of argument if i also have five minutes for rebuttal these remember only the clerk is permitted to record these proceedings today good morning counsel i apologize we had some technical difficulties this morning and some arguments that lasted a little longer than expected i appreciate your patience before we get started this status filed a motion to cite additional already the new cases come out th mean we're going to grant that motion i'm sorry just case thank you yes we're going to grant that motion and then indicate counsel stated they do not need any additional time to supplement anything in writing correct of rehabilitation that it's fifteen years old he deserves to die in prison and no matter how much this day and clifford argue over factors in aggravation or minute geisha and or even the actual issues in the record end of the day everything comes  juvenile sentencing that teenagers are not beyond the point of rehabilitation as a general they do not deserve life sentences despite their crimes because they are just less culpable and is their ra continue to develop and mature they can he be rehabilitated unlike their parts the flip side of this rule of course is that there are rare juveniles and something in the record will and kate that because of that particular juvenile or the rehabilitated makes perfect sense but in application the idea is more comfortable teenagers like clifford who raise miller claims they internet research for drug offenses these teenagers but want miller spoke about commit murder the very crimes that we instinctively want to punish harshly as a society to get the will is that these teenagers can be rehabilitated and they should receive a life sentence unless there is something beyond the average kids that court specifically referenced my space not just bits and those only messages that were admitted were between clifford and kelly lang and what's more it's less important how everyone voluntarily in a mental hospital where he's treated then released and less than four days later this offense occurs and in those intervening four days he wasn't taken to the doctor like the like the parents were told i'm going to get  doesn't have a car he doesn't have money he can't do these things that was personal responsibility and on top of that he's complaining that he's having homicidal dreams and you know it's also use lying to do anything about that now when you also consider the crime itself you know when the state argues over you know whether clifford you know shot them while they were asleep or whether clifford shot them when they were startled but it he end of the day he absolutely still killed two people  established by miller that murder does not move the needle towards in corage ability and regardless of how much the state a chance to break this case down into fragments in order to justify that life sentence cli critical i also being it's you know really important that the trial or contributed to clifford you know an aggravating factor of criminal history when a p s i i writes that he had no criminal history there's no allegations he committed other criminal lists are a sort of misunderstands the entire situation here ok thank you very much but i like to follow up with justice kate's question and what you said mr warner was you know you look you want the court to fix the factual mistakes and then prior you talked about the court looking at the totality of the circumstances obviously the court looked at the totality of the circumstances that this young man went into a house and shot these two people seven or eight times if i remember correctly and in fact went back got a different gun and shot the lady square in the forehead correct is that not part of the totality of the circumstances in the court south i think we have to look at the sort of mental health issues he was having prior to this offense i think we have to what the parental responsibility in his life or lack there of it he's telling people he's having homicid of the circumstances and i think you know you're on your rights you people got here it was it was a horrible situation but i think when you look at clifford himself the way the police found behavior that w cameron on behalf of the people one quick factual note response to the defendant's statement that no one took him for follow up care between his release and the time of the crimes the record shows that his step mother figure  defendant in this case isn't contesting whether the court complied with the procedure set forth in bell or whether it considered the characteristics of his here or whether it found that that he was i in corrigible it did consider those characteristics and it did make that finding he's arguing that the court abused its discretion in assessing and weighing statutory aggravating factors and miller's factors but the court's assessment of those trials factors was well within its discretion as was the sentence i know that the sentence for each of the crimes was below the midpoint of each applicable sentencing range here and the defendant can simply point to his total sentence and then argue that the court should have weighed the statutory aggravating factors and the miller factors differently the trial court was in the best position to assess and weigh these counts factors along with the evidence of the seriousness of the offense and all other material relevant sentencing this case involves just a straightforward use the courts broad at sentencing discretion and this court should affirm his sentence st with regard to that claim to factual error there was testimony at trial that the defendant announced prior to his crimes that he was going to do something bad and then the defendant gave a video interview which was admitted into evidence at trial and in which he said it before the crimes that he texted why i spoke to lange on the phone spoke to another girl on the phone and quote i remember telling somebody i was about to do something bad and quote so on that record it's not plain error for the sentencing court to note that the defendant said before the crimes that he was going to do something bad that statement was supported by the trial record also i'd say that it doesn't matter whether the court was trying to quote this is the text in the exhibit the issue is whether the sentence was clearly and obviously based on a fact not in the record and here it was not that that fact was in the record there were several sources for that information both from the from the other witnesses and from defendant himself now the defendant argues that the testimony of lang and others is based on her assumption about what the defendant meant but it's still a record before the murders that he was going to do something bad he also speculates in the reply brief that the police might have known about lang's texts with him before his video interview and planted that in his head off camera but st course that speculation doesn't show clean air and nd the police report admitted into evidence at people's forty seven and a shows that the police interviewed lang on august th at one hundred and fifty in the afternoon and obtained the text at that time they interviewed the defendant in the hospital more than six hours earlier so that can't have been what happened so in some the record contains evidence of what the court said so there's no plain air with regard to