Michael Kiefer

The Republic | azcentral.com

Murder is ugly, and murderers are not sympathetic characters.

But justice is justice, and a deal is a deal.

We expect the men and women who administer the criminal justice system — prosecutors, defense attorneys, and especially judges — to know the law and to apply it fairly.

Yet, for more than 20 years they have been cutting plea deals and meting out a sentence that was abolished in 1993: Life with a chance of parole after 25 or 35 years.

Some of those deals are about to come due.

Danny Valdez, for example, was part of a 1995 drug deal that went bad in Glendale. One person was killed, and no one was sure who fired the shot.

Valdez took a plea deal to avoid death row, and following the terms of the agreement, the judge sentenced him to life in prison with a chance of parole after 25 years.

The only problem: Parole was abolished in Arizona in 1993. As of January 1994, it was replaced by a sentence that sounds similar, but in fact nearly eliminates the possibility of ever leaving prison alive.

Valdez should have been sentenced to “life with chance of release after 25 years.”

“Parole” was something that could be granted by judgment of a parole board, based on the prisoner's behavior and rehabilitation, without the approval of a politician.

But release is a long shot, because it requires the prisoner to petition the Arizona Board of Executive Clemency, which can only recommend a pardon or commutation of sentence by the governor.

Valdez has served 22 years of his sentence.

"He's not a bad person, and he's done well in prison, and he would be good on the outside," his sister-in-law, Cassandra Valdez, recently told The Arizona Republic. Referring to his crime, she added, "He's not normally like that."

But he was involved in a murder. He is doing his time.

No one — not Valdez’s attorney, not the prosecutor, not the judge — ever told Valdez that he was not legally entitled to parole or a parole hearing. He found out when he received a letter last December from The Republic.

He didn’t want to believe it.

"Why would they sentence me with parole if it was abolished?" he asked in a return letter.

READ: Danny Valdez's letter

“I was sentenced in 1995 and will be eligible for parole in 2020,” he wrote. “If I would of (sic) known that I would have to go through the process of pardons and commutations, I would of (sic) went to trial.”

Valdez is not alone.

Between January 1994 and January 2016, a study by The Republic found, half of Arizona murder defendants sentenced to less than natural life sentences — at least 248 current prisoners in the Arizona Department of Corrections — were given sentences of life in prison with a chance of parole after 25 or 35 years.

The sentence has not existed since the law was changed in 1993. But judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys continued to crank defendants through the system, seemingly unaware of the mistake.

Duane Belcher, a former head of the state clemency board, started gathering examples early in this decade, but he was fired by former Gov. Jan Brewer before he could do anything about it. He took the issue to the Arizona Supreme Court, which oversees all state courts.

Belcher, appointed to the Arizona Board of Pardons and Paroles in 1992, remained in the office long after it became the Arizona Board of Executive Clemency under the new law. He served many years as its chairman.

“I started asking the question in 1994 when the law changed,” Belcher said. “What’s going to happen when 25 years comes? Nobody seemed to have the answer.”

Belcher was only talking about how the state was going to handle those prisoners sentenced to life with a chance of release. Then he noticed that some defendants were still being sentenced to life with chance of parole. He started to collect examples, concerned about the inaccurate sentences.

Belcher, a former parole officer and former supervisor at the Department of Corrections, looked at it from both sides.

“People are going into an agreement with the understanding that they will be eligible for parole, and it’s not the case,” he said.

But he also worried about whether it could be grounds for reversing a sentence.

“We don’t want to go back to the public and say we paved the way to letting go a murderer.”

Belcher started to tell people about the error, including the administrative offices of the Arizona Supreme Court.

“Nobody really gave a damn, because (it was as if to say) ‘In 2019, I’ll be gone,’ ” he said. “Nobody wants to look in the mirror and say, ‘I screwed up.’ ”

Defense attorneys have brought it to the court’s attention, too.

But courts tend to kick matters down the road until someone files a lawsuit. The first attempts to correct the problem by individual prisoners have been easily knocked down in court. Several were rendered moot when the state was forced by a 2012 U.S. Supreme Court decision to reinstate parole for juveniles. The decision barred mandatory natural life sentences for murderers younger than 18.

As for the rest?

The first cases will not become ripe until at least 2019, 25 years after the new law was enacted. The question is, what happens?

The best remedy for what could be a judicial error is a new trial. But will defendants really want to go there and face anew the possibility of a death sentence? Some have already entered new pleas to the correct sentence — life with chance of release after 25 years.

