State of New Hampshire v. Robert Dingman

THE STATE OF NEW HAMPSHIRE

SUPREME COURT

In Case No. 2018-0662, State of New Hampshire v. Robert
Dingman, the court on April 20, 2021, issued the following
order:

Having considered the briefs and oral arguments of the parties, the court
concludes that a formal written opinion is unnecessary in this case. The
defendant, Robert Dingman, appeals an order of the Superior Court (Nadeau,
C.J.) ruling that his sentence of forty years to life is not a de facto life sentence
in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution. We
affirm.

In 1997, when the defendant was 17 years old, he committed two first
degree murders and conspiracy to commit murder. See State v. Dingman, 144
N.H. 113 (1999). Following his conviction, he received two statutorily-
mandated sentences of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for
the first degree murder convictions and a sentence of seven-and-a-half to
fifteen years for the conspiracy conviction. See RSA 630:1, III (1986) (amended
1990, 2017).

In 2012, the United States Supreme Court ruled that “the Eighth
Amendment forbids a sentencing scheme that mandates life in prison without
possibility of parole for juvenile offenders.” Miller v. Alabama, 567 U.S. 460,
479 (2012). Reasoning that a trial court must take into account the attributes
of youth before imposing a sentence of life in prison on a juvenile homicide
offender, the Court concluded that trial courts must hold individualized
sentencing hearings for such juvenile offenders. See id. at 489. Thereafter, by
writ of habeas corpus, the defendant requested resentencing, arguing that
Miller must be applied retroactively. We affirmed the trial court’s
determination that Miller applied retroactively, Petition of State of N.H., 166
N.H. 659, 662 (2014), and, subsequently, the Supreme Court reached the same
conclusion, Montgomery v. Louisiana, 136 S. Ct. 718, 732 (2016).

Accordingly, the trial court scheduled a resentencing hearing for October
2018. After receiving notice from the State that it would seek consecutive
stand-committed sentences totaling 50 years to life for the two murder
convictions, the defendant requested the trial court to rule, prior to the
resentencing hearing, that such a sentence is a de facto life sentence, therefore
requiring the State to prove, in accordance with Miller, that he is irreparably
corrupt. See Montgomery, 136 S. Ct. at 734 (explaining that Miller barred life
without parole “for all but the rarest of juvenile offenders, those whose crimes
reflect permanent incorrigibility”). Following a hearing on that issue, the court
ruled that while “Miller applies to sentences that are the functional equivalent
of life without parole,” a 50-year-to-life sentence “is not the functional
equivalent of a life sentence and therefore does not require the court to find
that the defendant’s crimes reflect irreparable corruption in order to accept the
State’s recommended sentence, if it decides to do so at the sentencing hearing.”

In reaching its conclusion, the court noted that “a central question in
determining whether fifty years to life constitutes a de facto life sentence is
whether the defendant will live to the time he is eligible for parole and for how
long.” Reasoning that “[s]ince most, if not all, juvenile offenders who have been
sentenced to serve fifty years to life will not be eligible for release until they are
well into their 60s,” the court relied “on statistical data to determine, as a
general basis, the average life expectancy of the population within the
defendant’s age group.” The State offered the 2014 Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC) National Vital Statistics tables indicating that
“individuals in the defendant’s age group will live to be approximately 78 to 81
years old.” The defendant provided studies from Michigan, New York, and
Ontario, Canada on the effect of imprisonment on life expectancy. For several
reasons, the court found the CDC tables were “the most reliable” for the
“limited extent that the court is considering the life expectancy data to
determine whether fifty years to life is a de facto life sentence.”

Based on the CDC tables, the trial court determined that the defendant’s
“eligibility for release at age 67 falls within 11 to 14 years of a juvenile
offender’s lifetime” and “is not the functional equivalent of a life sentence.” The
court subsequently denied the defendant’s request for reconsideration.
Following a three-day resentencing hearing, the trial court imposed two 20-year
consecutive sentences for the first degree murder convictions and a consecutive
suspended sentence for the conspiracy conviction. This appeal followed.

On appeal, the defendant argues that a stand-committed sentence with a
minimum term of 40 years constitutes the de facto equivalent of life
imprisonment without parole and therefore cannot be imposed in the absence
of a finding of incorrigibility. According to the defendant, the earliest he will be
eligible for parole will be at age 57, which would not “afford him a realistic
opportunity to build a meaningful post-prison life.” He asserts that the Federal
Constitution “permits no more than thirty years, as an upper limit on the
period of parole ineligibility for a non-incorrigible juvenile offender.”

In State v. Lopez, 174 N.H. ___ (decided April 20, 2021), we considered,
and rejected, essentially the same arguments raised by the defendant in this
appeal. We observed that under Miller, a juvenile homicide offender cannot be
subjected to a mandatory sentence of life without parole, Miller, 567 U.S. at
465, and that under Montgomery, the holding in Miller is retroactive,

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Montgomery, 136 S. Ct. at 736. See Lopez, 174 N.H. at ___. Thus, in this case,
as in Lopez, because the defendant was resentenced from a mandatory
sentence of life without the possibility of parole to a term of years with the
opportunity for parole, the sentence complies with the applicable Supreme
Court holdings. See id.

Likewise, we decline the defendant’s invitation to establish a bright-line
rule that, under the Federal Constitution, “the outer limit on the period of
parole ineligibility” is 30 years. As we explained in Lopez, doing so would
extend Miller beyond the Supreme Court’s holding, which we decline to do. See
id.

Alternatively, the defendant argues that the trial court erred “for it used
life expectancy tables based on the general American population, rather than
information focused on the life expectancy of long-term prisoners.” According
to the defendant, the trial court “should have gauged [his] life expectancy as
much shorter than seventy-eight to eighty-one years, and much more in line
with the estimates supported by the prisoner-based studies.” We disagree.

The trial court found that “the studies submitted by the defendant
consider only a small sample of individuals in other states and another country
while the CDC tables consider the national population in the United States,
including prisoners and residents of New Hampshire.” In addition, “[b]ecause
the CDC tables take into account the entire population,” the court found they
contain “the most accurate information available to determine the general life
expectancy of someone in the defendant’s age group.” The trial court has
broad discretion in choosing the types of evidence on which to rely in imposing
sentence. State v. Kimball, 140 N.H. 150, 151 (1995). We conclude that the
trial court’s determination that the CDC tables “provide a more reliable picture
of the average life expectancy” than the studies offered by the defendant was
not clearly untenable or unreasonable to the prejudice of the defendant’s case.
See State v. Lambert, 147 N.H. 295, 296 (2001).

Affirmed.

HICKS, BASSETT, and HANTZ MARCONI, JJ., concurred.

Timothy A. Gudas,
Clerk

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