Opinion ID: 4535750
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Hall is an Evolutionary Refinement

Text: Although this Court in Walls did not consider whether Hall falls within Witt’s second category of developments of fundamental significance—that is, a change of “sufficient magnitude” under the Stovall/Linkletter test—having receded from our conclusion that it falls within the first, we do so now. In order to determine whether a new rule of law is of “sufficient magnitude” to merit retroactive application, this Court considers the following three factors of the Stovall/Linkletter test adopted in Witt: “(a) the purpose to be served by the new rule; (b) the extent of reliance on the old rule; and (c) the effect on the administration of justice of a retroactive application of the new rule.” Witt, 387 So. 2d at 926. We agree with the reasons given by the Walls dissent as to why these factors counsel against the retroactive application of Hall: Hall should not be given retroactive effect under the Stovall/Linkletter test based on (a) Hall’s purpose of adjusting at the margin the - 15 - definition of IQ scores that evidence significant subaverage intellectual functioning, (b) the State’s reliance on Cherry’s holding in numerous cases over an extended period of time, and (c) the ongoing threat of major disruption to application of the death penalty resulting from giving retroactive effect to Hall as well as similar future changes in the law regarding aspects of the definition of intellectual disability. Walls, 213 So. 3d at 351 (Canady, J., dissenting) (footnote omitted). Moreover, our Court in Witt equated new rules of law that are of “sufficient magnitude” to merit retroactive application with “jurisprudential upheavals.” Witt, 387 So. 2d at 929. Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963)—which first announced that each state must provide counsel to every indigent defendant charged with a felony at all critical stages of the proceeding—“is the prime example of a law change included within this category.” Witt, 387 So. 2d at 929. “In contrast to these jurisprudential upheavals are evolutionary refinements in the criminal law, affording new or different standards for the admissibility of evidence, for procedural fairness, for proportionality review of capital cases, and for other like matters.” Id. Hall is an evolutionary refinement of the procedure necessary to comply with Atkins. It merely clarified the manner in which courts are to determine whether a capital defendant is intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for the death penalty. Roybal v. Chappell, No. 99CV2152-JM (KSC), 2014 WL 3849917, at  (S.D. Cal. Aug. 5, 2014) (stating that Hall was a clarification of Florida’s implementation of Atkins). It did not invalidate any statutory means for - 16 - imposing the death sentence, nor did it prohibit the states from imposing the death penalty against any new category of persons. Before Walls, this Court had been clear that evolutionary refinements do not apply retroactively. See, e.g., State v. Barnum, 921 So. 2d 513, 526 (Fla. 2005) (“Witt dictates that those decisions constituting ‘evolutionary refinements’ and not ‘jurisprudential upheavals’ should not be applied retroactively.” (quoting Witt, 387 So. 2d at 929)); State v. Glenn, 558 So. 2d 4, 8 (Fla. 1990) (“Applying the principles of Witt, we conclude that Carawan was an evolutionary refinement of the law which should not have retroactive application.”). As an evolutionary refinement, Hall “do[es] not compel an abridgement of the finality of judgments.” Witt, 387 So. 2d at 929. It is not of sufficient magnitude to warrant retroactive application to cases on collateral review. In Walton v. State, 77 So. 3d 639 (Fla. 2011), we rejected a claim that the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Porter v. McCollum, 558 U.S. 30 (2009), warranted retroactive application. Porter was a fact-intensive decision in which the Supreme Court held that in a particular case, this Court had unreasonably applied the prejudice test for establishing ineffective assistance of counsel under Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 688 (1984). We held in Walton that the decision in Porter d[id] not concern a major change in constitutional law of fundamental significance. Rather, Porter - 17 - involved a mere application and evolutionary refinement and development of the Strickland analysis, i.e., it addressed a misapplication of Strickland. Porter, therefore, does not satisfy the retroactivity requirements of Witt. Walton, 77 So. 3d at 644. Similarly, as explained above, Hall involved a mere application and evolutionary refinement of the Atkins analysis and therefore does not satisfy the retroactivity requirements of Witt. D. Federal Law Does Not Require Retroactive Application of Hall Finally, we must consider whether federal law requires retroactive application of Hall. Under Teague v. Lane, 489 U.S. 288 (1989), state courts must give retroactive effect to new substantive rules of federal constitutional law. Montgomery v. Louisiana, 136 S. Ct. 718, 728-29 (2016) (holding “that when a new substantive rule of [federal] constitutional law controls the outcome of a case, the Constitution requires state collateral review courts to give retroactive effect to that rule” under the first prong of Teague’s retroactivity analysis).5 Substantive rules set forth categorical constitutional guarantees that place certain criminal laws 5. Although the federal standard for determining retroactivity under Teague is a two-pronged approach stating that courts must give retroactive effect to (1) new substantive rules of federal constitutional law and (2) new watershed rules of criminal procedure implicating the fundamental fairness and accuracy of the criminal proceeding, Montgomery held only that substantive rules of federal constitutional law must be applied retroactively by state courts. The Court in Montgomery explicitly declined to address “the constitutional status of Teague’s exception for watershed rules of procedure.” 