After being waived to adult court, defendant pled non vult to two murders that he committed when he was seventeen years old. He was sentenced to two concurrent life terms with no specified period of parole ineligibility, rendering him eligible for parole in May 1995, after serving thirteen years.
Defendant had no prior juvenile charges or adjudications of delinquency. Defendant has been a model prisoner during his decades of imprisonment. He has incurred no disciplinary infractions, committed no new crimes, obtained his GED, engaged in multiple programs to address his behavior and substance abuse, taken vocational courses, achieved and maintained gang minimum custody status, and serves as the electrician for the correctional facility. Defendant has now served over forty years in prison after being denied parole seven times and receiving lengthy future eligibility terms, despite multiple psychological evaluations that concluded he was a low risk for committing a new offense if released.
Defendant filed a motion for an adversarial hearing under Miller v. Alabama, 567 U.S. 460 (2012), to correct an unconstitutional sentence. Defendant contended that being eligible for parole was not the same as having a "meaningful opportunity for release." In support of his motion, defendant submitted parole data statistics regarding inmates who received life terms with no specified period of parole ineligibility. Defendant argued that although his sentence was life with no specified period of parole ineligibility, he was serving the practical equivalent of life without parole, which was not the intent of the sentencing judge. Defendant also emphasized that he has "a perfect institutional record" and "is a trusted inmate."
The State opposed the motion, arguing that the parole data was not relevant to whether defendant's sentence was illegal, and that defendant was not entitled to a Miller/Zuber1 hearing because his original sentence was neither life without parole nor "the practical equivalent of life without parole."
Although recognizing that defendant had a blemish-free institutional record, the trial court denied the motion, finding it did not have the authority to review Parole Board or Appellate Division decisions. While crediting the parole data submitted by defendant and acknowledging that the "continued incarceration of defendant at the hands of the Parole Board did not seem to be the intention of [the sentencing judge]," the trial court nonetheless concluded that defendant's sentence was not within the purview of Miller, Zuber, or Graham v. Florida, 560 U.S. 48 (2010). Noting the absence of any "mandated system of review for all lengthy juvenile sentences," the trial court held "there [were] no grounds for relief to defendant under the holdings in Miller, Graham or Zuber."
Applying Article I, Paragraph 12 of the New Jersey Constitution and the fundamental fairness doctrine, the court extended the procedure recently adopted by our Supreme Court in State v. Comer, ___ N.J. ___ (2022), for a juvenile convicted of homicide to petition the trial court for a review of their sentence after having served twenty years in prison, to defendant, who was sentenced to life without a specified period of parole ineligibility, and has now been imprisoned more than forty years as a result of seven parole denials.
The court reversed and remanded for an adversarial hearing to afford defendant the "meaningful opportunity to obtain release based on demonstrated maturity and rehabilitation" envisioned by Graham v. Florida, 560 U.S. 48 (2010) and Zuber, and adopted by Comer. At the evidentiary hearing, defendant shall have the right to be represented by legal counsel, present witnesses and expert testimony, cross-examine the State's witnesses, and introduce his nonconfidential parole records and other relevant, admissible exhibits. The court left the admissibility of such records and exhibits and any request for discovery to the sound discretion of the trial court. The court directed the trial court to consider the Miller factors and determine whether defendant has demonstrated maturity and rehabilitation.
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1 State v. Zuber, 227 N.J. 422 (2017).