Share
RALEIGH When he was running for his first of four terms as governor, Jim Hunt told voters he'd crack down on criminals by bringing them to trial faster and putting them away in prison for a fixed term. His ads showed a cell door clanging shut, and the message was vivid: criminals would go to prison and stay there.
Hunt's goal was good: Prisoners who commit similar crimes should serve similar sentences to bring more fairness and certainty to the system. It sounded right.
But decisions made more than 25 years ago have presented Gov. Bev Perdue with a crisis - and an opportunity to shore up her sagging popularity numbers and show determined leadership. She has jumped on it, dramatically vowing to go to jail if necessary (it won't be) to keep criminals on the verge of release behind bars. It may help her popularity, and never mind that we've been releasing life-sentence inmates for years, including several murderers who won release from the parole commission.
Law cut sentences in half
Some background on how this came about: In order to avoid a costly prison-building campaign back in the 1980s, the Fair Sentencing Act in effect cut sentences in half - including retroactively. And if inmates were on good behavior, worked well at prison jobs and took advantage of other incentives to be model prisoners, many could get more time chopped off their sentences. This system of half-sentences and a combination of good time, gain time and meritorious time let some prisoners get out relatively quickly.
In 1983, prison officials made a fateful decision. They extended time-off incentives to all inmates, meaning those serving life-in-prison sentences. That may be at the heart of a new round of litigation. Did bureaucrats have authority to cut life sentences this way?
Keep in mind that a 1974 law, adopted back in a day when rehabilitation was still in vogue, had defined a life sentence as 80 years for purposes of determining when a prisoner would be eligible for parole consideration. Otherwise a life sentence meant life in prison. Many state officials believed the time-off provisions were meant only to calculate when an inmate could go before the parole board seeking release. No one talked about what one day would happen when old lifers got enough credit to get out.
By the late 1980s, prisons were filling up with drug offenders and officials were letting inmates out after serving a small fraction of sentences. This generated support for a truth-in-sentencing law that required inmates to serve virtually all of their sentences. Instead of a 10-year sentence in which an inmate was getting out after 20 months, an inmate convicted under the new law might get a four-year sentence and have to serve every day of it, for example.
A lifer wants out
In 1975, Bobby Bowden was convicted under the old Fair Sentencing Act of killing two people in a convenience story robbery. Thirty years later, he filed a petition arguing that his 80-year life sentence, originally cut to 40 years by the Fair Sentencing Act's retroactive provisions in 1981, was at an end because of all the good time, gain time and meritorious time he had accumulated.
A trial judge rejected his argument, but when it went before three of the state's most conservative judges (Doug McCullough, John Tyson and Ann Marie Calabria) on the N.C. Court of Appeals, they concluded in 2008 that Bowden was right and ordered a lower court to compute his credits and how they should apply.
The state attorney general's office appealed to the N.C. Supreme Court, and was optimistic about reversing the lower court when the Supremes agreed to review the case. The state argued that the time-off credits should apply only to determine a parole eligibility date for a life sentence, not for actual release. Bowden evidently was the first to make this argument, and if he won, the state said, there might be as many as 120 more lifers applying for release and potentially threatening public safety.
Then the Supreme Court did a strange thing: It punted. After hearing the state's arguments, it said in a one-page filing that its earlier decision to review the case was "improvidently allowed." That's legalese for "Oh, s--t." It left Perdue's administration scrambling to respond.
Here's the truly goofy part: The governor's office did not know in advance this might happen. It came as a surprise. With a number of other lifers also on the verge of release, according to the Department of Correction, Perdue spoke out, saying she was "appalled that the state of North Carolina is being forced to release prisoners who have committed the most heinous crimes, without any review of their cases."
That was a reach. The appeals court had ordered a lower court to review how many credits Bowden, and no one else, was entitled to. No one was "forced" to release others. Not yet, anyway.
Standing in the jailhouse door
Since then both Republicans and Democrats have called for a review of the way all time-off incentives are computed, and Perdue ordered that none of the inmates be released right away. If necessary, she implied in a telephone news conference from China, where she was on an economic development trip, she would go to jail to halt the release. That's the kind of hyperbole the news media eat up. Never mind that it will never happen.
Politicians in political trouble rarely pay a price for demagoguery on a controversial issue, and the governor is a savvy politician. And she and her staff have a good point about how time-off credits were applied back in 1983. That must be resolved first. But it is also clear that state courts - and judges from both political parties - are wary of making any decision that would retroactively increase the length of any inmate's sentence and raise a constitutional issue.
One thing's for sure: there will be no need for a gubernatorial suite at Raleigh's Central Prison - not for Gov. Bev Perdue, anyway.
