Two Recent Cases on Sentence Administration

Two recent cases—one from the North Carolina Court of Appeals and one from the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit—resolve questions of sentence administration that I’ve written about in the past. The first case is McDonald v. N.C. Department of Correction, __ N.C. App. __ (March 20, 2012), and it deals with the issue of how the prison system measures each month of an inmate’s sentence. I wrote about the issue in this prior post. To sum up, the Division of Adult Correction (DAC) treats individual months of a person’s sentence as 30 days for sentence administration purposes. For sentences of 12 months or more, however, DAC takes each 12-month grouping and converts it into a 365-day year, with any remainder months treated as 30 days. Through that approach, a 10-month sentence is converted to 300 days (10 x 30); a 13-month sentence is converted to 395 days (365 + 30); and a 26-month sentence is converted to 790 days (365 + 365 +60). A group of inmates challenged that methodology, contending that it was impermissible under G.S. 12-3(12). That law says that “the words ‘imprisonment for one month,’ wherever used in any of the statutes, shall be construed to mean ‘imprisonment for thirty days.’” The inmates argued that the statute applies to sentences under Structured Sentencing and requires DAC to treat every single month as 30 days, no matter how long the total sentence. If that were the case, every 12-month increment would be 360 days long [...]