ANCHORAGE, Alaska — A ruling by an Alaska appeals court provides a legal basis for reviewing the convictions of people sentenced to life in prison as juveniles.

The Alaska Court of Appeals has ruled in a case involving Winona Fletcher. The 14-year-old broke into a house in Anchorage with a friend in 1985 and shot three people there, the Anchorage Daily News reported.

The court ruled last year that the state constitution requires a judge to consider factors such as a juvenile defendant’s age before sentencing him to a term of imprisonment that effectively amounts to life without parole. And on Friday, the court upheld a lower court ruling that the decision should be applied retroactively to Fletcher, as well as others sentenced as juveniles to a term of imprisonment that amounts to life without parole.

“If Fletcher were to make his decision retroactive, it would uphold an important constitutional principle – namely, to ensure that juveniles tried as adults in Alaska courts are not subject to cruel and unusual punishment and that only juveniles found to be ‘irretrievably corrupt’ are sentenced to a de facto term of life without parole,” the ruling states.

Fletcher, the youngest woman ever convicted of murder in Alaska, is serving a 135-year sentence. Few other people incarcerated in Alaska could benefit from the ruling, said Marcy McDannel, Fletcher’s attorney.

“This doesn’t open the floodgates for hundreds of cases,” she said. “That only happens in very extreme cases.”

One of the defendants, Brian Hall, was sentenced as a juvenile to a longer prison term than Fletcher. He has served 31 years of a 156-year sentence, according to his wife, Angela Hall, who chairs a support group for families of inmates.

Two other juvenile defendants were sentenced to prison terms of more than 99 years, the ruling said. Six others have made claims related to the new criteria.

And the ruling does not necessarily mean a reduction in their prison sentences – some of the sentences could be upheld by lower courts, McDannel said.

Fletcher could be re-sentenced under the new criteria as early as December, McDannel said, but litigation in the case is still ongoing.

Angela Hall said the decision would allow her husband and others to seek re-sentence, based on the principle that factors such as advances in research into adolescent brain development and trauma should influence how young people are held accountable in the criminal justice system.

“When we read this decision, we burst into tears,” she said. “This is what we have been waiting for and hoping for.”