State v. Borlase

896 S.E.2d 742

STATE of North Carolina,

v.Tristan Noah BORLASE, Defendant.

No. COA22-985

Court of Appeals of North Carolina.

Filed January 2, 2024

Appeal by defendant from judgment entered 3 March 2022 by Judge R. Gregory Horne in Watauga County Superior Court. Heard in the Court of Appeals 20 September 2023. Watauga County, No. 19 CRS 50415

Attorney General Joshua H. Stein, by Assistant Attorney General Heidi M. Williams, for the State.

Law Office of Lisa Miles, by Lisa Miles, for defendant.

DILLON, Judge.

Defendant Tristan Noah Borlase was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder for killing his parents one month before turning eighteen years of age and was sentenced by the trial court to two life sentences without the possibility of parole, to run consecutively. He appeals his sentence. For the following reasons, we conclude Defendant received a fair trial, free from reversible error.

I. Background

On 10 April 2019, Defendant brutally killed his father and mother in separate attacks at their home near Boone. Evidence at trial showed as follows:

On the morning of 10 April 2019, Defendant attended his Civics and Economics class at school. The lesson that day focused on how juveniles are punished differently than adults in the criminal justice system. Specifically, the lesson instructed that juveniles could not receive the death penalty for murder.

In the afternoon, Defendant’s father surprised Defendant by picking him up from high school after receiving a call from school personnel informing him that Defendant’s grades had been slipping and that he was at risk of not graduating. Once home, Defendant’s parents informed him that they were disciplining him by taking his car keys and cell phone and by prohibiting him from participating on the school’s track team for the remainder of the season, including participating in the track meet that afternoon.

Later that evening, Defendant was inside the home with his mother while his father was outside engaged in yardwork. While alone with his mother, Defendant inflicted multiple stab wounds on her with a large knife. He also inflicted blunt force injuries on his mother and strangled her. He then went outside, approached his father from behind, and inflicted a stab wound. He chased and subdued his father, riding his father’s back until he fell to the ground, and inflicted several more stab wounds in a violent fashion. When he finished the attack, he walked away with his father still alive. He looked back towards his father and saw him on his knees, struggling to get up. His father then collapsed to the ground, and Defendant continued to walk away. He did not render aid to either parent.

Defendant spent the next two hours attempting to conceal his actions, hiding the bodies of his deceased parents and attempting to clean the crime scene. He hosed down the front porch and the living room area. To dispose of his mother’s body, he tied a rope around her feet to drag her from the house. When this was unsuccessful, he resorted to carrying her, but he repeatedly dropped her. He hid his mother’s body in the bed of a pickup truck, under a blanket and bags of mulch, in the woods on the family’s property. He stole his father’s wallet from his body but left the body in place and covered it with a hammock (which his sister would find later that night while searching for her parents).

Defendant then drove to his grandmother’s home to pick up his youngest brother, rather than requiring his grandmother to bring his brother home. That brother described Defendant as "overly happy" and "kinda upbeat" when Defendant picked him up. The grandmother described Defendant as being "just in a really good mood" and said that he "smiled and laughed a bit."

After bringing his brother home, Defendant then left to smoke marijuana with friends, leaving his twelve-year-old brother alone and scared in a home covered with blood, worried about his missing parents. As he was returning home a few hours later, he saw his grandmother’s car, whereupon he turned off his headlights and drove away. He stayed at a friend’s house overnight and attempted to flee the state the next morning but was caught shortly after crossing the border into Tennessee.

At the time of the killings, Defendant was 17 years, 11 months old, a senior in high school, and had been accepted to attend a state university in South Carolina, with plans to join the school’s track team as a pole vaulter.

While in jail, Defendant repeatedly showed a lack of remorse for his crimes. And a few weeks after the killings, Defendant even hosted a birthday gathering for himself, with his friends attending, at the jail.

Approximately three years later, on 2 March 2022, a jury found Defendant guilty of two counts of first-degree murder based on premeditation and deliberation.

The following day, on 3 March 2022, the trial court held a hearing to consider the appropriate sentence, as Defendant was a minor when he committed the two murders. At the conclusion of the hearing, the trial court entered a written sentencing order with its two judgments, sentencing Defendant to two life sentences without the possibility of parole, to run consecutively. Defendant appeals.

