Curtis L. Walker v. Dan Cromwell, No. 23-2240, 6/16/25
Despite making a “strong case for relief” that his de-facto life sentence for a homicide committed when he was 17 violated the Eighth Amendment, the Seventh Circuit held that Curtis Walker’s habeas petition could not overcome the heavy burden imposed by 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d) to show that the state court decision was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established federal law as determined by the Supreme Court because the Court’s precedents were not “a model of clarity.”
In 1994, Walker was tried in the Milwaukee County Circuit Court as an adult and convicted of first-degree intentional homicide while using a dangerous weapon as party to the crime. The circuit court sentenced him to life in prison with a parole eligibility date of 2071, when he will be 95 years old.
Walker’s judgment of conviction was affirmed on direct appeal, and the Wisconsin Supreme Court denied review in 2001. But Walker’s sentence was gradually called into question by a series of cases issued by the U.S. Supreme Court starting in 2010, when it held in Graham v. Florida that the Eighth Amendment prohibits a state from sentencing juvenile offenders who did not commit homicide to life without parole. In 2012, Miller v. Alabama found that the Eighth Amendment forbids mandatory life without parole for all juvenile offenders, including those convicted of murder. The Court’s reasoning in Graham and Miller was that children are categorically less culpable than adults and life without parole is a particularly harsh sentence for juvenile offenders. (p. 3). The Court adopted procedural safeguards to guarantee a juvenile offender’s Eighth Amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment – a categorical prohibition on life without parole for non-homicide offenders and an individualized sentencing process for homicide offenders. (p. 3).
Although Walker’s case was not necessarily implicated by Miller and Graham because he was sentenced under Wisconsin’s discretionary sentencing scheme, in 2016 SCOTUS held in Montgomery v. Louisiana that Miller adopted a substantive rule of constitutional law that applies retroactively on collateral review. More significantly for Walker, Montgomery characterized Miller as a “substantive holding that life without parole is an excessive sentence for children whose crimes reflect transient immaturity” and even if a court considers a child’s age before sentencing him or her to life in prison, that “sentence still violates the Eighth Amendment for a child whose crime reflects unfortunate yet transient maturity.” (567 U.S. at 208, 210).
In light of Montgomery, Walker filed a postconviction motion in the circuit court asking for resentencing. The circuit court denied the motion because Walker was not serving a sentence without the possibility of parole. Walker appealed to the Wisconsin Court of Appeals, which held the case in abeyance while the Wisconsin Supreme Court determined whether Miller and Montgomery applied to de-facto life sentences. The Wisconsin Supreme Court then held that case in abeyance pending SCOTUS’s decision in Jones v. Mississippi, which held in 2021 that a sentencing judge does not need to make an explicit or implicit factual finding that a juvenile homicide offender is permanently incorrigible before sentencing the juvenile to life without parole.
Walker’s appeal was reinstated in the Wisconsin Court of Appeals and the court assumed that Walker’s sentence amounted to a de-facto life sentence, but determined the circuit court did not violate the Eighth Amendment because the court considered Walker’s youth as a mitigating factor before imposing sentence. (p. 5). Walker’s petition for review in the Wisconsin Supreme Court was denied.
Walker then filed a federal habeas petition in district court and argued that, because the sentencing court considered him capable of reform, the Eighth Amendment prohibits a de-facto life sentence without parole. (p. 6). The district court dismissed Walker’s petition but granted him a certificate of appealability. (pp. 6-7).
In the Seventh Circuit, Walker argued that the Wisconsin Court of Appeals’ decision was contrary to and unreasonably applied clearly established federal law as determined by the Supreme Court in Montgomery; specifically, that Montgomery imposes a “categorical prohibition on sentencing corrigible juvenile offenders to life without parole. Applying this rule to the facts of his case, he argues that the judge who sentenced him affirmatively found that he was capable of change and therefore could not constitutionally sentence him to life without parole.” (p. 12).
Acknowledging that Walker “has solid grounds” for his petition, the Court cautioned that a state-court decision can withstand habeas review “even when the petitioner makes a strong case for relief” because the petitioner must establish that the state court decision is “so lacking in justification that there was an error well understood and comprehended in existing law beyond any possibility for fair-minded disagreement.” (p. 13). The Court concluded no “such error occurred here because the [Supreme] Court’s precedents, when read together, simply do not establish such a categorical prohibition against sentencing corrigible juveniles to life without parole, at least when the sentencing judge has discretion not to impose a severe sentence.” (p. 13).
The Court noted that Miller “expressly declared that it was not adopting a categorical prohibition on sentencing any subset of juvenile offenders to life without parole” when it explained that the decision mandates only that a sentencer follow a certain process considering an offender’s youth before imposing sentence. (p 13-14). On the other hand, Montgomery “seemed to contradict . . . Miller when it held that Miller was retroactively applicable precisely because it ‘did bar life without parole . . . for all but the rarest of juvenile offenders, those whose crimes reflect permanent incorrigibility.’” (p. 14, quoting Montgomery). But then “Jones expressed a substantially narrower reading of both Miller and Montgomery that is in significant tension with Montgomery’s language, logic, and retroactivity holding.” (p. 14). The Court determined the “shifting rationales of Miller, Montgomery, and Jones have left unsettled whether the Eighth Amendment categorically forbids life without parole for corrigible juvenile homicide offenders.” (p. 15).
Because Jones held that states are not required by the Constitution to distinguish between corrigible and incorrigible juvenile offenders and that a state’s discretionary sentencing system is both “constitutionally necessary and constitutionally sufficient” the Court considered it “difficult if not impossible to find that a state court has applied Supreme Court precedent unreasonably by upholding a juvenile sentence of life without parole imposed under a discretionary standard.” (p. 22).
The Court concluded:
The state court was not required to anticipate a future decision holding that a sentencing judge’s comment that a juvenile offender is capable of change entitles him to a meaningful opportunity for release during his lifetime, no matter how heinous the homicide. That may or may not be the logical next step in the Court’s jurisprudence on juvenile homicide offenders, but for now, it suffices to observe that there are reasonable arguments on both sides.
(p. 23-24).