the threat to the court's statement that he was intelligent  i don't that that he presented evidence at sentencing to support that finding the evidence was that starting after his original sentencing hearing he got a's and b s and his academic classes at the juvenile detention center and was asked to teach other students and after he did initially failed the ged he continued with his classes and got his high school diploma as class valedictorian he was described as bright so on that  there is a presumption isn't there that if the sentencing the sentence given is within the step story range we can assume that the judge didn't consider all the factors in my career oh of course   two people and shooting them in their sleep at all times as as the court noted and in two different home invasions right and so that's why this is my question really why do you think that the judge in this case the defendant's discretion of the miller factors in mitigation he argues that the court should have found that he couldn't assess risks and consequences and didn't plan his crime i don't that the quarter that the court assessed those factors and found  differently and that the record does support the court's assessment that he intended to do something bad and have a plan to do something bad so for that reason there was no abuse of discretion i don't that miller guarantees the analysis of these factors not a particular outcome and that in the stafford case cited by the state the sentencing court didn't find those factors either now the defendant argued that the state his statement of intent to do something bad doesn't show his intent to commit murder but the court and stated that he may not might not have known exactly what the plan was so the court didn't sentence the defendant based on finding that he planned to murder amanda to shoot before he entered their home i don't know that the discussion of the facts of this case was in the breeze was relevant because the defendant in the opening brief took the defendant it took his video statement as the truth and argued that because he started a fire and panicked when t abused its discretion in assessing his ability to consider risks and consequences in the state's response to that was that there were discrepancies between d the defendant statement and the physical evidence namely there was no fire and that the victims were murdered in their sleep and the court just believe the defendant's eyes statement and sentencing him stating that based on the forensic evidence he executed them in their sleep i'd like to discuss the defendant's contesting the court's finding of the statutory aggravating aggravating factor that is applicable for use in juvenile cases and in the cases fox and stafford it was used in those were both juvenile cases the court in this case was just following the statute in assessing that factor and th defendant's argument that that factor it should not be applied in juvenile cases is better suited for the legislature because it was a factor eligible for consideration in this case the defendant theorizes that the court hoped or must have hoped to deter juveniles who are less likely to be deterred but the court never said that its goal was specific terms of the defendant or of other juveniles it stated that the sentence was necessary to deter others so  speculation that the court meant something other than what it said doesn't meet his burden of showing error that general deterrence factor isn't about youth the other can be of any age and although miller stated that juveniles are not susceptible to deterrence that doesn't mean that it's error to find the statutory aggravating factor of general deterrence in sentencing the juvenile it's not and the defendant argues that his sentence won't deter adults but that it is argument about the effica juvenile sentence as a general deterrent is again one for the legislature not this court he also argues that his crime was unique and unplanned i see that amount of time you go right ahead and finish your thought they did just that that every crime is unique and the court could have hoped to deter the very common crimes of murder and home invasion in finding the application of this factor some of these reasons and the reason stated in people's hands are grave we respectfully request that the  think that's probably the right analysis but as many cases that are reviewing juvenile he says no juveniles are different here and simply because it's within the sentencing range doesn't necessarily mean that and and so coverage challenge statements from the very beginning but it's interesting that the state wants to use those statements to prove that clifford stated he did something bad but then argue that absolutely everything else he said during those statements wasn't credible either clifford was was sort of making credible statements to police there or he wasn't any and it's kind of ironic that we're going to pay based on what suits the state's arguments best i suppose particularly when the trial court didn't rely on the st statements it relied on the messages none selves and it's hard to argue that clifford said that in stated in writing that lang's memory at trial is better than the actual messages themselves  and when we look at the trial the evidence about those text messages came from kelly lang and it came from a police officer talking about that interrogation video but in terms of telling lang they asked her what she thought it meant and she speculated that it meant that he was going to do something bad it seems sort of i guess sort of ridiculous to put more weight on what she was speculating clifford meant they want the message just said themselves especially given that laying in clifford had ben in a relationship for less than a week she'd known clifford for roughly and then in terms of his intelligence you know being able to indicate that at the time he was fifteen and committing these offenses that he's into what allowed him to extricate himself from the situation which is what the trial court was suggesting when it when it was talking about that that miller when he was a teen he was failing his classes and doing poorly in school perhaps because he was moved around a lot and had a very unstable home line but then any of that the trial court didn't make those actual errors in a review of the record indicates that we argued that it was both snow and tension an abuse of discretion i think in terms of the miller actors themselves and to the extent that you is a constitutional mitigation and evidence is constitutionally mitigating evidence i'm sorry that it should be reviewed to novel and read the trial court whether it complied with miller and its requirements it should be reviewed to know so  this case do you believe the standard in her view was to knowhow or abuse of discretion yes i you know i think that whenever we're talking about factual determination and that the same sort of factual determination standard of review what o'clock so you know we're looking at whether or not the trial court abused its discretion in making these sort of factual considerations but in terms of whether a constitutional process w morning this matter will be taken under advisement and an order will be issued in due course believe this concludes our oral arguments courts for today in the court will be in recess thank you very much