On January 13, 2025, a unanimous New Jersey Supreme Court decided the Passaic County case of State v. Celestine Payne. The principal issue concerned whether the trial court abused its discretion in denying Celestine Payne’s petition for release under the Compassionate Release Act (CRA or Act), N.J.S.A. 30:4-123.51e.
Justice Wainer Apter wrote for the Court in relevant part: In 1991, Celestine Payne poisoned her husband, Alphonso, to collect his life insurance policy. She then enlisted her children and a tenant who lived with her family, Eugene Cooper, to help her dump Alphonso’s body on the side of a road. Two years later, Celestine convinced Cooper to name her the beneficiary of a life insurance policy in his name. Once the policy was in place, she offered Charles Pinchom, the boyfriend of Celestine’s daughter, Wendy, $60,000 to kill Cooper. When Pinchom refused, Celestine told him that Cooper was molesting Wendy. In September 1994, she handed Pinchom a kitchen knife and told him to take Cooper “somewhere dark and stab him in the neck.” Pinchom stabbed Cooper and left him on the street to die. But Cooper survived. While Cooper was in the hospital in critical condition, Celestine went to the hospital, pretended to be his mother, and signed a do-not-resuscitate order (DNR).
Celestine next enlisted her daughter Wendy to pose as Wendy’s best friend, 18-year-old Tara Carter, to obtain a life insurance policy on Tara naming Celestine as the beneficiary. Tara had grown up with the Payne family and moved in with them after Tara’s family moved to Georgia. With the fraudulent life insurance policy in hand, Celestine repeatedly pressured Pinchom to kill Tara. He initially refused. Then Tara learned from Wendy that Celestine had poisoned Alphonso, and Celestine had also offered Tara money to act as her alibi in an arson. Uncomfortable, Tara made plans to move out. The day before Tara was supposed to move, Celestine handed Pinchom a crowbar, and said “now is your chance.” Pinchom then struck Tara in the back of the head four or five times, bludgeoning her to death. Together, Celestine and Pinchom stuffed Tara’s body into a sleeping bag and dumped her in Paterson’s Eastside Park. After joggers discovered Tara’s body, Celestine and her children lied to police to cover up the crimes.
In 1997, Celestine pled guilty and was sentenced to two concurrent life terms with 30 years’ parole ineligibility plus a consecutive 20-year term. The sentencing court found several aggravating factors, including that the offenses were “committed in an especially heinous, cruel, or depraved manner,” N.J.S.A. 2C:44-1(a)(1). In November 2021, when she was 71 years old, Celestine petitioned for compassionate release. The trial court found she had satisfied the Act’s medical and public safety requirements, and it acknowledged that Celestine “had no infractions” while incarcerated, was “compliant with prison rules,” and got along “well with other inmates,” along with additional mitigating factors. But the court denied her petition, finding, among other things, that her crimes involved “particularly heinous, cruel, or depraved conduct” and therefore satisfied the first “extraordinary aggravating factor” set forth in State v. A.M., 252 N.J. 432, 460 (2023). The Appellate Division reversed, holding, as relevant here, that the facts presented in this case “are often present in first-degree murder cases” and did not “rise to the level of extraordinary.”
The trial court’s finding that Celestine’s crimes were extraordinarily heinous, cruel, and depraved was supported by substantial evidence in the record, and the trial court’s application of extraordinary aggravating factor one was not an abuse of discretion. In addition, in denying Celestine’s petition for compassionate release, the trial court appropriately considered significant mitigating factors raised by Celestine alongside the extraordinary aggravating factors raised by the State. The CRA was enacted in 2020 to reduce capacity and alleviate financial strains on the Department of Corrections while getting medically vulnerable residents the care they need outside of prison. The Act provides that for an inmate who has a permanent physical incapacity, “the court may order” compassionate release if it “finds by clear and convincing evidence that the inmate is permanently physically incapable of committing a crime if released and the conditions under which the inmate would be released would not pose a threat to public safety.” N.J.S.A. 30:4-123.51e(f)(1).
In A.M., the Court held that the CRA “cannot be read to require courts to grant compassionate release” if the medical and public safety conditions are met, 252 N.J. at 454-56 (emphasis added), but stressed that “courts may not exercise discretion in a way that creates de facto categorical barriers to release and overrides legislative intent,” id. at 459. Instead, inmates who meet “the Act’s medical and public safety criteria should be granted compassionate release unless one or more extraordinary aggravating factors exist,” such as “whether an offense involved any of the following extraordinary circumstances: (1) particularly heinous, cruel, or depraved conduct; (2) a particularly vulnerable victim . . . ; (3) an attack on the institutions of government or the administration of justice; and (4) whether release would have a particularly detrimental effect on the well-being and recovery process of victims and family members.” Id. at 460.
The trial court’s finding that Celestine’s crimes were “particularly heinous, cruel, or depraved,” see A.M., 252 N.J. at 460, is amply supported by the record. The Court does not accept the Attorney General’s suggestion that a finding that aggravating factor one applies at sentencing will generally preclude compassionate release. However, the Court does consider some case law interpreting that factor to be instructive. Here, the trial court’s analysis of extraordinary aggravating factor one reflected no impermissible double-counting of the elements of first-degree murder, see State v. Fuentes, 217 N.J. 57, 74-75 (2014), and did not rely on facts common to many first-degree murder cases, see State v. McGuire, 419 N.J. Super. 88, 159-60 (App. Div. 2011). As required in A.M., the trial court found the facts of this case truly “exceptional and rare.”
The mitigating factors that courts consider at sentencing may not be relevant at a compassionate release hearing held years later. But other mitigating evidence may weigh strongly in favor of compassionate release, such as a petitioner’s conduct in prison, including lack of disciplinary infractions and involvement in work, courses, or other activities; testimony from those who know the person well about their extraordinary adjustment to prison life or an extraordinary personal transformation; strong family or community support; and more. The trial court considered just such evidence here, yet it still denied compassionate release, implicitly finding none of that could overcome Celestine’s extraordinarily cruel, heinous, and depraved conduct. The Court discerns no abuse of discretion in that conclusion. In petitioning a court for compassionate release, the inmate bears the burden of proving she meets the Act’s medical and public safety requirements. If the State relies on one or more extraordinary aggravating factors to then oppose compassionate release, petitioners can present significant mitigating factors that point in favor of release, which the trial court must consider. The existence of mitigating factors alone, however, cannot establish that an individual is entitled to compassionate release.
Trial courts will tend to play it safe and look for ways to deny “compassionate release.” Even in cases where the victim(s) have no surviving friends and family, the potential to commit an additional offense will almost always exist, even with very sick petitioners. The case at hand show that mere access to a phone or the internet is enough to allow almost anyone to solicit a crime.