Several prisoners contacted by The Republic were unaware they were not really eligible for parole.

“When they sentenced me, they did not say that parole didn’t exist,” Juvenal Arellano said in a letter to The Republic. Arellano killed a man while stealing his car in 2004, and he, too, pleaded to life with chance of parole.

READ: Juvenal Arellano's letter

“The reason why I signed the contract was for the chance to get out after 25 years, and that was in the plea I signed. … I am prepared to pay for my error, but neither should they hide something so important from me.”

He thought he would someday see his family again.

So, too, Jock Coker, who beat a man to death in 2009 and then stole his truck to use in armed robberies.

READ: Jock Coker's letter

“When I signed my plea agreement, I was told by my then-attorney that after I serve 25 calendar years that I will be eligible for parole,” he wrote. “That is the sole purpose of me signing the plea agreement. Because I felt by me getting paroled after 25 years that I have a chance of enjoying my kids, mother and the rest of my family out there in the free world.”

He has practically no chance at all.

The change came in 1993, when the Arizona Legislature followed a national trend by passing a series of tough-on-crime laws under the name Truth in Sentencing, which was a national buzz word.

It was championed by then-Gov. Fife Symington, who repeated the slogan “Do the crime, do the time” as a rallying cry. And he mustered outrage for his cause with the complaint that a convicted murderer named James Hamm had been granted parole after serving 17 years of his sentence.

Ironically, Symington later resigned the office after being convicted of seven counts of fraud in federal court. But he never had to do the time. His conviction was overturned and remanded on appeal because of juror misconduct. Before he could stand trial a second time, he was pardoned by college chum, then-President Bill Clinton.

Hamm, on the other hand, became the poster child for rehabilitation, earning a law degree from Arizona State University. Though the Arizona Supreme Court would not allow him to be admitted to the state Bar, he became a paralegal and a prisoner-rights advocate.

Among the components of Arizona’s Truth in Sentencing bill to make life harsher for bad guys was language to abolish parole and disband the parole board. It established the Arizona Board of Executive Clemency in its place.

The sentence of “life with chance of parole after 25 years,” the third-harshest sentence possible in Arizona, was eliminated. It was replaced by “life with chance of release after 25 years,” 35 years if the murder victim was a child. The other sentence options for first-degree murderers were death or natural life, which means no possibility of parole or release, ever.

Life with chance of release, in effect, is a mitigated sentence, meaning it is imposed when there are circumstances that render the crime less horrible than a murder that calls for natural life or death. Life sentences also may be imposed for conspiracy to commit first-degree murder, sexual conduct with a child, and in certain cases where a repeat offender is deemed incorrigible.

The two sentences sound very similar. And this has become a problem, because judges and lawyers tend to conflate the two and use the shorthand phrase “25 to life” to describe either, without defining the end result.

But they are substantially different.

Those eligible for parole could get a guaranteed hearing before the parole board, a state-appointed panel that had the authority to release the prisoner. It was not a guaranteed release, but instead depended on the prisoner’s behavior and rehabilitation while in prison. And if denied, the prisoner could re-apply after six months to a year.

But under the new system, there is no automatic hearing. Instead, the prisoner has to petition the Board of Executive Clemency, which would likely require a lawyer. The board can then choose to hold hearings on the prisoner’s likelihood to stay out of trouble and make a recommendation to the governor. Rather than parole, the prisoner needs a pardon or a sentence commutation. Only the governor can provide those.

In essence, the process ceased to be a rehabilitation matter and became a political decision.

The earliest “life with chance of release” cases will reach the 25-year mark in 2019. But there is no mechanism set up to handle the cases yet, and most of the prisoners are indigent and unlikely to be able to hire attorneys to start the process.

In the end, “life with chance of release” differs very little from “natural life.” And that has become a problem in federal court.

The law was altered slightly in 2013 to make it even harsher. "Life with chance of release" was eliminated for those convicted of premeditated first-degree murder, but remained in effect for juveniles and for those convicted of first-degree felony murder, meaning that someone died during the commission of another felony.

How the affected defendants get a chance at possible release remains in question.

Petitions for clemency would go to the Board of Executive Clemency, but that agency has no authority to set up the process.

"Whose problem is it?" asked Ellen Kirschbaum, the board's executive director. "As the Board of Clemency, we have to stay neutral. We're a board that follows the law set out for us."

Board chairman C.T Wright agrees.

"We're in a precarious situation," he said. "We will follow the dictates of the Legislature."

