TRAMAIN SMITH v. THE STATE OF FLORIDA

• Court: District Court of Appeal of Florida
• Decided: August 16, 2023
• Docket: 22-2073
• Status: Published

Opinion

Third District Court of Appeal State of Florida

Opinion filed August 16, 2023. Not final until disposition of timely filed motion for rehearing.

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No. 3D22-2073 Lower Tribunal Nos. F93-18139C & F93-18141C ________________

Tramain Smith, Appellant,

vs.

The State of Florida, Appellee.

An Appeal under Florida Rule of Appellate Procedure 9.141(b)(2) from the Circuit Court for Miami-Dade County, Joseph Perkins, Judge.

Tramain Smith, in proper person.

Ashley Moody, Attorney General, and Linda Katz, Assistant Attorney General, for appellee.

Before SCALES, HENDON and GORDO, JJ.

SCALES, J. Appellant Tramain Smith appeals a June 17, 2022 order denying his

motion seeking rehearing of the trial court’s September 19, 2019 order that

denied Smith’s Florida Rule of Criminal Procedure 3.800 postconviction

motion to correct what Smith alleged was an illegal sentence. We affirm.

On May 24, 1993, Smith and two co-defendants, including John

Hazelton, committed a series of crimes for which they were charged, in two

separate cases, with multiple counts of armed burglary, armed kidnapping,

armed robbery, armed sexual battery with a deadly weapon, as well as one

count of attempted murder. Smith was fifteen years old at the time of these

crimes.

On January 7, 1994, Smith entered a plea of no contest to all counts

in both cases. Smith was sentenced to a total of forty years in prison, with

the sentences imposed on all counts running concurrently. On July 27, 2018,

Smith filed his postconviction motion to correct what Smith alleged was an

illegal sentence. Smith asserted that, because Smith was a juvenile at the

time the crimes were committed, his forty-year sentence violated the United

States Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and

unusual punishment. Smith’s motion cited among other cases, Graham v.

Florida, 560 U.S. 48 (2010) and Johnson v. State, 215 So. 3d 1237 (Fla.

2 2017). The so-called Graham/Miller 1 line of United States Supreme Court

cases held that sentencing a juvenile to life in prison without the possibility

of parole, for either a homicide or a non-homicide crime, constituted cruel

and unusual punishment. Miller, 567 U.S. at 465; Graham, 560 U.S. at 82.

The Florida Supreme Court expanded this Graham/Miller principle,

concluding that any lengthy prison term imposed on a juvenile that did not

include a mechanism to review the defendant’s rehabilitation and maturity

constituted a de facto life sentence, thus implicating Graham/Miller. See,

e.g., Johnson, 215 So. 3d at 1243; Henry v. State, 175 So. 3d 675, 679-80

(Fla. 2015) (holding that a ninety-year sentence that does not afford a

meaningful opportunity for release from prison is the functional equivalent of

a life sentence and is unconstitutional under Graham).

In both his postconviction motion, and his motion for rehearing, Smith,

relying on Johnson and Henry, asserts that his forty-year sentence is

unconstitutional because it provides no mechanism for review of Smith’s

rehabilitation. Smith, though, fails to acknowledge that, in 2020, the Florida

Supreme Court receded from the Johnson and Henry line of cases in

Pedroza v. State, 291 So. 3d 541 (Fla. 2020). Pedroza held that, to implicate

1 See Miller v. Alabama, 567 U.S. 460 (2012).

3 Graham/Miller, the juvenile must be sentenced to life in prison or to the

functional equivalent of life in prison. Id. at 549. Smith’s forty-year sentence

does not reach the level of punishment necessary to implicate

Graham/Miller’s constitutional protection. Thus, the trial court did not err by

denying Smith relief on this ground.

Below and on appeal, Smith has raised another issue. Smith’s co-

defendant, Hazelton, after receiving a forty-year sentence, was resentenced

to a reduced term in prison. Smith argues that he, too, is entitled to a

resentencing because he is “similarly situated” to Hazelton. This Court,

though, has already considered and rejected this argument which Smith

raised in an earlier petition for a writ of habeas corpus. Smith v. State, 325

So. 3d 19 (Fla. 3d DCA 2021). Accordingly, our rejection of Smith’s “similarly

situated” argument pertaining to Hazelton’s sentence is the law of the case.

See Duckworth v. State, 305 So. 3d 732, 733 (Fla. 3d DCA 2020). The trial

court, therefore, correctly denied Smith relief on this ground as well.

Affirmed.