136 S. Ct. at 729. - 18 - and punishments altogether beyond the State’s power to impose. Id. at 729. In contrast, procedural rules are designed to enhance the accuracy of a conviction or sentence by regulating the manner of determining the defendant’s culpability and merely raise the possibility that someone convicted with use of the invalidated procedure might have been acquitted otherwise. Id. at 730. Because we have concluded that Hall announced a new procedural rule, which does not categorically place certain criminal laws and punishments altogether beyond the State’s power to impose but rather regulates only the manner of determining the defendant’s culpability, we conclude that federal law does not require retroactive application of Hall as a new substantive rule of federal constitutional law. Hall is similar to other nonretroactive “decisions [that] altered the processes in which States must engage before sentencing a person to death,” which “may have had some effect on the likelihood that capital punishment would be imposed” but which did not render “a certain penalty unconstitutionally excessive for a category of offenders.” Id. at 736. E. Receding from Walls Having concluded that Hall does not satisfy the Witt analysis for retroactivity and that it is not a new substantive rule of federal constitutional law requiring retroactive application to cases on collateral review, we are now faced with the question of whether the policy of stare decisis should yield. - 19 - We recently discussed the doctrine of stare decisis, stating: While this Court has consistently acknowledged the importance of stare decisis, it has been willing to correct its mistakes. In a recent discussion of stare decisis, we said: Stare decisis provides stability to the law and to the society governed by that law. Yet stare decisis does not command blind allegiance to precedent. “Perpetuating an error in legal thinking under the guise of stare decisis serves no one well and only undermines the integrity and credibility of the court.” Shepard v. State, 259 So. 3d 701, 707 (Fla. 2018) (quoting State v. Gray, 654 So. 2d 552, 554 (Fla. 1995)). Similarly, we have stated that “[t]he doctrine of stare decisis bends . . . where there has been an error in legal analysis.” Puryear v. State, 810 So. 2d 901, 905 (Fla. 2002). And elsewhere we have said that we will abandon a decision that is “unsound in principle.” Robertson v. State, 143 So. 3d 907, 910 (Fla. 2014) (quoting Brown v. Nagelhout, 84 So. 3d 304, 309 (Fla. 2012)). It is no small matter for one Court to conclude that a predecessor Court has clearly erred. The later Court must approach precedent presuming that the earlier Court faithfully and competently carried out its duty. A conclusion that the earlier Court erred must be based on a searching inquiry, conducted with minds open to the possibility of reasonable differences of opinion. “[T]here is room for honest disagreement, even as we endeavor to find the correct answer.” Gamble v. United States, 139 S. Ct. 1960, 1986 (2019) (Thomas, J., concurring). State v. Poole, 45 Fla. L. Weekly S41, S47-48 (Fla. Jan. 23, 2020), clarified, 45 Fla. L. Weekly S121 (Fla. Apr. 2, 2020). We cannot escape the conclusion that this Court in Walls clearly erred in concluding that Hall applies retroactively. We say that based on our review of Hall, our state’s judicial precedents regarding retroactivity, and the decisions of federal habeas courts concluding that Hall does not apply retroactively. Based on - 20 - its incorrect legal analysis, this Court used Hall—which merely created a limited procedural rule for determining intellectual disability that should have had limited practical effect on the administration of the death penalty in our state—to undermine the finality of numerous criminal judgments. As in Poole, “[u]nder these circumstances, it would be unreasonable for us not to recede from [Walls’] erroneous holdings.” Id. at S48. “[O]nce we have chosen to reassess a precedent and have come to the conclusion that it is clearly erroneous, the proper question becomes whether there is a valid reason why not to recede from that precedent. . . . The critical consideration ordinarily will be reliance.” Id. But reliance interests are “at their acme in cases involving property and contract rights.” Payne v. Tennessee, 501 U.S. 808, 828 (1991). And reliance interests are lowest in cases—like this one—“involving procedural and evidentiary rules.” Id.; see also Alleyne, 570 U.S. at 119 (Sotomayor, J., concurring) (“[W]hen procedural rules are at issue that do not govern primary conduct and do not implicate the reliance interests of private parties, the force of stare decisis is reduced.”). Id. As the expectant potential beneficiary of the erroneous decision in Walls, Phillips has no concrete reliance interest; he has in no way changed his position in reliance on Walls. In this postconviction context, Phillips’s interest as an expectant potential beneficiary of Walls is set against all the interests that support maintaining the finality of Phillips’s judgment. The surviving victims, society-at- - 21 - large, and the State all have a weighty interest in not having Phillips’s death sentence set aside for the relitigation of his claim of intellectual disability based on Hall’s evolutionary refinement in the law. Thus, we conclude that we should not continue to apply the erroneous reasoning of Walls. And because Hall does not apply retroactively, it does not entitle Phillips to a reconsideration of whether he meets the first prong of the intellectual disability standard. F. Moore Phillips also asserts that he is entitled to a new determination as to whether he meets the adaptive deficits prong of the intellectual disability standard because the circuit court in 2006 and this Court in 2008 improperly relied on his adaptive strengths in concluding that he did not meet the adaptive deficits prong, assertedly in violation of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Moore. But because Phillips has conclusively failed to establish that he meets the first prong of the intellectual disability standard, he cannot be found to be intellectually disabled even if he were entitled to a renewed determination on the second prong and could establish that he has deficits in adaptive behavior. As we have repeatedly stated, if a defendant fails to prove that he or she meets any one of the three prongs of the intellectual disability standard, he or she will not be found to be intellectually disabled. E.g., - 22 - Jones v State, 231 So. 3d 374, 376 (Fla. 2017); Salazar v. State, 188 So. 3d 799, 812 (Fla. 2016). Thus, we need not address his Moore claim.