If it makes any.

In 1994, the first year that the new sentencing was in effect, judges and attorneys paid attention to it. There was only one defendant accidentally sentenced to “life with parole” in the entire state.

The next year, 1995, there were three such sentences, including Danny Valdez, who thinks he is eligible for parole in 2020.

But by 2001, the number of “life with parole” sentences had risen to 16 statewide. Between then and 2013, it averaged about 15 per year. The peak was 27 in 2008 — all but four of them from Maricopa County Superior Court.

Law is a very precise discipline, and in their motions and oral arguments, in case law and court orders, judges and attorneys parse words, stressing the differences between “shall” and “will”; “probable cause” and “preponderance of the evidence”; and “reasonable doubt” and “beyond all doubt.”

The Arizona Revised Statutes define a life sentence in this way: “If the defendant is sentenced to life, the defendant shall not be released on any basis until the completion of the service of twenty-five calendar years if the murdered person was fifteen or more years of age and thirty-five years if the murdered person was under fifteen years of age or was an unborn child.”

Minute entries, which are a Superior Court judge’s record of what transpired in open court, and also the record of the judge’s orders in a case, are full of boiler-plate language.

But when it comes to notarizing a life sentence, the state’s third-harshest possible after death and natural life in prison, judges follow no set language.

Instead, the minute entries may say “life with chance of parole after 25 years,” “life with no chance of parole for 25 years,” “life with chance of release after 25 years,” “with eligibility for release,” “without eligibility of release or parole for 25 years,” “life,” “25 years to life,” “lifetime,” or myriad other combinations.

The Republic reviewed minute entries for more than 500 life sentences imposed between Jan. 1, 1994, and Jan. 30, 2016. Most of the cases came from a list of prisoners with life sentences provided by the Arizona Department of Corrections, but others excluded from the DOC list turned up over the course of research. After sorting out some natural-life sentences accidentally included in the list, and other errors, and then adding other cases that were uncovered, The Republic was left with 490 cases.

SEARCH: The Republic's inmate database

Most of the defendants had pleaded to or been found guilty of first-degree murder. Some were convicted of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder or sexual conduct with a child. A few were repeat offenders.

The database does not include defendants sentenced to multiple consecutive sentences of life with chance of parole, only those prisoners who would have a reasonable chance of living out the specified time before they are eligible for parole/release. All of the prisoners in the database were confirmed on the Department of Corrections website as being currently in the state prison population.

Sentencing minute entries show:

158, or 32 percent, were precisely written to specify a chance for “release” after 25 or 35 years.

84, or 17 percent, of the sentences are written as “life” or “lifetime” or “25 years to life,” which is imprecise, but not inconsistent with the wording of the 1993 statute.

248, or 51 percent, offered a chance of parole after 25 or 35 years, contradicting the law. The lion’s share of those sentences — 175 — were imposed in Maricopa County Superior Court, which is widely regarded as a worldwide model for court administration and efficiency.

Of the invalid sentences, 90 were the result of plea agreements, meaning that the defendants pleaded guilty with the expectation that they would get a hearing before a parole board after 25 or 35 years.

Some judges interviewed by The Republic theorized that the incorrect sentences on minute entries could be clerical errors, or a faulty template for the documents.

But 248 times? That number does not include numerous "life with parole" sentences excluded from The Republic database because the inmates have so many consecutive sentences to serve that they could never live long enough to have a parole hearing.

To the inmates sentenced under those terms, it is the formal record of their sentence. All of those minute entries bear the judges’ signatures.

“In 2006, I was sentenced to life with possibility of parole,” said Francisco Centeno-Lopez, who shot and killed his brother-in-law after an argument and a long-running antagonism. He took a plea agreement.

“At the time of signing, I was not told by my lawyer that I would have to apply for a pardon or a commutation of sentence,” Centeno-Lopez wrote in Spanish in a letter to The Republic. He was told that if he had a good record in prison, he could get out after 25 years.

“When I spoke to my attorney about the plea agreement, he said it was the best he could negotiate, and it was sign the plea or go to trial, lose and spend the rest of my days in prison,” he wrote.

READ: Francisco Centeno-Lopez's letter

Needless to say, judges and attorneys, the people who are expected to enforce and interpret the law, are confused.

In 2004, for example, a defendant who discovered that there was no parole wrote to the judge who sentenced him, Jeffrey Hotham.

Hotham fired off a letter to the Arizona Department of Corrections, and notarized it in a minute entry, saying, “The court has received a letter from the defendant indicating that the Department of Corrections has communicated to the defendant that the defendant is not eligible currently to see the parole board.

