Avalos v. State

Decision Date15 December 2021
Docket NumberNOS. PD-0038-21 & PD-0039-21,S. PD-0038-21 & PD-0039-21
Citation635 S.W.3d 660
Parties Johnny Joe AVALOS, Appellant v. The STATE of Texas
CourtTexas Court of Criminal Appeals

Andrew Warthen, for State.

George William Aristotelidis, for Appellant.

OPINION

Yeary, J., delivered the opinion of the Court in which Keller, P.J., and Keel, Slaughter, and McClure, JJ., joined.

In two separate indictments, Appellant was charged with capital murder for the serial killing of five women over the course of several years. The State waived the death penalty, and Appellant pled guilty to two capital murders, judicially confessing in the process to murdering all five of the alleged victims. In pre-trial proceedings, he preserved his argument that the only remaining punishment—mandatory life without the possibility of parole—was unconstitutional as applied to him because he is intellectually disabled. The trial court accepted Appellant's plea but rejected his claim that to automatically assess life without parole against him, without allowing the consideration of mitigating evidence, violated the Eighth Amendment. Accordingly, the trial court sentenced Appellant to two life sentences without the possibility of parole, as required by statute when the State waives the death penalty in Texas.1

In Miller v. Alabama , 567 U.S. 460, 132 S.Ct. 2455, 183 L.Ed.2d 407 (2012), the United States Supreme Court decided that it violates the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution for a state to automatically sentence a juvenile offender—even one who has committed murder—to a term of life in the penitentiary without the possibility of parole. While it did not categorically ban a life without parole sentence for such a juvenile offender, it held that the state must at least first afford the juvenile offender the opportunity to persuade the punishment fact finder that he should not be automatically, "irrevocably" sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison. Id. at 480, 132 S.Ct. 2455.2

In the instant case, the Fourth Court of Appeals, sitting en banc , extended Miller ’s Eighth Amendment ban on automatic life-without-parole sentences to cover murder defendants who are intellectually disabled.3 Avalos v. State , 616 S.W.3d 207, 211 (Tex. App.—San Antonio 2020) (opinion on en banc reconsideration). A panel of another court of appeals has held that such an extension is not appropriate, albeit in an unpublished opinion. Parsons v. State , No. 12-16-00330-CR, 2018 WL 3627527, at *5 (Tex. App.—Tyler July 31, 2020) (mem. op., not designated for publication). We granted the State's petition for discretionary review to examine whether the Supreme Court's decision in Miller should be so extended. We conclude that it should not, and we now reverse the Fourth Court of Appeals judgment.

I. THE COMPETING ARGUMENTS

The State maintains that because Appellant is an adult offender, not a juvenile, this case is controlled by Harmelin v. Michigan , 501 U.S. 957, 111 S.Ct. 2680, 115 L.Ed.2d 836 (1991). There, the United States Supreme Court held that the Eighth Amendment does not require an individualized sentencing determination—as a prerequisite to assessing a sentence of life without parole—for an adult offender, and that the mandatory imposition of such a sentence is constitutionally acceptable. Id. at 994–96, 111 S.Ct. 2680. The court of appeals disagreed that Harmelin controls, however, deciding that what was true of the juvenile homicide offender under Miller is equally true of the adult intellectually disabled homicide offender. Avalos , 616 S.W.3d at 211. Just as the Supreme Court in Miller found it appropriate to extend the individualized sentencing requirement to juveniles facing the possibility of life-without-parole because of the recognized mitigating qualities of youth, the court of appeals in this case also considered it appropriate to extend the individualized sentencing requirement to the mentally disabled offenders sentenced to life without parole because of the recognized mitigating qualities of that debilitating condition. Id.

In order to evaluate the legitimacy of this reasoning, it is necessary for us to take a deeper dive into the Supreme Court cases. In Part II of this opinion, we will examine the opinions of the Supreme Court that laid the foundation for its opinion in Miller , with a view to explaining exactly what it is about juvenile offenders that led the Court to conclude that mandatory life without parole was an unacceptable sentence. In Part III, we will explain that, because offenders who are intellectually disabled do not share all of the same qualities as juvenile offenders—specifically, that their mitigating qualities are not inherently "transient" as are those of a juvenile offender—mandatory life without parole is a constitutionally acceptable punishment for them.

