Case Title: Vasquez v. Dotson

Citation: 

Docket Number: 230514

State: virginia

Court: Virginia Supreme Court

Date: 2024-04-18T00:00:00Z

Document:
PRESENT:  All the Justices 
 
JOSE ISAIS GARCIA VASQUEZ 
 
 
 
OPINION BY 
v.  Record No. 230514 
JUSTICE D. ARTHUR KELSEY 
 
 
 
APRIL 18, 2024 
CHADWICK DOTSON, DIRECTOR OF 
THE VIRGINIA DEPARTMENT OF  
CORRECTIONS, ET AL. 
 
Upon Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus 
Jose Isais Garcia Vasquez seeks a writ of habeas corpus, asserting that he has a right 
under Code § 53.1-202.3 to an early release from prison.  One of his two convictions involved 
conspiracy to commit first-degree murder.  The Director of the Virginia Department of 
Corrections and the Warden of the Haynesville Correctional Center (collectively, the 
“Commonwealth”) contend that the General Assembly did not intend such a “serious and 
dangerous” offense to be eligible under the early-release statutes.  See Resp’t Mot. to Dismiss 
Pet. at 1 [hereinafter Mot. to Dismiss].  In response, Vasquez argues that the literal text of Code 
§ 53.1-202.3, when contextually construed using neutral principles of statutory interpretation, 
demonstrates that the early-release statute applies to his conspiracy conviction.  We agree and 
will issue the writ. 
I. 
 
Initially indicted by a grand jury for first-degree murder in violation of Code § 18.2-32, 
Vasquez pleaded guilty in 2019 to an amended charge of conspiracy to commit a felony in 
violation of Code § 18.2-22 — with the predicate felony being first-degree murder.  Vasquez 
also pleaded guilty to violating Code § 18.2-46.2(A), a statute prohibiting a member or active 
participant in a “criminal street gang” from committing a “criminal act . . . for the benefit of, at 
the direction of, or in association with any criminal street gang.” 
2 
 
The trial court sentenced Vasquez on each conviction to 10 years imprisonment with 5 
years suspended for a total of 10 years of active incarceration.  Vasquez entered the penitentiary 
in July 2020.  At that time, he was eligible under then-existing Code §§ 53.1-202.2 and 53.1-
202.3 to receive earned-sentence credits at a maximum rate of 4.5 days of credit for every 30 
days served.  Under the then-existing statutory framework, all convicted felons would serve at 
least 85% of their sentences.  See Comm’n on Sent’g & Parole Reform, Sentencing and Parole 
Reform, House Doc. No. 18, at 19 (1995); Va. State Crime Comm’n, 2020 Annual Report, at 16, 
21 (June 30, 2021). 
 
In 2020, the General Assembly amended the earned-sentence credit program with an 
effective date of July 1, 2022.  See Prease v. Clarke, 302 Va. 376, 379-80 (2023).  Under the 
new early-release program, prisoners with qualifying convictions are eligible to receive credits at 
a higher rate of up to 15 days of credit for every 30 days served.  See Code § 53.1-202.3(B).  
According to the Virginia Criminal Sentencing Commission, the new crediting system could 
potentially lower the actual incarceration of some but not all convicted felons to 67% of the 
court-ordered sentences.  See Va. Crim. Sent’g Comm’n, Re-analysis of Virginia’s Sentencing 
Guidelines and Midpoint Enhancements for Violent Offenders (Chapter 783, 2022), House Doc. 
No. 13, at 1 n.3, 5, 49 n.22 (2022). 
Subsection A of the amended statute enumerates various disqualifying convictions that 
do not receive the new, more favorable, sentencing credits.  One of them is “any violation of 
§ 18.2-32.”  See Code § 53.1-202.3(A)(2).  Code § 18.2-32 distinguishes between first- and 
second-degree murder, deeming first-degree murder a Class 2 felony for sentencing purposes and 
fixing punishment for second-degree murder at 5 to 40 years in the penitentiary.  Subsection A of 
amended Code § 53.1-202.3, however, does not include a violation of Code § 18.2-22 as a 
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disqualifying conviction.  In relevant part, Code § 18.2-22(a) applies to those who “shall 
conspire, confederate or combine with another . . . to commit a felony.” 
Because he was not convicted of either first- or second-degree murder, Vasquez argues 
that he did not violate Code § 18.2-32 and thus was not disqualified from early release under the 
enhanced earned-sentence credit statute.  While acknowledging that conspiracy to commit a 
felony in violation of Code § 18.2-22 is not literally “enumerated in subsection A,” see Code 
§ 53.1-202.3(B), the Commonwealth argues that conspiracy to commit a murder is subsumed 
within the phrase “any violation of § 18.2-32,” see Code § 53.1-202.3(A)(2), and thus is a 
disqualifying conviction.  See generally 2022 Op. Atty. Gen. 22-008, 2022 Va. AG LEXIS 11 
(April 13, 2022).  The dispute is not merely academic in this case.  If Vasquez is correct, he is 
entitled to immediate release.1  If the Commonwealth is correct, Vasquez’s earliest release date 
would be in February 2025. 
II. 
 
