State v. Proctor - Kansas Judicial Branch

not entail a punishment requiring a return to prison for life without parole based on a later
felony conviction. Even murderers are not treated so harshly. A person committing
successive second-degree murders could be released and then commit a low-level felony
without spending the rest of his or her life in prison.
On the whole, the comparison between Proctor's circumstances if he were on
lifetime supervised release for a severity level 5 offense and those of persons committing
crimes with higher offense levels supports the gross disparity between offense and
punishment indicative of an Eighth Amendment violation. Whether we treat the result as
a means of confirming that disparity, in keeping with Justice Kennedy's methodology, or
as an integrated part of an overall analysis of the sentence's constitutionality, as the Solem
majority and the Kansas Supreme Court have done, we arrive at the same point. This
factor weighs against the State.
The State argues that the Kansas Supreme Court has upheld lengthy sentences and
60-month periods of postrelease supervision against constitutional challenges. The
authority, however, is unpersuasive.
The State cites State v. McCloud, 257 Kan. 1, 891 P.2d 324, cert. denied 516 U.S.
837 (1995), and State v. Tyler, 251 Kan. 616, 644-46, 840 P.2d 413 (1992), as
demonstrating the court has rejected constitutional challenges to prison sentences with
minimum terms approaching or in excess of 100 years. Those sentences effectively
amounted to life in prison for the respective defendants. But the lengthy duration resulted
from sentences on multiple criminal acts imposed consecutively. For example, in
McCloud, the defendant committed 12 separate aggravated robberies during a 4-month
crime spree. He received a statutorily proper sentence of 8 years to life on each and was
ordered to serve them consecutively, resulting in a minimum sentence of 96 years. The
aggregate incarceration of 111 to 330 years imposed in Tyler resulted from consecutive
sentences on multiple convictions, including second-degree murder of a police officer
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