For this, the judge sentenced him to 20 years, and rightfully so. However, the problem was that the particular crime of arson to which he pleaded guilty carried a maximum penalty of 10 years. By the time I met him, he had already completed the ten years. After I discovered this in the prison law library, the problem was how to get him out. This is not a simple or a trivial problem in Virginia.
Nobody ever gets out in Virginia, except on parole or when the term is completed.
New trials are never granted. Also, because of the serious nature of Kevin's offense, were there a new trial, they could without difficulty reformulate the charges to give him far more than the 20 years he got. One of our fellow prisoners, Richard Shanklin, a commercial airline pilot who had once stolen a DC-10 jumbo jet airplane as a protest to being laid off as a United Airlines pilot because he was too short, found a good lawyer for Kevin. The lawyer quietly approached the judge with this problem. They made a deal to quietly reduce Kevin's sentence to ten years without telling anybody about it, realizing that the 21-day rule and the bar against habeas corpus would keep Kevin locked up if this were known.