“This court sentenced the defendant to life in prison, with the possibility of parole after serving 25 calendar years. This minute entry will serve to notify all involved that under the law, although currently not eligible for parole consideration, the defendant will be eligible for parole consideration after serving 25 years.”

The general counsel for the Corrections Department responded, “Truth in Sentencing came into effect on January 1, 1994, and there was no stated review for release from a life sentence after twenty-five calendar years. Truth in Sentencing has no mechanism for parole review on life sentences after 25 years.”

Of the defense attorneys interviewed by The Republic, some said they were aware of the misuse of parole but have taken advantage of it, advising clients that there is no such thing, but urging them to accept the plea deal offering it because it is better than facing a jury in a death-penalty trial and because it may someday give them a bargaining edge in getting out of prison after 25 years.

Other defense attorneys denounced it as a prosecutor’s trick, to scare juries into thinking that a craven murderer may someday get out of prison if they don’t sentence him or her to death.

Many others were confused, as if they had used the term “25 to life” generically, without any idea of what happened after the term had run.

Ronald Reinstein spent 22 years on the Maricopa County Superior Court bench and is remembered as an excellent trial judge. After he retired, he went to work for the Arizona Supreme Court as a judicial consultant, especially on death-penalty and victims-rights issues.

“I’m not as troubled as you by the minute entries,” he told The Republic.

“You have to look beyond the minute entry,” he said. “It could be an error. You have to look into the record and look at the transcript.”

In case law, the oral pronouncement in open court takes precedence over the written document.

But that argument cuts both ways. This reporter covered a sentencing in 2010 at which the judge talked at length about a defendant’s slim chance of ever getting parole. But he said it would be available to him.

The minute entry, by contrast, simply said he was sentenced to “life (25 years flat time).”

READ: Sabrina Romero's letter

As a judge, Reinstein sentenced at least eight people to life with a chance of parole, according to minute entries. After speaking to The Republic, he went back and reviewed one of the cases and found the term was included in the plea agreement generated by the prosecutor.

He conceded that a defendant who entered a plea agreement specifying a chance for parole might have more of a chance of staging a legal challenge than someone sentenced after a jury verdict.

That logic was echoed by defense attorneys as well.

“It’s a contract. It’s a deal,” said Kathy Brody of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona.

Referring back to the standard language of plea agreements, Brody said, “How can you say it’s a knowing and voluntary decision (by the defendant) if it’s an incorrect sentence?”

And Marty Lieberman, the director of the Maricopa County Office of the Legal Defender, said, "If somebody entered into a plea agreement, they've got a right to the benefit of a contract."

But Lieberman was uncertain what would happen to those who were sentenced to life with chance of parole after a trial.

"Are you ever entitled to an illegal sentence?" his colleague, John Curry, asked. "I think it will come down to the facts of the case."

Barring a class action, however, Reinstein said the cases would have to be considered one at a time on appeal, an opinion echoed by Mary Jane Gregory, a former assistant Arizona attorney general who pondered the question as general counsel to the Clemency Board.

“I think it’s going to be a case-by-case basis,” she said. “I don’t know if you’re going to get an answer until one of these cases goes to the Supreme Court and gets a written opinion.”

High-profile Phoenix defense attorney Larry Hammond, who is involved in the Arizona Justice Project, said, “The right thing to do would be to have a resentencing for all of these defendants, at which time they would be told what the law is.”

That would entail more than 200 resentencing hearings in an already busy court calendar.

Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery thinks the solution is just to admit that the sentences were in error and correct the paperwork.

“I would look at that and say, ‘That’s a mistake.’ Life without release: And then proceed on that statute," he said.

But retired Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Kenneth Fields countered, “Arizona doesn’t have the ability to correct sentences.”

“You can’t have it both ways,” Fields said. “You can’t go back and make (the sentence) more. That’s a jeopardy argument. Usually you have to live with what the judge did.”

State courts, however, have been hesitant to acknowledge the conflict.

Jesus Godinez and a fellow gang member drove to a rival gang party in south Phoenix in 2008 and started a shootout. Both were wounded, as were several other party-goers. The friend and one of the rivals died of their wounds.

Two years later, Godinez entered a plea agreement to avoid a capital trial and was sentenced to two concurrent sentences of life with possibility of parole after 25 years. His attorneys took note of the erroneous sentence, and in his post-conviction relief hearing, they argued that he did not enter into the plea “knowingly, voluntarily and intelligently,” because his trial attorney had not correctly advised him that parole was not available to him.

