On May 31, 2024, a three-judge appellate panel decided the Essex County case of State v. Sean Jones. The principal issue under N.J.S.A. 2C:1-9 concerned whether offenders between the ages of eighteen and twenty when offenses were committed are entitled to the “lookback” resentencing afforded to juvenile offenders.
Judge Rose wrote for the panel in relevant part: Unpersuaded, we decline defendants’ invitation to extend the holding in Comer for two reasons. Initially, we conclude the Court’s decision was limited to juvenile offenders tried and convicted of murder in adult court. In our view, the Court neither explicitly nor implicitly extended this right of sentence review to offenders who were between eighteen and twenty years of age when they committed their crimes.
Our conclusion finds support in a decision issued by the Court one month after Comer was decided. In State v. Ryan (2022), the majority considered the legality of a life sentence without parole under New Jersey’s “Three Strikes Law,” N.J.S.A. 2C:43-7.1(a), raised in the defendant’s twelfth PCR petition. The defendant argued, in part, the Miller factors applied to his “first strike” conviction, which was committed when he was sixteen years old. In rejecting the defendant’s appeal, the Court emphasized: “Because the defendant committed his third offense and received an enhanced sentence of life without parole as an adult, his appeal did not implicate Miller or Zuber.”
The Court reasoned: In Zuber, we built upon federal juvenile sentencing jurisprudence and extended application of the Miller factors to situations where a juvenile is facing a term of imprisonment that is the practical equivalent to life without parole. In doing so, we acknowledged that “Miller‘s concerns apply broadly: to cases in which a defendant commits multiple offenses during a single criminal episode; to cases in which a defendant commits multiple offenses on different occasions; and to homicide and non-homicide cases.” We did not, however, extend Miller’s protections to defendants sentenced for crimes committed when those defendants were over the age of eighteen.
As part of the nationwide banning of the juvenile death penalty in 2005, victim advocacy groups were promised that life without parole would still be available as a juvenile sentence for incapacitation purposes. Since then, there have been many efforts to ban juvenile life without parole sentences nationwide.