Under Virginia law, “[c]riminal punishment serves a number of purposes, including 
incapacitation, deterrence, and retribution.”  Walker v. Commonwealth, 302 Va. 304, 324 (2023); 
see also Woodard v. Commonwealth, 287 Va. 276, 281 (2014); Wilborn v. Saunders, 170 Va. 
153, 160 (1938).  With these purposes in mind, Virginia’s sentencing guidelines seek “to ensure 
the imposition of appropriate and just criminal penalties . . . especially for the effective 
incapacitation of violent criminal offenders.”  Code § 17.1-801.2  In support of these goals, the 
 
1 Vasquez has remained classified at Level 1 at all times during his incarceration, which 
would earn him the maximum of 15 credits for every 30 days served under Code § 53.1-202.3 
(B)(1).  The Commonwealth does not dispute that if Vasquez’s earned-sentence credits were 
calculated under his interpretation of Code § 53.1-202.3, he would be eligible for immediate 
release.  Mot. to Dismiss at 8 n.1. 
2 “An important function of the corrections system,” the United States Supreme Court has 
observed, “is the deterrence of crime.”  Pell v. Procunier, 417 U.S. 817, 822 (1974). 
4 
 
General Assembly has provided various “tools for rehabilitation of criminals,” Peyton v. 
Commonwealth, 268 Va. 503, 508 (2004), premised on the belief that rehabilitation that is truly 
effective reduces recidivism. 
Legislating within this penological context, the General Assembly in 2020 increased the 
availability of earned-sentence credits “as an incentive for good behavior and rehabilitative 
activity while incarcerated.”  Prease, 302 Va. at 379.  Accepting this as the declared purpose of 
the legislation, the parties ask us to choose between their disparate views on whether the 
legislature intended enhanced credits to apply to criminals convicted of conspiring to commit 
murder.  In addressing this question, however, we ask “not what the legislature intended to enact, 
but what is the meaning of that which it did enact.  We must determine the legislative intent by 
what the statute says and not by what we think it should have said.”  Carter v. Nelms, 204 Va. 
338, 346 (1963).  We thus do not inquire as to “what the legislature meant; we ask only what the 
statute means.”  Tvardek v. Powhatan Vill. Homeowners Ass’n, 291 Va. 269, 277 n.7 (2016) 
(quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Theory of Legal Interpretation, 12 Harv. L. Rev. 417, 419 
(1899)). 
As we said nearly a century ago, “[i]t is our duty to interpret the statute as written and 
when this is done our responsibility ceases.”  City of Lynchburg v. Suttenfield, 177 Va. 212, 221 
(1941).  We see things no differently today.  “[T]he interpretative principle that precedes all 
 
The premise is that by confining criminal offenders in a facility 
where they are isolated from the rest of society, a condition that 
most people presumably find undesirable, they and others will be 
deterred from committing additional criminal offenses.  This 
isolation, of course, also serves a protective function by 
quarantining criminal offenders for a given period of time while, it 
is hoped, the rehabilitative processes of the corrections system 
work to correct the offender’s demonstrated criminal proclivity. 
Id. at 822-23. 
5 
 
