A convicted murderer from Monticello who was tried as a teenager -- and potentially more than 40 others sentenced to life terms as minors -- can forgo the resentencing path chosen by lawmakers and instead opt for a new hearing before a judge or jury, the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled Thursday.
The 5-2 decision by justices held that the 2017 state Fair Sentencing of Minors Act does not apply retroactively to Derrick Harris, an inmate who at the time the law was passed had had his sentence vacated by other court decisions.
In ruling that the statute failed to apply to Harris, the majority opinion by Chief Justice Dan Kemp declined to address broader arguments by Harris' attorneys that the Fair Sentencing Act itself was unconstitutional.
Instead, Kemp's opinion focused on how the Legislature intended to treat a cohort of lifers in state prisons whose sentences were overturned by U.S. Supreme Court decisions outlawing no-parole sentences for minors.
"We conclude that the legislature did not intend for the penalty provisions [of the act] to apply retroactively," the chief justice wrote.
Still, in a foreboding dissent, Justice Shawn Womack warned that the effect of the majority decision would be to deny justice to victims and their families, while burdening the lower courts with convicts seeking new sentences.
"By needlessly ignoring the [2017 law], this court has not only opened the flood gates but has also likely opened prison doors," Womack wrote.
Womack estimated the number of prisoners who would be affected by the Supreme Court's decision to be "over 50." However, the head of the Arkansas Public Defender Commission, Gregg Parrish, said Thursday that the number was around 42. The state prison system regularly holds more than 16,000 people.
Harris was 15 when he was arrested and charged with capital murder in the 1996 shooting of Jimmy Gathings, a 60-year-old used-car salesman in Monticello. The teenager was convicted as an adult later that year, and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The only other sentence applicable to capital murder at the time was death.
In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Miller v. Alabama that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for underage offenders violated the U.S. Constitution. Such sentences, the nation's high court determined, failed to consider "hallmark features" of youthful defendants such as immaturity, family and home environment, and an ability to understand consequences. Three years later, the Arkansas Supreme Court, and later the U.S. Supreme Court, applied the Miller ruling retroactively.
Harris was one of about 56 "Miller defendants" who had their sentences vacated in 2016 during a round of hearings held at courts near state prisons in Lee, Jefferson, Lincoln, Jackson and Hot Spring counties, said Jeff Rosenzweig, Harris' attorney. About a dozen of those defendants were resentenced in their original trial courts, Rosenzweig and Parrish said, and were not affected by Thursday's ruling.
While Harris waited for a new sentencing hearing in Drew County, the Legislature passed the Fair Sentencing of Minors Act, which struck obsolete language from Arkansas' sentencing laws and provided a new punishment for young murderers that complied with the Miller ruling. That new punishment was life in prison, with parole eligibility after 30 or 25 years, depending on the degree of the crime.
While the 2017 law included language that made the new punishments retroactive to past sentences, the court held on Thursday that the law cannot be applied to Harris, and potentially other such defendants, because he technically had no sentence on which to apply parole eligibility at the time the law was passed.
The justices joining Kemp in the majority were Karen Baker, Courtney Goodson and Josephine Hart.
The decision is a potential boon to defendants such as Harris, who is eligible for a new sentence of 10 to 40 years, or life, if he goes before a judge and jury.
Many defendants to which the Miller ruling applies, like Harris, were sent to prison during the tough-on-crime policies of the 1990s, and could potentially be eligible for release now if they are resentenced or reach a plea deal with prosecutors. Under Act 539 of 2017, many would have to wait at least another decade to be released.
"Eligibility for parole is not the same thing as getting parole," said Rosenzweig. Prisoners, he said, "would rather have a judge and jury decide."
Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, whose office fought to uphold a lower court's decision to apply the 2017 law to Harris, released a statement Thursday vowing to work with prosecutors to keep the former teenage killers behind bars.
"Because of today's ruling, numerous convicted murderers may now be given more lenient sentences than what the General Assembly intended," Rutledge said in a statement.
The primary Senate sponsor of the 2017 resentencing law, Sen. Missy Irvin, R-Mountain View, also disputed the court's interpretation of lawmakers' intentions when they, prosecutors and the Parole Board crafted the law. She said it was meant to apply to defendants like Harris, in order to prevent the relitigation of old cases.
"The Parole Board are the ones that should be the gatekeepers of [parole] eligibility," Irvin said.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Robin Wynne wrote that he disagreed with the majority's conclusion that the 2017 law did not apply retroactively, but said he still agreed with the outcome because it would have been "fundamentally unfair" to deny Harris the type of resentencing hearing that about a dozen individuals got before the law passed.
In his dissent, Womack, a former Republican lawmaker, also warned of the challenges that would occur in trying to resentence individuals in decades-old cases "in which key witnesses have either died, retired from their positions in law enforcement and moved away, or are otherwise unavailable."
Justice Rhonda Wood also dissented Thursday, although she did not sign on to any opinion. Both Wood and Womack similarly dissented from a decision from the Supreme Court last September not to block seven inmates from Pulaski County from getting new sentencing hearings, after a circuit judge ruled that they should be allowed to do so.
According to the Arkansas Department of Correction, Harris is incarcerated at the Maximum Security Unit near Tucker.
Metro on 05/25/2018