The trial judge denied relief. Godinez took the case to the Arizona Court of Appeals, which concluded that the judge had erred in allowing the terms “parole” and “release” to be used interchangeably. But it gave the judge the option to simply correct the wording in the sentence.

In an earlier case, the appellate court found a problem with the sentence, but sent it back to the trial court to fix.

Darius Agboghidi was just 16 when, in 2004, he and another teen shot a man to death during a burglary. He, too, entered a plea agreement to life with chance of parole. His attorneys argued that he had been misinformed by his trial attorney and that the terms “parole” and “release” were used interchangeably.

The trial judge refused to grant relief. But this time, the Arizona Court of Appeals said that he had a point, though it was not merely being misinformed by his trial attorney.

“Because the potential for early release after 25 years appears to be illusory under current law, Agboghidi’s claim is colorable,” the appeals panel of judges wrote. His case went back to Superior Court and stayed there until 2014, when the trial judge dismissed it because it had since been rendered moot by federal court decisions regarding juvenile murderers with life sentences.

Agboghidi will get his parole hearing after 25 years, but not because a Superior Court judge erred in sentencing him in the first place.

Leave aside the question of parole for a moment.

“The bigger problem is, there’s not a mechanism for reasonable consideration for those people whom the judges decided should have a chance for release,” said Keith Hilzendeger, an attorney at the Federal Public Defender’s Office in Phoenix.

That’s a fact that has chipped away at Arizona’s current sentencing statute in federal court.

Agboghidi’s case was one of more than 70 affected by a 2012 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Miller vs. Alabama. The high court ruled that it was a violation of the 8th Amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment to sentence a person who committed a crime as a juvenile to a mandatory natural life sentence without parole.

The logic followed that of a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court decision barring the death penalty for juveniles: that a juvenile’s brain is not fully developed, leaving him or her impulsive and irrational.

In the Miller case, the high court ruled that life without parole could be imposed only on the “rarest of juvenile offenders, those whose crimes reflect permanent incorrigibility.”

A subsequent Supreme Court ruling made the ban retroactive to cases that had already been decided.

When defense attorneys in Arizona first tried to apply Miller to their clients, they were stymied by the argument that Arizona’s sentencing scheme already had an alternative to life without parole, specifically, life with possibility of release after 25 or 35 years.

But the federal court did not agree. The U.S. Supreme Court had specifically referenced parole, and the concept that the actual chance of “release,” as the Arizona Court of Appeals put it, was "illusory."

“If we’re going to use that standard for commutation, it renders release void — because they’re never going to get it,” said Katherine Puzauskas of the Sandra Day O’Connor School of Law at Arizona State University and a former attorney for the Arizona Justice Project.

In 2014, the Arizona Legislature changed the law and reinstated parole for those, like Agboghidi, who were convicted of murder as juveniles and given less than natural-life sentences.

Puzauskas and the Arizona Justice Project lobbied on behalf of the juveniles serving life sentences in Arizona prisons. And a Maricopa County Superior Court judge ruled that they were to be afforded legal relief under Miller and the subsequent rulings.

At first, that affected 73 prison inmates. Remarkably, the post-Miller change legitimized more sentences than it undid.

Forty-one people had been sentenced as juveniles to life with chance of parole, and with the ruling, their sentences became valid. Thirty-two others sentenced for crimes as juveniles, whose sentences had not mentioned parole, will also now be eligible for parole after 25 or 35 years.

The 2014 legislative change did not apply to juveniles sentenced to natural life, meaning they would never be eligible for release.

In December 2016, the Arizona Supreme Court threw out the natural-life sentences of two additional Arizona prisoners who were convicted as juveniles. They sent the cases back to Superior Court for resentencing, with a suggestion to the Arizona Legislature that it amend the law to grant parole eligibility to other juveniles sentenced to natural life as well.

Meanwhile, the federal courts are chipping away at the Arizona life-sentencing statutes elsewhere, most recently a U.S. Supreme Court decision in May 2016 accusing Arizona prosecutors of using the threat of release to scare juries into imposing the death sentence for fear that the defendant will someday get out of prison.

“Under Arizona law, ‘parole is only available to individuals who committed a felony before January 1, 1994,’ ” the court wrote. “… But under state law, the only kind of release … is executive clemency.”

The Supreme Court justices threw out that death sentence. In December, they knocked down a second for the same reason. There probably will be more to come.