others is that ‘courts must presume that a legislature says in a statute what it means and means in 
a statute what it says there.’”  Appalachian Power Co. v. State Corp. Comm’n, 301 Va. 257, 279 
(2022) (citation omitted).  Given our commitment to “neutral principles of interpretation,” we are 
not “free to pave over bumpy statutory texts in the name of more expeditiously advancing a 
policy goal.”  Id. (citation omitted). 
This perspective leads us to a simple exposition of the disputed text in Code § 53.1-
202.3(A)(2) — “any violation of § 18.2-32” — as a conviction disqualified from receiving the 
enhanced sentencing credits.  “Any” is an adjective modifying “violation,” which is further 
modified by the prepositional phrase “of § 18.2-32.”  The question is whether “any violation of 
§ 18.2-32” includes the inchoate offense of conspiracy to commit murder.  The answer must be 
no.  An accused criminal indicted for murder under Code § 18.2-32 cannot be convicted on that 
indictment for conspiracy to commit murder under Code § 18.2-22.  Nor can an accused criminal 
indicted for conspiracy be convicted of murder.  They are separate crimes with separate 
elements.  Neither is a lesser-included offense of the other.  The jury instructions are different, 
the trial court’s review of the sufficiency of the evidence is different, and the statutory 
punishments are different. 
Challenging this interpretation as literalistic, the Commonwealth relies on the maxim that 
“a statute should never be construed in a way that leads to absurd results.”  Mot. to Dismiss at 10 
(quoting Ricks v. Commonwealth, 290 Va. 470, 477 (2015)).  The alleged absurdity appears to be 
twofold:  (i) the anomaly of denying early release to those that solicit others to commit murder (a 
crime expressly deemed disqualifying by Code § 53.1-202.3(A)(2)) but granting it to those who 
conspire with others to commit murder3 and (ii) the related oddity of granting early release to 
 
3 “To read the term ‘any violation of’ in this subdivision as referring to only the 
completed crime,” the Attorney General has opined, “would lead to the irrational conclusion that 
6 
 
conspirators who agree to commit a premeditated murder and yet denying it to murderers that act 
with malicious, but not premeditated, intent.  The “any violation” language remedies these 
aberrations, the Commonwealth argues, by treating conspiracy to commit murder as a “type” of 
murder prohibited by Code § 18.2-32.  Mot. to Dismiss at 11, 16. 
This argument asks too much of Code § 18.2-32.  Neither this statute, nor any other, 
defines murder or lays out the essential elements of the crime.  See generally Wooden v. 
Commonwealth, 222 Va. 758, 761 (1981) (observing that “murder is not elsewhere defined in the 
Code”).  Murder is a term of art with an “ancient common law” definition.  Heacock v. 
Commonwealth, 228 Va. 397, 403 (1984).4  Professor Costello concisely summarized it as “the 
unlawful killing of one human being by another with malice aforethought.”  John L. Costello, 
Virginia Criminal Law and Procedure § 3.2[1], at 41 (4th ed. 2008). 
The term “murder” has been incorporated into scores of Virginia statutes.  Code § 18.2-
32 is one of them.  It first mentions, but then excludes from its reach, “aggravated murder” that is 
governed by Code § 18.2-31.  Code § 18.2-32 thereafter categorizes three types of first-degree 
murder based upon the circumstances of the killing.  These include murders (i) “by poison, lying 
in wait, imprisonment, [or] starving”; (ii) “by any willful, deliberate, and premeditated killing”; 
or (iii) “in the commission of, or attempt to commit, arson, rape, forcible sodomy, inanimate or 
animate object sexual penetration, robbery, burglary or abduction, except as provided in § 18.2-
 
the General Assembly intended to make solicitation to commit murder ineligible for enhanced 
sentence credits — yet leave convictions for conspiracies or actual attempts to commit murder 
eligible for enhanced sentence credits.”  2022 Op. Atty. Gen. 22-008, 2022 Va. AG LEXIS 11, at 
*4-5 (emphasis omitted). 
4 See generally M’Whirt’s Case, 44 Va. (3 Gratt.) 594, 604 (1846); Whiteford v. 
Commonwealth, 27 Va. (6 Rand.) 721, 723 (1828); 4 William Blackstone, Commentaries *195; 2 
Edward Coke, The First Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England: or, a Commentary upon 
Littleton § 500, at 287b (1st Am. ed. 1853); James M. Matthews, Digest of the Laws of Virginia 
of a Criminal Nature 154-55 n.1 (2d ed. 1878); George Webb, The Office and Authority of a 
Justice of the Peace 231 (1736). 
7 
 
