The Colorado Supreme Court on Monday upheld lifetime prison sentences for people convicted of felony murder despite a 2021 change to Colorado law that capped such sentences at 48 years.
The sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole is acceptable in the case of a former Fort Carson soldier who was convicted of felony murder after he participated in a 2018 robbery in which his friend killed a 20-year-old man, the justices ruled.
People can be convicted of felony murder in Colorado if they participate in a felony arson, robbery, burglary, kidnapping, escape or sexual assault and someone dies during the crime. It doesn’t matter whether the person charged killed the victim themselves or intended for someone to die during the crime.
Wayne Sellers, 26, challenged his life sentence after state legislators in 2021 capped the sentence for felony murder at 48 years in prison, instead of an automatic life sentence.
Lawmakers who championed the change said life in prison was an unjust sentence for people who did not actually kill anyone. Life in prison without the possibility of parole is the harshest punishment available under Colorado law.
The law change followed a series of high profile felony murder convictions, including for a man who was sentenced to life in prison after standing watch as a 14-year-old while other teenagers broke into a woman’s house and killed her.
“The person who did the murder should do the most time,” Gov. Jared Polis said when he signed the bill into law in April 2021.
The new sentence cap applied only to felony murder convictions after September 2021, but Sellers, who was convicted in 2019, argued the law change showed his life sentence should also be reduced.
“In Sellers’s view, the General Assembly’s reclassification of felony murder as a Class 2 felony shows that standards of decency have evolved in Colorado to the extent that its citizens will no longer tolerate punishing felony murder offenders with the most severe sentence available under state law. We are unpersuaded,” the court’s unanimous 26-page opinion reads.
The justices found that Sellers’ sentence was constitutional and reasonable, and noted that he was convicted three years before the law change, for events that happened in October 2018.
Sellers was part of a five-man crew who set up 20-year-old Kenyatta Horne for a robbery. They met Horne on the premise that they wanted to buy drugs from him, but the would-be robbery turned into a shooting in which both Sellers and another man shot at Horne.
Sellers fired 11 rounds but did not kill Horne; his friend did. Sellers was convicted of felony murder after a jury trial in Colorado Springs and sentenced to life in prison plus 32 years.
“Although Sellers did not personally kill the victim, he fired his weapon at the victim and was an active and willing participant in the events resulting in the victim’s death,” the opinion reads. “…We cannot say that Sellers’s (life without parole) sentence is one of the rare cases requiring us to conclude that the sentence is unconstitutional or grossly disproportionate to the crime that he committed.”
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