But what of the defendants who were adults when they were sentenced to life with chance of parole? There are still more than 200 Arizona prisoners who were told by a judge that they would someday be granted parole hearings.

“I think the state has to uphold its side of the bargain,” Puzauskas said.

It will likely require a lawsuit.

“I think what will happen is, if a number of people are successful, someone will go to the Legislature,” said Reinstein, the retired judge. “It’s an executive issue to do that or to let them ride one at a time.”

And the suggestion from the Board of Executive Clemency?

"I think the best process is no longer here, which would be parole," said the board's executive director, Ellen Kirschbaum. "It's here for others," she said, referring to the juvenile killers and those convicted before 1994. "It's a fair process."

Wright, the board chairman, agreed.

"I would say at the moment, parole is the way to go."

Venus Lopez and a friend tried to steal a vehicle at a Circle K store near 43rd Avenue and Thomas Road in Phoenix in 2000. According to media accounts at the time, Lopez, who was then 19, pressed a shotgun into the driver’s side and demanded his keys.

But her mother, Sophia Lopez, who was a well-known anti-gang activist at the time, told The Republic recently that there was no gun, and that the car's owner was inside the store when they took the vehicle.

The owner saw them, ran from the store, pulled out a 9mm handgun and emptied a magazine in Lopez’s direction. He missed, and instead, he shot an innocent bystander between the eyes, killing him.

It was Lopez's second armed robbery. According to her mother, Venus started using drugs and going downhill after she graduated from high school and was turned down when she tried to enlist in the U.S. Army. She started getting in trouble.

And even though she didn’t pull the trigger in the fatal shooting, Lopez and her friend were both charged with first-degree murder under Arizona’s felony murder laws. It was a high-profile case because of her mother's reputation as a community activist, and it was prosecuted by the flamboyant and usually successful Juan Martinez.

Venus Lopez was convicted after a trial and she was sentenced to “life with eligibility of parole after 25 years.”

In December she wrote to The Republic.

“I’ll be direct. NO, I wasn’t aware that parole was abolished at the time of my sentencing. Nor did my attorney inform me of this, as he understood that I would have a parole hearing after serving 25 years,” she said.

READ: Venus Lopez's letter

“Because of my legal illiteracy then, ‘clemency’ and ‘parole’ were synonymous. I believed I would appear before a ‘board’ who would decide my release.

“Now I am being told the decision to release me will be a gubernatorial decision.

“My quest to clarify what my sentence truly is began in 2008 and continues,” she wrote.

Lopez wrote to her trial attorney, to judges, to officials at the Department of Corrections. So did her roommate, Veronica Torres, who killed a woman in a drive-by gang shooting when she was 14 years old.

Lopez studied the case law, like the Agboghidi case and Miller vs. Alabama. She talked with her fellow inmates to learn their stories.

“The reality of my sentence was clarified when Miller vs. Alabama was decided and applied to Arizona juveniles serving life without the eligibility of parole,” she said. “This is when I realized that I am undeniably serving a natural life sentence, meaning I am not guaranteed a board hearing of any kind unless I file the paperwork. If I never file I am never released. And if I file for a pardon or sentence commutation (clemency), statistically, in Arizona, it is unlikely that either will be granted because it is a gubernatorial decision.”

Lopez didn’t actually kill anyone; Torres did. But ironically, because Torres was a juvenile when she committed murder, she is eligible for parole under the Supreme Court’s Miller case.

“There are cases that have challenged this sentencing scheme based on pleas taken that gave the impression parole was a possibility,” Lopez continued. “It’s a fact that much of the legal committee, lawyers, prosecutors and judges did not fully grasp the meaning of this sentencing scheme.”

“The abolishment of parole and what that meant to those sentenced to ‘Life’ after 1993 is now being called Arizona’s ‘dirty little secret’ among the legal committee. Why? Because they know the law is vague, no process was established on how these cases would be handled 25 years later, and the probability of release is not probable statistically.”

“The sentencing scheme for felony murders is an issue in itself because we did not commit murder. The psychology associated with the intent to kill versus the intent to steal is significantly different and does not warrant a life sentence, which is what Arizona law allows.”

“I know it is difficult to get people to care, after all, we made some really bad decisions. It doesn’t mean the justice system should be allowed to perpetuate the practice of revenge or disregard the essence of what justice is, if it even really exists.”

Reach reporter Michael Kiefer at 602-444-8994 or michael.kiefer@arizonarepublic.com.

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