Edwards

*186 Appellants Emmanuel Chioma and Antonio Edwards were each convicted on multiple counts arising from their joint sexual assault and robbery of Jane Doe and robbery of her male friend. With "one-strike" and other allegations against them, Chioma was sentenced to 129 years to life, and Edwards was sentenced to 95 years to life. Appellants were both 19 years old when they committed these offenses.

*45 Appellants challenge their respective prison sentences as cruel and unusual punishment, and they challenge on equal protection grounds their exclusion from the provisions of Penal Code section 3051 1 -which mandates youthful-offender parole hearings for most who receive de facto life sentences for crimes they commit at or before age 25. In the published portion of our opinion, we reject appellants' cruel and unusual punishment challenge but accept their equal protection arguments. In the unpublished portion we reject two further challenges-Chioma's to the sufficiency of the evidence of his involvement in the crimes and Edwards's to the admission into evidence of photographs recovered from Chioma's phone. We therefore affirm the judgments, except to the extent we remand to allow…