How Do You Measure a Month?

In State v. Bowden, 193 N.C. App. 597 (2008), disc. rev. improvidently allowed, 363 N.C. 621 (2009), and Jones v. Keller, 364 N.C. 249 (2010), our appellate courts considered the sentence length and sentence credits applicable to a group of inmates with offense dates from the 1970s. They committed their crimes at a time when G.S. 14-2 read that a “sentence of life imprisonment shall be considered as a sentence of imprisonment for a term of 80 years in the State’s prison.” The inmates successfully argued in Bowden that, under the plain language of that statute, their “life” sentences should be considered 80-year sentences for all purposes—not just for things like determining parole eligibility. In Jones, however, a subset of the inmates (those convicted of first-degree murder) were unable to convince the supreme court that they were entitled to be released now based on their accumulated sentence reduction credits. Cases involving other inmates from the Bowden cohort (those sentenced to life for crimes other than first-degree murder) are still working their way through the system. Bowden and Jones were big cases ( I wrote about them here and here, respectively). They involved important questions about when “life” means life and how the Department of Correction administers sentences. At the end of the day, though, the cases affected a relatively small number of inmates sentenced under a law that was only on the books from April 8, 1974, to June 30, 1978. A separate sentence-length matter that affects many more inmates may [...]