Understanding Consecutive Felony Sentences: The Floor, the Ceiling, and the Roof

Consecutive sentences can be madness. Today’s post will—I hope—give you a championship-caliber understanding of how they are administered. I’ve written about consecutive sentences before (here, mainly). I also made a video about them (here), under the Sentencing Whiteboard banner. Those prior posts attempted to explain how the Division of Adult Correction determines the ultimate release date for an inmate serving two or more consecutive sentences. The key to understanding how consecutive sentences are administered is G.S. 15A-1354(b), the so-called single sentence rule. That statute directs DAC to treat a defendant sentenced to consecutive sentences as though he had been committed for a single term of imprisonment. The minimum sentence of that single term—the floor, if you will—is simply the sum of all the individual minimum sentences. No matter how much earned time or meritorious time the inmate accrues for working and completing programs in prison, he cannot be released before the aggregate minimum. The maximum sentence is more complicated. Every felony sentence nowadays has a portion of imprisonment built into it for post-release supervision—9, 12, or 60 months depending on whether the crime is a Class F–I felony, B1–E felony, or B1–E sex crime, respectively. (The only other variety of post-release is for aggravated level one DWI, where the final four months are for PRS.) But the defendant will only serve a single term of PRS upon release. So, applying G.S. 15A-1354(b), DAC will strip the extra PRS time off all the maximum sentences and add them together to determine an [...]