Lonnie Bassett v. Arizona: Juvenile LWOP and Cert Denial

In Lonnie Bassett v. Arizona, the U.S. Supreme Court on July 2, 2024, declined to hear the appeal of an Arizona man serving life without parole for a double murder he committed at sixteen, leaving his sentence intact and prompting a sharp dissent from Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson.¹ The denial left Arizona as the only state identified in Miller v. Alabama that has neither opened parole to juvenile lifers in Bassett’s situation nor given them a mechanism to be resentenced.²

What Bassett Did at Sixteen

In 2004 near Phoenix, Bassett was riding in the back seat of a car driven by Frances Tapia. Her boyfriend, Joseph Pedroza, sat in the front; another teenager, Chad Colyer, sat next to Bassett. Using a shotgun, Bassett shot and killed both Pedroza and Tapia. Colyer jumped from the moving car and survived. Bassett acted alone and was charged with two counts of first-degree murder.³

His background figured heavily in the mitigation case. Bassett’s mother did not want him and kept only his brother; he was raised by another family, the Alexanders. Just before his second birthday, his father kidnapped him and his brother, which led to custodial interference charges. He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder at fourteen, and his lawyers argued the PTSD contributed to an exaggerated startle response and poor judgment the night of the killings. He was off his medication at the time.⁴⁵

The Sentence and Why “Life” Meant No Release

Judge Katherine Cooper sentenced Bassett in 2006 in Maricopa County Superior Court. She said she gave his youth “considerable weight,” but found that his intelligence, work history, failure to pursue available mental health treatment, and lack of remorse over Tapia’s death supported the harshest available sentence. The court also cited the double homicide, the especially cruel manner of Tapia’s killing, the use of a deadly weapon, and the grave risk of death to Colyer as aggravating factors.⁶

On the first count, Bassett received “natural life,” which under Arizona law bars parole, commutation, or release of any kind. On the second count, he received a consecutive “life” sentence that nominally required twenty-five years before any possibility of release. The catch: Arizona abolished parole for all felony convictions committed on or after January 1, 1994. The only theoretical path out on either count was executive clemency.²

The Eighth Amendment Argument

Six years after Bassett was sentenced, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Miller v. Alabama (2012) that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juvenile homicide offenders violate the Eighth Amendment, and that sentencing judges must have discretion to consider youth before imposing the most severe punishment.⁷ Montgomery v. Louisiana (2016) made that rule retroactive.⁸ Jones v. Mississippi (2021) then clarified that no separate finding of “permanent incorrigibility” is required so long as the sentencer has discretion to weigh youth.⁹

Bassett’s lawyers argued his sentencing was not meaningfully discretionary. With parole abolished, Judge Cooper’s choice was between natural life and a life sentence requiring twenty-five years before a release that did not legally exist. Two forms of life without parole, in other words, is not the discretion Miller contemplates.

What the Arizona Supreme Court Decided

In State ex rel. Mitchell v. Cooper, 256 Ariz. 1 (2023), the Arizona Supreme Court denied Bassett post-conviction relief. The court held that his sentence was not “mandatory” within Miller because the trial judge chose between natural life and a lesser life sentence and considered his age as mitigation. It read Jones as foreclosing any additional incorrigibility finding, and it overruled its earlier decision in State v. Valencia, which had entitled juveniles sentenced to natural life to evidentiary hearings on resentencing.⁴¹⁰

After that ruling, the state supreme court reversed and remanded several cases in which the Arizona Court of Appeals had granted Miller relief to other juvenile offenders, effectively closing the door on similar claims statewide.¹⁰

What the U.S. Supreme Court Did

Bassett petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court in January 2024, asking whether the Eighth Amendment permits a juvenile life-without-parole sentence in a system that gave the sentencing court no authority to impose anything else.¹¹ The petition pointed to contrary rulings from the high courts of Mississippi, Wyoming, Nebraska, North Carolina, and Iowa, and argued that executive clemency is not a constitutionally adequate substitute for parole.¹⁰ Supporting amici included the Juvenile Law Center, the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, Human Rights for Kids, fifteen constitutional and criminal law professors, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, which said it was unaware of a single first-degree murder conviction in Arizona since 1994 that had resulted in executive clemency.¹²

The Court denied the petition on July 2, 2024, without a majority opinion.¹

The Sotomayor Dissent

Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson, would have granted the petition and summarily reversed. She wrote that Bassett’s sentence plainly violated Miller, Montgomery, and Jones because the sentencing judge had no legal authority to impose a parole-eligible sentence, which made the scheme mandatory in all but name. She described Bassett’s history of being “abandoned by his mother, kidnapped and abused by his father, and kept in a closet with just one meal a day,” and said a judge with real discretion might have reached a different result.²

Sotomayor noted that Arizona partially addressed the parole gap in 2014 by restoring parole eligibility for certain juvenile offenders, but the fix reaches only “life” sentences, not the “natural life” sentence Bassett received. She called Arizona the only state in the Miller cohort that has “neither made individuals like Bassett eligible for parole nor provided a mechanism for them to be resentenced under a constitutional scheme.”²

What the Denial Means for Other Arizona Prisoners

The case reaches beyond Bassett. His petition said at least twenty other Arizona prisoners had similar claims pending when the state supreme court ruled against him, and the state Court of Appeals has since reversed its own earlier rulings granting relief in cases including State v. Arias, State v. Odom, State v. Cabanas, State v. Wagner, and State v. Aston.¹⁰ Arizona law still sets no minimum age for transferring a juvenile to adult court, and the minimum age at which a juvenile can be sentenced to life without parole is fourteen.¹³

Without further legislative action or a future Supreme Court case taking up the question, Bassett and similarly situated juvenile offenders in Arizona have no legal avenue to seek parole eligibility or resentencing. He has now been incarcerated for roughly two decades for crimes committed when he was sixteen.¹⁴

1
U.S. Supreme Court. Docket, Bassett v. Arizona, No. 23-830
2
U.S. Supreme Court. Bassett v. Arizona, Dissent from Denial of Certiorari
3
U.S. Supreme Court. Brief of Respondent Arizona in Opposition, Bassett v. Arizona
4
Arizona Supreme Court. State ex rel. Mitchell v. Cooper, 256 Ariz. 1
5
New Republic. Arizona Juvenile Life Without Parole Lonnie Bassett Supreme Court
6
FindLaw. State ex rel. Mitchell v. Cooper
7
Equal Justice Initiative. Miller v. Alabama
8
Justia. Montgomery v. Louisiana, 577 U.S. 190
9
Justia. Jones v. Mississippi, 593 U.S.
10
U.S. Supreme Court. Petition for Writ of Certiorari, Bassett v. Arizona
11
SCOTUSblog. Bassett v. Arizona
12
Cornell Law Institute. Bassett v. Arizona, 23-830
13
NACDL. Excessive Sentencing Project – Arizona
14
Arizona Republic. Supreme Court Declines Arizona Case Lonnie Bassett