Flores is now 54. He has served 37 years behind bars. The last time he got written up for a disciplinary offense was when he disobeyed an order to keep the mess hall line moving. That was more than 25 years ago. A recent risk-assessment test found that his release would pose the lowest risk of danger to the public. In other words, he’s the sort of person parole is designed for.

And yet for the 16 years, the New York state Parole Board has denied him parole, using its customary boilerplate language: “Discretionary release at this time,” the board said in its most recent denial, last October, “would not be compatible with the welfare of society and would tend to deprecate the seriousness of the instant offense and undermine respect for the law.”

Flores is being locked up not because he’s a threat to society or has failed to show that he’s changed, but for a crime he committed nearly four decades ago. Too often, that’s the default attitude for New York’s parole commissioners, even after a state appeals court in 2016 ordered the board to weigh an inmate’s youth at the time of the crime in deciding whether he or she should be released.

That ruling was grounded in a revolutionary string of rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court, all of which have found that young people are “constitutionally different” from adults — their brains are still developing, their impulse control is weaker and their ability to change over time is greater. This means that they are less guilty than adults and that their punishment must be different, especially in the case of life sentences for those convicted of murder. The “imposition of a state’s most severe penalties on juvenile offenders cannot proceed as though they were not children,” the court said in 2012. They must be given “a meaningful opportunity” to get out; actual life sentences should be reserved for those few who exhibit “irretrievable depravity.”

While those rulings have struck down the most severe sentences for juveniles — the death penalty and mandatory life without parole — the New York appeals court rightly extended their logic to cases in which parole is technically available but is rarely or never granted. “A parole board is no more entitled to subject an offender to the penalty of life in prison in contravention of this rule than is a legislature or a sentencing court,” the state court said.

That’s right, of course, but it should go further. Parole officials should, as a rule, expect to release juvenile offenders who have served their minimum sentences. If the board has evidence that an inmate continues to pose a threat to the public, it’s reasonable to keep him or her locked up, but the inmate should still get future chances to show that he or she is ready to return to society.

In response to the state court’s ruling, New York’s Parole Board said last summer that it would start considering an inmates’ youth when deciding whether to release that inmate, but it still regularly rejects people like Flores, whom no one would describe as “irretrievably depraved.” On Tuesday, Flores filed a federal class-action lawsuit against the Parole Board, claiming that its knee-jerk denials of applications by inmates like him violate the Constitution. New York holds roughly 630 prisoners on indeterminate life sentences for crimes they committed before they turned 18.

New York’s Parole Board has long resisted modern understandings of crime and punishment, but the failure to treat juveniles as a unique category of offender exists nationwide. A 2016 report by the American Civil Liberties Union found that in just 12 states, more than 8,300 inmates were serving sentences of effective life — meaning 40 years or more — for crimes they had committed as juveniles. In Florida in 2015, 366 people were serving juvenile life sentences. Two were granted parole. And as in the rest of the justice system, race matters a great deal when it comes to who gets harsh juvenile sentences. A study of juvenile transfers to adult courts found that black juveniles were nearly 2 1/2 times as likely as white juveniles to be tried as adults even when controlling for factors like prior records and seriousness of the offense.

Even in states with more enlightened parole procedures, release rates of juvenile lifers are not rising as they should. Many parole commissioners cling to outmoded prejudices about offenders, and most live in fear of letting out the guy who goes on to commit another terrible crime. They churn through parole applications, sometimes conducting dozens of interviews in a single afternoon. Because they face virtually no accountability for keeping people locked up, there is no incentive to vote for release. So they pay lip service to the new rules even as they disregard them, and the public generally doesn’t know the difference.

This persists despite the fact that people are far less likely to commit crimes as they get older. At a deeper level, though, parole becomes a meaningless concept if it is routinely denied in the situations where it’s most called for. That’s particularly true in the case of juvenile lifers. Parole boards in New York and elsewhere must not only make passing note of an offender’s youth. They must, as the Supreme Court has said repeatedly, give them a real chance to show they’ve grown up.

