It didn’t take long for the New Jersey Appellate Division to grapple with the New Jersey Supreme Court’s ruling in State v. Comer. Here, the Appellate Division remanded a case for an adversarial hearing to determine whether the defendant “still fails to appreciate risks and consequences and whether he has matured or been rehabilitated.” The Court’s ruling was limited to the facts presented, but the Court opened the door to other defendants seeking similar relief. The defendant committed two murders when he was seventeen years old. He received two concurrent life sentences with no parole qualifiers. Now fitly-eight years old, the defendant has remained infraction-free during the forty years he has been incarcerated, completed programs to address his behavior and substance abuse, attained a GED and vocational skills, and been found to be at low risk of recidivism by numerous evaluating psychologists. Despite these circumstances, the defendant has been denied parole and received lengthy future eligibility terms (FET) seven times. Most recently, on December 16, 2020, the defendant was denied parole and received a sixty-month FET. In the wake of Miller and Montgomery, he filed a motion in which he argued that being eligible for parole was not the same as having a meaningful opportunity for release. And he provided data to support that contention. The State argued that, since the defendant did not receive life without parole, Miller and Montgomery were not applicable. The Appellate Division conducted a deep-dive into recent juvenile lifer caselaw, including Comer. It then held that parole hearings fall short of providing an adversarial hearing for a defendant to demonstrate the degree of maturity and rehabilitation he has achieved. The Court held that the defendant’s constitutional rights were not satisfied by periodic parole hearings, and he was entitled to a constitutionally sound hearing before the trial court.
