The justices ruled Monday that the 2019 opinion does not apply retroactively to prior convictions.
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.
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. 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.
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.
“ 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.
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