Johnson v. State

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NOT DESIGNATED FOR PUBLICATION

No. 117,323

IN THE COURT OF APPEALS OF THE STATE OF KANSAS

RONALD JOHNSON, JR.,
Appellant,

v.

STATE OF KANSAS,
Appellee.


MEMORANDUM OPINION

Appeal from Wyandotte District Court; J. DEXTER BURDETTE, judge. Opinion filed September 1,
2017. Affirmed.

Jonathan Laurans, of Kansas City, Missouri, for appellant.

Daniel G. Obermeier, assistant district attorney, Mark A. Dupree, Sr., district attorney, and Derek
Schmidt, attorney general, for appellee.

Before HILL, P.J., ATCHESON and SCHROEDER, JJ.

PER CURIAM: Ronald Johnson, Jr., appeals from the denial of his habeas corpus
motion challenging the constitutionality of the hard 50 sentence he received in Wyandotte
County District Court in 2003 on a conviction for first-degree murder. In his motion, filed
under K.S.A. 60-1507, Johnson argued that Alleyne v. United States, 570 U.S. ___, 133 S.
Ct. 2151, 186 L. Ed. 2d 314 (2013), should be applied retroactively to his case to require
that a jury, rather than the district court, find the facts warranting the hard 50 sentence.
He also argued that the rule in Alleyne furnished exceptional circumstances to support his
60-1507 motion, which was both successive and untimely.
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The district court was unpersuaded by Johnson's presentation and denied the
motion. Johnson has appealed.

After Johnson filed his appellate brief, the Kansas Supreme Court rejected those
exact arguments in Kirtdoll v. State, 306 Kan. 355, ___, 393 P.3d 1053, 1057 (2017). The
State, however, relied heavily on Kirtdoll in its brief to this court. Johnson did not file a
reply brief. We consider Kirtdoll to have been properly put before us, and both sides have
had the opportunity to address its application.

The material factual and procedural circumstances of Kirtdoll are
indistinguishable from Johnson's posture here. The twin holdings of Kirtdoll address the
same legal arguments Johnson makes and unequivocally reject them.

We necessarily must follow the legal trail the court blazed in Kirtdoll. Not
surprisingly, then, we necessarily arrive at the same destination. That means the district
court came to the right conclusion in denying Johnson's 60-1507 motion.

Affirmed.