II. Analysis

Defendant’s sole argument is that the trial court erred by sentencing him to two consecutive life sentences without parole. In making his argument, Defendant contends that the trial court did not comply with Section 15A-1340.19B of our General Statutes, which provides the procedure for considering a sentence of life without the possibility of parole ("LWOP") for a juvenile offender. He further contends that he was sentenced in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the federal constitution and Article 1, Section 27 of our state constitution.

A. Federal Constitution – Eighth Amendment Jurisprudence

[1] In the present case, the sentencing judge held a hearing in which he heard evidence concerning Defendant’s youth and upbringing. The judge exercised discretion and determined two consecutive sentences of LWOP to be appropriate. For the reasoning below, we conclude the procedure employed in sentencing Defendant conformed with the Eighth Amendment of the federal constitution.

[2] The Eighth Amendment to our federal constitution bars the imposition of "cruel and unusual punishments." U.S. Const. amend. VIII. The Eighth Amendment applies to states by virtue of the Fourteenth Amendment. See Harmelin v. Michigan, 501 U.S. 957, 962, 111 S.Ct. 2680, 115 L.Ed.2d 836 (1991).

[3, 4] A LWOP sentence is "the second most severe [punishment] known to the law." Id. at 996, 111 S.Ct. 2680. But as a LWOP sentence is markedly different than a death sentence, Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238, 306, 92 S.Ct. 2726, 33 L.Ed.2d 346 (1972), a LWOP sentence is permissible under the Eighth Amendment for adult offenders, even for many non-violent crimes, such as simply possessing a large amount of cocaine, Harmelin, 501 U.S. at 996, 111 S.Ct. 2680, and may be imposed on adult offenders even without ever considering mitigating factors or the "particularized circumstances of the crime and of the criminal." Id. at 962, 111 S.Ct. 2680.

However, the United States Supreme Court has determined that the Eighth Amendment is more restrictive on the ability of a trial court to impose a LWOP sentence on a defendant who was a minor when he committed his crimes. For instance, in 2010, the Court held that the Eighth Amendment bars the imposition of a sentence of LWOP for a juvenile nonhomicide offender. Graham v. Florida, 560 U.S. 48, 75, 130 S.Ct. 2011, 176 L.Ed.2d 825 (2010).

In 2012, the Court held that a sentencing scheme which requires a sentencing judge to impose a LWOP sentence on a juvenile homicide offender violates the Eighth Amendment. Miller v. Alabama, 567 U.S. 460, 479, 132 S.Ct. 2455, 183 L.Ed.2d 407 (2012) (holding that "the Eighth Amendment forbids a sentencing scheme that mandates [LWOP] for juvenile offenders."). In so holding, the Court reasoned that a sentencing scheme must afford a sentencing judge or jury "the opportunity to consider mitigating circumstances before imposing the harshest possible penalty for juveniles." Id. at 489, 132 S.Ct. 2455. The Court quoted earlier cases to reiterate the "great difficulty [for the sentencing judge] of distinguishing at this early age between ‘the juvenile offender whose crime reflects unfortunate yet transient immaturity, and the rare juvenile offender whose crime reflects irreparable corruption.’ " Id. at 479, 132 S.Ct. 2455 (quoting Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551, 573, 125 S.Ct. 1183, 161 L.Ed.2d 1 (2005), and Graham, 560 U.S. at 68, 130 S.Ct. 2011) (emphasis added).

Four years later, the Court explained that Miller "drew a line between children whose crimes reflect transient immaturity and those rare children whose crimes reflect irreparable corruption." Montgomery v. Louisiana, 577 U.S. 190, 209, 136 S.Ct. 718, 193 L.Ed.2d 599 (2016).

Courts across our country have grappled with the proper interpretation of these decisions, specifically whether or not the Eighth Amendment prohibits a judge from sentencing a juvenile homicide offender to LWOP without expressly finding that the offender was permanently incorrigible (or at least that his crime reflected incorrigibility). See Jones v. Mississippi, 593 U.S. 98, 141 S. Ct. 1307, 1313, 209 L.Ed.2d 390 (2021) (recognizing a "disagreement in state and federal courts about how to interpret Miller").

In 2021, in Jones v. Mississippi, the Court clarified that the Eighth Amendment does not require a sentencing judge to make any finding regarding the juvenile offender’s permanent incorrigibility or otherwise to provide a "sentencing explanation with an implicit finding of permanent incorrigibility" before imposing a sentence of LWOP. Id. at 1318-19, 1321. Rather, the Eighth Amendment merely requires that the sentencing judge be afforded the "discretion to consider the mitigating qualities of youth and impose a lesser punishment."...