STATE OF NEW JERSEY VS. LAMONT T. RICHARDSON (10-03-0271, MERCER COUNTY AND STATEWIDE) ( 2019 )

NOT FOR PUBLICATION WITHOUT THE
APPROVAL OF THE APPELLATE DIVISION
This opinion shall not "constitute precedent or be binding upon any court." Although it is posted on the
internet, this opinion is binding only on the parties in the case and its use in other cases is lim ited. R. 1:36-3.
SUPERIOR COURT OF NEW JERSEY
APPELLATE DIVISION
DOCKET NO. A-3731-17T2
STATE OF NEW JERSEY,
Plaintiff-Respondent,
v.
LAMONT T. RICHARDSON,
Defendant-Appellant.
______________________________
Argued September 17, 2019 - Decided December 16, 2019
Before Judges Fisher, Accurso and Gilson.
On appeal from the Superior Court of New Jersey,
Law Division, Mercer County, Indictment No.
10-03-0271.
Peter Thomas Blum, Assistant Deputy Public
Defender, argued the cause for appellant (Joseph E.
Krakora, Public Defender, attorney; Peter Thomas
Blum, of counsel and on the brief).
Monica Anne Martini, Assistant Prosecutor, argued
the cause for respondent (Angelo J. Onofri, Mercer
County Prosecutor, attorney; Monica Anne Martini,
of counsel and on the brief).
PER CURIAM
In 2015, this court affirmed defendant Lamont T. Richardson's
conviction for first-degree murder and other offenses but remanded for
resentencing. State v. Richardson, No. A-1134-12 (App. Div. August 20,
2015) (slip op. at 38). Defendant was resentenced by another judge in 2016 to
the same sixty-year term first imposed on the murder conviction, subject to the
periods of parole ineligibility and supervision required by the No Early
Release Act (NERA), N.J.S.A. 2C:43-7.2.
Another panel of this court heard defendant's appeal on a sentencing
calendar and again remanded for resentencing, this time "without consideration
of aggravating factor one or of defendant's continuing assertion of innocence."
The same judge re-sentenced defendant in 2017 in accordance with the second
remand to a fifty-five-year NERA term. Defendant appeals, raising only one
issue:
THE PAROLE BAR OF APPROXIMATELY
FORTY-SEVEN YEARS WAS CRUEL AND
UNUSUAL PUNISHMENT BECAUSE THE COURT
IMPOSED IT UPON A TWENTY-ONE-YEAR OLD
OFFENDER WHILE REFUSING TO CONSIDER
THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE THAT COUNSELED
STRONGLY AGAINST IMPOSING IT UPON A
PERSON OF THAT AGE. U.S. CONST. AMEND.
VIII, XIV; N.J. CONST. ART. I, ¶ 12.
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Defendant contends that had he been under eighteen when he murdered
his ex-girlfriend, instead of over twenty-one, his parole disqualifier of forty-
seven years "would be presumptively unconstitutional as cruel and unusual
punishment." He asks, in essence, that we extend the holdings of Miller v.
Alabama, 567 U.S. 460, 465 (2012), forbidding a mandatory life sentence
without parole for juveniles under the age of eighteen at the time of their
crimes and State v. Zuber, 227 N.J. 422, 446-47 (2017), which extended
Miller's holding "to a sentence that is the practical equivalent of life without
parole" and remand for resentencing as if he had been a juvenile when he
committed the murder.
The facts are set out at length in our prior opinion and need not be
repeated here. Suffice it to say, the State presented a mountain of evidence at
defendant's trial that he tormented the victim for at least a year, hitting her,
burning her clothes, and breaking into her apartment to vandalize her
belongings, before strangling her to death when she finally ended their
relationship for good. He then impersonated her, using her cell phone to invite
two ex-boyfriends over for sex, leading one to discover her dead body.
Such a lengthy course of planned conduct, obviously designed by
defendant to impress on the victim the consequences of rejecting him, would
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not appear characteristic of the impetuosity and obliviousness to risks and
consequences that mark children and support sentencing them differently from
adults. See Zuber, 227 N.J. at 444-45 (discussing the mitigating qualities of
youth represented by "the Miller factors," which must be considered in
imposing a sentence on a juvenile that is the practical equivalent of life
without parole).
We, however, have no need to consider those facts further. Defendant
was over twenty-one years old when he murdered his ex-girlfriend, the mother
of his infant daughter. Leaving aside whether defendant's forty-seven-year
parole ineligibility term, which will end when defendant is sixty-eight, is the
practical equivalent of life without parole, there is simply no legal basis for
treating defendant as if he had been a juvenile, that is, under the age of
eighteen, when he committed his crimes. See N.J.S.A. 2A:4A-22(a) (Code of
Juvenile Justice definition of a juvenile as an individual under the age of
eighteen).
Affirmed.
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