In a pair of decisions this week, the Supreme Court of Missouri upheld one lengthy prison sentence for a juvenile, and rejected another.
In a 4-3 decision, the Supreme Court of Missouri has upheld an 85-year effective prison sentence imposed on a juvenile in a Cole County criminal case.
The US Supreme Court has rejected sentences of life without parole for juveniles. But, in the ruling in Missouri, Judge Mary Russell said the federal court ruling did not apply to multiple, fixed-year, sentences.
This defendant will not be eligible for parole until the defendant is 85 years old.
Timothy Willbanks was 17 when he and two older individuals kidnapped a woman at gunpoint, emptied her bank account at an ATM, and stole her vehicle. She was forced her into the trunk and later released, only to be shot by Willbanks. She survived. A trial jury found Willbanks guilty of one count of kidnapping, one count of first-degree assault, two counts of first-degree robbery and three counts of armed criminal action.
The circuit court sentenced Willbanks to consecutive prison terms totaling life in prison plus 355 years. He will not be eligible for parole until he is 85 years old, which he says exceeds his life expectancy, according to actuarial tables.
In Graham v. Florida, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a juvenile convicted of an offense other than homicide cannot be sentenced to life in prison without a meaningful opportunity for release.
In arguments and deliberations, the Missouri court wrestled with several issues, including whether Willbanks received a de facto sentence of life without parole, whether the Graham ruling applies retroactively, and whether Missouri’s parole statute and regulations are unconstitutional as applied to Willbanks.
In the opinion, Judge Russell writes that Missouri’s mandatory minimum parole statutes and regulations are constitutionally valid under the United States Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Graham v. Florida. But she says that decision addressed only a single sentence of life without parole, not aggregated multiple fixed-term sentences. She describes the Cole County case as a question of first impression for the Missouri Court. Without direction from the U.S. Supreme Court to the contrary, Russell writes that the state will continue to enforce its current sentencing laws.
In a dissenting opinion joined by two other judges, Judge Laura Denvir Stith said she would find it violates the Eighth Amendment to impose aggregate sentences for non-homicide offenses that are the functional equivalent of life without parole because they do not give a juvenile offender a meaningful opportunity for release.
In another case from Wright County, a man sentenced as a juvenile to mandatory terms of life without parole for 50 years won his case before the Missouri Court. Judge Patricia Breckenridge writes in that 5-1 decision that the sentences violate the Eighth Amendment, because they were imposed without any opportunity for the judge to consider whether the sentences were just and appropriate under the federal court ruling. Breckenridge says Jason Clay Carr must be re-sentenced.
Chief Justice Zel Fischer was the lone dissenter in the Carr case. Justice Fischer said the US court precedent applies only to cases involving a mandatory sentence of life in prison without the possibility for parole.
Jason Carr was convicted in 1983 of three counts of capital murder for killing his brother, stepmother and stepsister when he was 16 years old. He was sentenced to three concurrent terms of life in prison without the possibility of parole for 50 years the only sentence he could receive under state law at the time.