31.”  Code § 18.2-32.  All types of murder other than those described in Code §§ 18.2-31 and 
18.2-32 are deemed “murder of the second degree.”  Code § 18.2-32.  Though they are fairly 
described as discrete types of murder, that does not change the settled view that these “statutory 
gradations” did not create “new offenses.”  Flanders v. Commonwealth, 298 Va. 345, 354 
(2020).  “Instead, they established punishments for the common law crime of murder that 
correspond to the degree of culpability with which it is committed.”  Id.; see also Wicks v. 
Commonwealth, 4 Va. (2 Va. Cas.) 387, 392 (1824). 
No statute treats conspiracy to commit murder as a type of murder.  Nor is there any 
common-law tradition of doing so.  It would be difficult, to be sure, to conceive how it could be.  
The definition of murder (and, it follows, all types of murder) requires the “fact of a death.”  
Costello, supra, § 3.2[3], at 42.  That fact “may be established directly or circumstantially, but it 
must be established.”  Id.  One cannot murder a victim by merely thinking about murdering him, 
plotting to murder him, or entering into a conspiratorial agreement with others to murder him.  A 
conspiracy to commit a murder requires only an agreement to commit a future murder that may 
or may not ever occur.  But if a conspirator later follows through on the agreement and 
maliciously kills the targeted victim, the conspirator has committed two crimes:  murder and 
conspiracy to commit murder.  See id. § 17.4, at 272-73.  He can be indicted for and convicted of 
both crimes.  See Boyd v. Commonwealth, 236 Va. 346, 351 (1988) (distinguishing simultaneous 
charges from subsequent charges barred by Code § 18.2-23.1). 
This reasoning syncs well with the traditional view that the “distinctiveness between a 
substantive offense and a conspiracy to commit is a postulate of our law.”  Callanan v. United 
States, 364 U.S. 587, 593 (1961).  In many contexts and over many years, courts have recognized 
that “the commission of the substantive offense and a conspiracy to commit it are separate and 
8 
 
distinct offenses.”  Id. (quoting Pinkerton v. United States, 328 U.S. 640, 643 (1956)).  We see 
no reason in this case to blur this distinction by judicially defining the separate and distinct 
offense of conspiracy to commit murder as a type of the substantive offense of murder. 
In this case, the grand jury indicted Vasquez for murder in violation of Code § 18.2-32.  
The trial court, however, accepted a motion to amend the indictment to allege only conspiracy to 
commit murder in violation of Code § 18.2-22.  Vasquez pleaded guilty to the amended-
conspiracy indictment and was never convicted of murder in violation of Code § 18.2-32.  
Because the General Assembly chose not to disqualify conspiracy to commit murder from Code 
§ 53.1-202.3’s calculation of enhanced earned-sentence credits, Vasquez is entitled to these 
credits and thus to early release from prison. 
As in Prease, we offer no commentary on the policy judgments baked into this statute as 
a whole or the disputed provision in particular.  It is not our place to do so.  We unanimously 
held in Prease that the statutory text provided enhanced earned-sentence credits to criminals 
convicted of attempted aggravated murder yet denied such credits to criminals found guilty of 
solicitation of murder.  Because our textual and contextual analysis required that result, we said 
that competing “policy implications . . . do not factor into our interpretation” of the statute.  
Prease, 302 Va. at 385.  We explained in Prease the importance of this jurisprudential limitation.  
It bears repeating here: 
The legislature is “the author of public policy.”  For us, then, “the 
‘best indications of public policy are to be found in the enactments 
of the Legislature.’”  “We can only administer the law as it is 
written.”  We may not extend the meaning of a statute “simply 
because it may seem to us that a similar policy applies, or upon the 
speculation that if the legislature had thought of it, very likely 
broader words would have been used.” 
 
Id. at 385-86 (citations omitted) (quoting In re: Woodley, 290 Va. 482, 490 (2015)). 
9 
 
III. 
In sum, we grant Vasquez’s petition and issue a writ of habeas corpus directed to the 
Director of the Virginia Department of Corrections and to the Warden of the Haynesville 
Correctional Center ordering that Vasquez be released from custody. 
Writ Awarded.