By Jonathan Bilyk | Legal Newsline
The Center Square

A Chicago gang member in the midst of a 40-year sentence for shooting and killing an innocent man while the other man was carrying his three-year-old son to a neighborhood store on Chicago’s South Side can’t use an Illinois criminal justice reform law passed nearly two decades after his conviction to potentially secure an early release from prison, a federal appeals court has ruled.

On Dec. 23, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the appeal of Israel Ruiz, finding the new state law shouldn’t be read to apply to offenses committed before the law was enacted and that such a reading doesn’t violate his rights under the prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishments under the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment.

The ruling could potentially staunch what could have been a wave of lawsuits from others, like Ruiz, serving long prison sentences for murder and other violent crimes committed while they were under the age of 21, asserting they have been wrongly denied the chance for early release on parole.

The case landed before the Seventh Circuit after U.S. District Judge John Robert Blakey ruled in favor of the state of Illinois in Ruiz’s legal action.

Ruiz had filed suit in 2022, seeking to secure the chance to shorten his 40-year prison sentence.

At that point, Ruiz was considered to have served about 23 years of the sentence he had received in connection to his 2000 murder conviction in the gang-related shooting death of Nathaniel Walls in 1998.

According to published reports, at the time he was shot, Walls was walking to a store, carrying his three-year-old son, in the 8900 block of South Brandon Avenue in Chicago’s South Chicago neighborhood when he was caught in gang crossfire. Walls was not the intended target of the gunfire, but was still struck by bullets and died.

Ruiz, who was then 18 years old, was among three men charged in connection with Walls’ murder. Ruiz was convicted at trial two years later and was declared to be ineligible for parole.

However, in 2019, as part of a series of criminal justice reforms enacted in the name of social justice and racial equity, Illinois Democratic state lawmakers and Gov. JB Pritzker enacted a new law creating new parole opportunities for people who were convicted of criminal offenses they committed between the ages of 18 and 21.

Under the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2012 decision in Miller v Alabama, the high court has declared that life sentences without the possibility of parole are unconstitutional when applied to juvenile offenders. At the time, juvenile offenders were considered to be those under the age of 18.

However, in the years since, criminal justice reformers, citing scientific evidence which they said shows that human brains are continuing to develop well beyond the 18th year of life, have enacted a series of laws extending the Miller decision’s protections for juvenile offenders to older offenders, as well.

In Illinois’ case, the 2019 law, known as Public Act 100-1182, extended those protections to people up to the age of 21, and automatically made such offenders eligible for parole after serving at least 20 years in prison. However, the law only applied to those sentenced after June 1, 2019, and is not retroactive to those sentenced before that date.

In his lawsuit, Ruiz challenged the state’s decision to limit the reforms to those convicted only after the law took effect. He argued that clause in the reform law violated his rights to equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment and to protection against cruel and unusual punishments under the Eighth Amendment.

Ruiz is represented in the action by attorneys Ann H. MacDonald, William P. Ziegelmueller, and Meera Gorjala, of the firm Arentfox Schiff LLP, of Chicago.

However, judges disagreed, saying that the state’s “rational basis” for making the distinction was enough to uphold the law.

In the appellate ruling, the Seventh Circuit judges said they would not overrule Illinois lawmakers on the question, nor would they extend Miller protections to Ruiz and other “juvenile offenders” convicted for murder and other violent crimes committed before their 21st birthday.

The decision was authored by Seventh Circuit Judge Joshua P. Kolar. Circuit judges Doris L. Pryor and Nancy L. Maldonado concurred in the decision. All three judges were appointed to the court by former President Joe Biden.

The judges noted Illinois is among a growing number of states have moved to revise state sentencing and parole laws to make it easier for juvenile offenders convicted of murder and other violent crimes to avoid lengthy prison sentences or potentially secure an early release decades before their sentence would otherwise expire.

“While Illinois’s passage of Public Act 100-1182 is of a piece with this trend, the General Assembly specifically declined to extend the Act’s protections to offenders like Ruiz retroactively,” Kolar and his colleagues wrote.

“We will not supersede that legislature’s authority to make these policy judgments in the first instance.”

“… Ruiz asks us to broaden the Illinois legislature’s selective extension of Miller’s protections beyond the constitutional baseline set by the Supreme Court; this we cannot do.”

Ruiz and his lawyers could now seek to appeal that decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.