When the New York International Auto Show opens Friday, Audi will be featuring vehicles like the SQ5, one of the German automaker’s latest entries in the highly competitive SUV market. Well appointed and high powered, the SQ5, which ranges in price from $54,300 to nearly $70,000 with options, competes with the likes of BMW, Lexus, Lincoln and Land Rover.

It’s a German import, the kind President Donald Trump has threatened with tariffs. The president is miffed at Germany’s “already massive tariffs and barriers" and says he’s going to tilt the track back in our favor. (Technically, Germany doesn’t impose tariffs; the European Union does.) Last year, the United States imported $20.1 billion worth of German cars while its exports of cars to Germany reached $5.7 billion, according to the Commerce Department.

Looking from behind the wheel of the SQ5, the road has far more twists than the administration may anticipate. The president seems to think that tariffs will strong-arm manufacturers and suppliers into basing more production in America, or somehow get Europeans to buy Chevys. But supply chains have become so sophisticated as to be borderless, and Audi and other foreign companies have already invested billions of dollars in the United States.

Foreign-badged cars aren’t the only ones that have foreign parts. The Chevrolet Bolt EV — an important vehicle for General Motors — is composed of 26 percent U.S./Canadian parts. The sales sheet isn’t more specific because the parts don’t care whether they’re made in Ontario or Michigan. The motor and transmission — more than half the total parts — are from South Korea, which has already been frosted by Trump’s refrigerator tariff. The Bolt is then bolted together at GM’s Lake Orion, Michigan, plant. In terms of origin, the Chevy Bolt is as American as a karaoke bar — a venue that has become increasingly popular in the United States. Maybe Trump should slap a tariff on bad singing.

Unlike the president, automakers have realized that free trade isn’t a policy; it’s essential to manufacturing efficiency. They source globally and manufacture locally when it makes economic sense — one reason Audi’s owner, Volkswagen, is investing in more production capacity in Tennessee. U.S. automakers haven’t been able to make small cars very profitably in the United States, so some of that production, such as that for Ford’s Focus, goes to Mexico. Or China. Trump is now revving up duties on up to $60 billion in unspecified Chinese imports to punish that country for stealing U.S. technology. He might want to avoid autos. Buick’s Envision crossover SUV, a potential Audi competitor, is manufactured in Yantai, China, from 88 percent Chinese-made parts. Buick is a best-seller in China; indeed, GM sells more Buicks there than here. Cadillac sales increased 50 percent in China last year.

One company that is helping the administration close the automotive trade gap with Germany is Mercedes-Benz. It builds and exports SUVs in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama. Mercedes says there are about 200 suppliers tied to the plant, the majority of them international firms that have followed the Germans to the United States and built plants here. They’ve added thousands of jobs and pay millions in taxes. Many of these suppliers also export components to other Mercedes-Benz plants worldwide, the company says.

This is how trade works in a rational world — a world the president apparently doesn’t visit. Ford uses fewer than a dozen global platforms, meaning that any car built here can be built the same way (with some local modifications) in China or Brazil. Fiat Chrysler’s all-American Jeep Renegade is assembled in Melfi, Italy. You can order a Renegade with a Tigershark engine built in Dundee, Michigan, or with Fiat’s highly efficient 1.4 liter MultiAir version. Both power plants combine expertise and technology from Chrysler and Fiat. Small world. That’s how Jeep can compete with Range Rover and Toyota outside the United States.

Before he became president and had to give up the wheel, Trump had a taste for foreign models like Lamborghini and Ferrari. (And for foreign models in general.) Trump liked bespoke Rolls-Royce motorcars as well. For rich boys and their auto toys, a 10 percent or 20 percent tariff added to the price of exotic metal is meaningless. For the people who make or buy automobiles, a tariff is a road tax, one that won’t help the economy, or the auto industry.