Cooke v. State

Summary

The Court affirmed Cooke’s resentencing to life imprisonment without parole or reduction after his death sentence was vacated. It held that the Superior Court was not required to sentence him under the term-of-years provision and that mandatory life without parole for first-degree murder did not violate the Eighth or Fourteenth Amendments. The Court also rejected Cooke’s unsupported claim that he would have adopted a different trial strategy if he had known the mandatory sentence applied.