Jones v. Keller

Last Friday, after years of litigation and months of deliberation, the Supreme Court of North Carolina issued its decision in Jones v. Keller. The case resolves the question of what sentence reduction credits, if any, apply to a group of life-sentenced inmates who were sentenced 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 court concluded that no credits should apply toward the inmates’ outright release date, and that their continued incarceration is thus lawful. (The court also decided a companion case, Brown v. North Carolina Department of Correction, in which it reached the same conclusion for the same reasons.) I’ll say up front what the dissenting opinion in Jones says on the next-to-last page of a 37-page decision: “This is a hard case.” You may recall that in State v. Bowden, 193 N.C. App. 597 (2008), discussed here, the court of appeals held that the plain language of G.S. 14-2, as it existed between April 8, 1974 and June 30, 1978, meant that a life sentence must be considered an 80-year sentence for all purposes, including calculation of the inmate’s outright release date. In light of that ruling, Alford Jones—convicted and sentenced to life in prison for a 1975 murder—petitioned in November 2009 for a writ of habeas corpus. His argument: if, under Bowden, his life sentence was actually a determinate 80-year sentence, when you take into [...]