II. THE SUPREME COURT CASES
A. Woodson and Eddings : Individualized Sentencing

In 1982, in Eddings v. Oklahoma , the United States Supreme Court decided that, before a state may impose the death penalty in a capital murder case, it must permit the sentencer to consider "the character and record of the individual offender and the circumstances of the particular offense" insofar as those considerations may militate against sentencing him to death. 455 U.S. 104, 112, 102 S.Ct. 869, 71 L.Ed.2d 1 (1982) (quoting Woodson v. North Carolina , 428 U.S. 280, 304, 96 S.Ct. 2978, 49 L.Ed.2d 944 (1976) (plurality opinion)). That Court's 1976 plurality opinion in Woodson had already concluded that a state may not automatically impose the death penalty upon any offender, including murderers. "This conclusion" the Court explained, "rest[ed] squarely on the predicate that the penalty of death is qualitatively different from a sentence of imprisonment,""however long." Woodson , 428 U.S. at 305, 96 S.Ct. 2978 (plurality opinion).

B. Harmelin : No Individualized Assessment Required Before Mandatory Life Without Parole

Indeed, the Supreme Court explained in 1991 that its "cases creating and clarifying the ‘individualized capital sentencing doctrine’ [of Woodson / Eddings ] have repeatedly suggested that there is no comparable requirement outside the capital context, because of the qualitative difference between death and all other penalties." Harmelin , 501 U.S. at 995, 111 S.Ct. 2680 (citing, inter alia , Eddings , 455 U.S. at 110–12, 102 S.Ct. 869, and Woodson , 428 U.S. at 303–05, 96 S.Ct. 2978 ). In Harmelin , for example, a majority of the Supreme Court concluded (in Part IV of what was otherwise a plurality opinion) that the individualized-sentencing requirement in death-penalty cases does not apply to a lesser sentence, and that it does not offend the Eighth Amendment for a state to impose an automatic sentence of life without parole—even for a non-homicide offense. Id. "We have drawn the line of required individualized sentencing at capital cases," the Supreme Court majority declared in Harmelin , "and see no basis for extending it further." Id. at 996, 111 S.Ct. 2680.

C. Miller : Individualized Assessment Required Before Imposition of Mandatory Life Without Parole for Juveniles

Of course, the offender in Harmelin was an adult. In Miller , however, which was decided in 2012, the offender was a juvenile. For the first time, in Miller , the Supreme Court did extend the individualized sentencing requirement beyond the context of the death penalty, so that it now embraces what Harmelin characterized as "the second most severe [sentence] known to the law": life without parole. Miller , 567 U.S. at 479, 132 S.Ct. 2455 ; Harmelin , 501 U.S. at 996, 111 S.Ct. 2680. To be sure, Miller does not categorically eliminate life without parole from the ambit of permissible punishments for juvenile offenders. 567 U.S. at 479–80, 132 S.Ct. 2455. But Miller does mandate an individualized sentencing requirement as a prerequisite to assessing life without parole for a juvenile offender, even one who commits murder—the same kind of individualized sentencing required to impose the death penalty for adults. Id. The Supreme Court explained that, "[a]lthough we do not foreclose a sentencer's ability to make that judgment [that life without parole is appropriate for juvenile offenders] in homicide cases, we require it to take into account how children are different, and how those differences counsel against irrevocably sentencing them to a lifetime in prison." Id. at 480, 132 S.Ct. 2455.

The decision in Miller represented a "confluence" of two "strands" of the Supreme Court's Eighth Amendment cases. 567 U.S. at 470, 132 S.Ct. 2455. The first strand identifies circumstances in which certain punishments (usually, but not exclusively, the death penalty) are simply prohibited—categorically. Id. The second strand, deriving from Woodson , requires particularized assessment of the appropriateness of assessing a punishment (only the death penalty, until Miller ). Id. The Supreme Court explained in Miller that "the confluence of these two lines of precedent leads to the conclusion that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles violate the Eighth Amendment." Id. The question before us now is whether that confluence also ineluctably leads to the conclusion that mandatory life-without-parole sentences similarly violate the Eighth Amendment when assessed against an adult offender who is intellectually disabled.

1. Categorical Prohibitions Against Particular Punishments

(a) Atkins : Prohibiting the Death Penalty for Intellectually Disabled Offenders

Atkins v. Virginia , 536 U.S. 304, 122 S.Ct. 2242, 153 L.Ed.2d 335 (2002), is an example of the first "strand" that Miller identified—the categorical-challenge strand. In Atkins , the Supreme Court conducted what it called a "[p]roportionality review" to determine whether a particular category of punishment is constitutionally "excessive" for a particular class of offender under the Eighth Amendment. Id. at 311–13, 122 S.Ct. 2242. It looked to "objective factors,"...

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