Background
On September 11, 2007, sixteen-year-old Samuel Salas, a member of the Two-Six street gang, was charged with the first-degree murder of Sergio Ojeda in Chicago. Multiple eyewitnesses — including a neighbor who identified Salas in a photo array and lineup, and several bystanders — testified that Salas chased Ojeda through an alley, shot him in the back of the head, and then attempted to fire at others before fleeing. Salas testified that a rival gang member pulled a gun on him first, that they struggled, and that he never fired the weapon. A detective rebutted that account with Salas’s own statement admitting he pulled the trigger three times during the struggle.
At trial, the court gave the jury a self-defense instruction but denied Salas’s tendered instruction on second-degree murder based on an unreasonable belief in self-defense. The jury convicted Salas of first-degree murder and he was sentenced to 50 years in prison. On direct appeal in 2011, the appellate court affirmed, holding that because Salas never admitted to shooting Ojeda, the evidence did not support giving a self-defense instruction in the first place — and under People v. Lockett, 82 Ill. 2d 546 (1980), only where evidence supports a self-defense instruction is a second-degree murder instruction also required.
Salas subsequently filed an initial postconviction petition in 2013 (dismissed as frivolous) and then a successive petition in 2017, arguing both that his sentence was unconstitutional under Miller v. Alabama and that the trial court erred by withholding the second-degree murder instruction. The circuit court denied leave to file. While the appeal was stayed, the circuit court resentenced Salas to 30 years in April 2025, resolving the sentencing issue. The sole remaining question before the appellate court was whether Salas should have been granted leave to file the successive petition on the instructional error claim.
The Court’s Holding
The appellate court affirmed the circuit court’s denial of leave to file the successive postconviction petition. To overcome the procedural bar of res judicata on a successive petition, a defendant must satisfy a two-part cause-and-prejudice test. The court found Salas could not establish “cause” for two independent reasons. First, the Illinois Supreme Court’s decision in People v. Washington, 2012 IL 110283 — which Salas argued provided the legal basis for his successive claim — was issued in January 2012, more than a year before he filed his initial postconviction petition in April 2013. Because Washington predated the initial petition, nothing prevented Salas from raising it then. His affidavit attributing the omission to prison lockdowns and limited law-library access was insufficient because he never attested to specifically requesting Washington or being blocked from obtaining that particular case.
Second, and independently, neither Washington nor People v. McDonald, 2016 IL 118882 — the two cases Salas cited as a “new framework” — represented a significant change in the law that could supply cause to relax res judicata. Both decisions merely reaffirmed Lockett‘s decades-old holding that when evidence supports a self-defense instruction, a second-degree murder instruction must also be given. Because the court’s 2011 direct-appeal opinion already applied Lockett extensively and reached a conclusion that Washington and McDonald left undisturbed, there was no intervening legal development that could justify reconsidering the issue in a successive petition.
Key Takeaways
- To establish “cause” for a successive postconviction petition based on a change in case law, the change must have occurred after the initial postconviction proceedings — not merely after direct appeal; a defendant who could have cited new authority in the first petition has no cause to raise it later.
- A supreme court decision that reaffirms existing precedent without modifying its analysis does not constitute the kind of significant legal development that relaxes the res judicata bar on successive petitions.
- A self-defense jury instruction presupposes that the defendant actually used deadly force; where a defendant denies firing the weapon, neither a self-defense instruction nor a companion second-degree murder instruction is warranted under Illinois law.
- This order was filed under Illinois Supreme Court Rule 23 and is non-precedential except in the limited circumstances allowed under Rule 23(e)(1).
Why It Matters
The decision reinforces the strict gatekeeping function that the cause-and-prejudice test plays in Illinois postconviction practice. Defense attorneys must vigilantly monitor new supreme court authority and raise it in an initial petition whenever it is available — even if it post-dates the direct appeal — or risk permanent preclusion from relying on it in subsequent proceedings. The ruling also signals that courts will scrutinize whether cited authority actually breaks new legal ground or merely restates existing doctrine, and will deny successive petitions where the “change” is more cosmetic than substantive.
For practitioners handling juvenile or young-offender cases, the decision is also a reminder that resentencing relief on Eighth Amendment grounds (here obtained in 2025 after People v. Buffer confirmed a 50-year term was a de facto life sentence) does not automatically reopen other trial-error claims. Sentencing and instructional error issues travel on separate tracks through postconviction proceedings, and a victory on one does not revive the other if it is otherwise barred.