A man sentenced to life in prison under Colorado’s habitual-offender law for twice robbing an ice cream store cannot seek to have his sentence reduced in the wake of a 2019 Colorado Supreme Court ruling, the justices decided in a pair of cases Monday.
The unanimous opinions close the door for people serving decades in prison on habitual-offender sentences who had hoped to challenge their prison terms after the state Supreme Court issued a ruling in 2019 that changed the proportionality review process for such sentences.
The justices ruled Monday that the 2019 opinion does not apply retroactively to prior convictions.
The new ruling sprang from two underlying cases in which Black men were sentenced to decades in prison under Colorado’s habitual-offender law, which imposes drastically longer prison sentences for defendants who have previously been convicted of two or three prior felonies.
David Ward, 62, was sentenced in 1993 to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 40 years for twice robbing the same Denver Dolly Madison ice cream store a few days apart in December 1991. Ward was convicted of robbery and aggravated robbery with a simulated weapon and was sentenced as a habitual offender because of prior convictions, including a 1981 conviction for second-degree burglary and a 1987 conviction for offering violence to a correctional officer in Missouri.
He remains incarcerated at the Limon Correctional Facility and will be eligible for parole in 2027, according to the Colorado Department of Corrections.
Rodney McDonald, 50, was sentenced to 72 years in prison in 1997 on an attempted-murder conviction. He was considered a habitual offender because of two previous low-level felony convictions: possession of a controlled substance and conspiracy to commit menacing.
He was released from prison on parole in July, said Alondra Gonzalez-Garcia, spokeswoman for the Department of Corrections.
Between 1929 and 1993, Colorado’s Habitual Criminal Act imposed exponentially longer-than-usual sentences for people convicted of three felonies, and mandatory life prison sentences for people convicted of a fourth felony, according to briefs filed in the cases on behalf of Daniel Loehr, a researcher at Yale Law School.
The briefs outlined how the habitual-offender laws sprang from the early 1900s eugenics movement and a desire to keep criminals from having children by imprisoning them for life. Colorado’s habitual-criminal law passed two years after the governor vetoed a law aimed at sterilizing prisoners in 1927.
Under current law, habitual offenders are punished with life in prison with the possibility of parole after 40 years only if they are thrice convicted of a handful of serious felonies. For most other felonies, a third felony conviction in a 10-year span triggers a sentence of three times the maximum presumptive prison sentence, and a fourth conviction is punished with four times the maximum.
In 2023, legislators adjusted the law to allow prisoners who have served 10 years of their sentences to seek judicial reviews if they were sentenced as habitual offenders to 24 years or more in prison, and allows judges to reduce those sentences.
Under current law, Ward could be sentenced to between 21 and 64 years in prison for the ice cream store robberies, his attorneys wrote.
In their separate cases, McDonald and Ward argued that the 2019 Colorado Supreme Court ruling about how courts should handle reviews of habitual-offender sentences entitled them to new reviews in their own cases. The 2019 ruling, they argued, made such substantial changes to constitutional law in Colorado that it should be applied retroactively to prior cases, opening up a chance for review that would otherwise be closed.
Attorneys from the Colorado Attorney General’s Office took the opposite stance, arguing that the 2019 ruling should not be applied retroactively because it made minor procedural changes, not adjustments to constitutional law.
The justices agreed with the state’s attorneys, finding that their 2019 ruling made only procedural changes to law.
“(The 2019) instruction for courts to consider post-offense legislative amendments when evaluating the gravity or seriousness of offenses… didn’t remove any range of conduct or class of offenders from the state’s ability to punish under the habitual criminal statute,” Justice William Hood wrote in the opinion. “Nor did it create a significant risk that a class of habitual criminal sentences would be grossly disproportionate. Rather, it simply reminded courts to consider society’s evolving views on the gravity or seriousness of certain crimes when conducting an abbreviated proportionality review.”
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