Opinion
No. 165, 2018
12-06-2018
MICHAEL MANLEY, Defendant Below, Appellant, v. STATE OF DELAWARE, Plaintiff Below, Appellee.
Court Below: Superior Court of the State of Delaware Case ID No. 9511007022 Before STRINE, Chief Justice; VALIHURA and TRAYNOR, Justices. ORDER
(1) This appeal presents a familiar issue that has arisen multiple times since this Court's opinions in Rauf v. State and Powell v. State, which respectively held that Delaware's death penalty statute is unconstitutional and that Rauf's holding applies retroactively. Although we concluded in Powell that the defendant "must be sentenced to 'imprisonment for the remainder of his natural life without benefit of probation or parole or any other reduction,'" a number of defendants who were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death before Rauf have argued that they must instead be resentenced to imprisonment for 15 years to life. As these defendants see it, Rauf struck down the entirety of Delaware's first-degree murder sentencing statute, not just the death penalty portion. Thus, they argue, they must be resentenced under the still-valid sentencing statute for felonies generally (i.e., for 15 years to life).
145 A.3d 430 (Del. 2016).
153 A.3d 69 (Del. 2016).
Id. at 70-71.
(2) The appellant and defendant below, Michael Manley, is another one of those defendants. Although he tries hard to give his case a new constitutional gloss based on the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, we rejected those same arguments earlier this year in Cook v. State.
181 A.3d 152, 2018 WL 1020106, at *1 (Del. 2018) (TABLE); see also Zebroski v. State, 179 A.3d 855, 863 (Del. 2018).
(3) Consistent with our prior decisions on this issue, we affirm the Superior Court's judgment on the basis of its well-reasoned order denying Manley's motion for resentencing. As we have now held many times, Rauf did not strike down the entirety of the first-degree murder statute—it struck down only the death penalty portion—and the proper sentence for a defendant convicted of first-degree murder is "imprisonment for the remainder of his natural life without benefit of probation or parole or any other reduction."
See, e.g., Cook, 2018 WL 1020106, at *1; Zebroski, 179 A.3d at 859-60, 863.
State v. Manley, 2018 WL 1110420 (Del. Super. Ct. Feb. 28, 2018).
NOW, THEREFORE, IT IS ORDERED that the judgment of the Superior Court is AFFIRMED.
BY THE COURT:
/s/ Leo E . Strine, Jr.
Chief Justice