“Using Up” Jail Credit

Suppose a person is held in jail for 20 days on two pending misdemeanor charges, Charge A and Charge B. For one reason or another, Charge A results in a conviction first and is sentenced to 100 days. Ten days later, the defendant is convicted of Charge B and also sentenced to 100 days on it. If the first judge applied 20 days of jail credit to Charge A, how much credit may be applied to Charge B? If Charge B is set to run consecutively to Charge A, the answer is easy: no pretrial jail credit should be applied to Charge B. That’s not because Charge A was sentenced earlier, but rather because of the general rule for applying shared jail credit to consecutive sentences. When a person is confined on multiple charges and eventually sentenced consecutively, the resultant sentences are considered as one sentence for the purpose of applying credit. G.S. 15-196.2. The shared credit time is not multiplied by the number of consecutive offenses for which the defendant is imprisoned, and so the 20 days applied to Charge A are not also applied to Charge B. There is no credit against Charge B for the 10 days after the sentencing of Charge A; once a person is serving one sentence, he or she does not accrue credit toward any still-pending charge. G.S. 15-196.1 ("[T]he credit available herein shall not include any time that is credited on the term of a previously imposed sentence to which a defendant is [...]