Opinion ID: 1811314
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: petitioner hall: offender group 2

Text: Petitioner Hall is serving a 40-year sentence for two sexual batteries, several burglaries, and a robbery with a firearm, all occurring in the period from March 14, 1986, to March 30, 1986. When Hall entered prison he was not awarded any kind of overcrowding credits prior to the United States Supreme Court's decision in Lynce and this Court's decision in Gomez. After Gomez was issued, however, the Department reexamined his case and awarded him 330 days of emergency gain time as a Group 2 Offender. [10] Hall argues that he should be entitled to many more days of credits. We disagree. Hall was eligible for emergency gain time credit when prison overcrowding exceeded 98% of lawful capacity with lawful capacity being defined as 133% of design capacity. As this Court explained in Gomez, the emergency gain time statute is different from the administrative gain time and provisional credits statutes because the number of emergency gain time awards is limited to a certain period of time. Hall was eligible for credits under the first version of the emergency gain time statute. That statute had two parts. The first part (phase I) provided for the award of credits across-the-board to all inmates, [11] and the second part (phase II) provided for the award of credits to a different group of inmates if the limited awards available to the first group did not work to sufficiently reduce the level of prison overcrowding. [12] Under the statute, the first group could only receive a certain number of credits per overcrowding occurrence (phase I). If the inmate did not qualify for credits under phase II, the inmate was limited to the phase I awards. The Department's prison population records show that inmates eligible for awards under only phase I were entitled to 30-day awards eleven times between 1987 and 1995. This totals 330 days. Based on the length of Hall's sentence, he did not qualify for phase II awards; thus, he can only receive the 330 credits due under phase I. Therefore, phase I members (like Hall) who are Group 2 Offenders are entitled to only up to 330 days of emergency gain time (depending upon their disciplinary records) and since Hall was awarded 330 days, he has received all he is entitled to. Hall also claims that he should be entitled to receive more than 330 days because the Department should not have been permitted to utilize later-enacted overcrowding statutes in order to let a different, less politically repugnant group of inmates out early. Essentially, he argues that the Legislature and the Department worked to keep sexual offenders, murderers, and other unpopular inmate groups from being released early by enacting and utilizing later-enacted statutes to release the less dangerous (less unpopular) inmates when prison overcrowding reached crisis proportions. By making this argument, Hall overlooks the fact that this Court said in Gomez that the Legislature could take action to prevent overcrowding from reaching such high levels that the offenders thought to be more dangerous would have to be released under the earlier statute. As explained in Gomez, the Legislature succeeded for a number of years in keeping the 98% of lawful capacity threshold from being exceeded by releasing the less dangerous inmates through new programs. It was not until the Legislature failed to keep the thresholds from being triggered and then ignored the fact of overcrowding that any ex post facto violation occurred. The emergency gain time statute did not provide that if anyone was ever to be released early it had to be Hall and all those eligible under the original, less restrictive statute. That was not the contingency. The award of credits was based on the contingency of prison overcrowding surpassing the 98% threshold. The Legislature kept that contingency from occurring for a good number of years and even when it failed, it kept it from occurring as often as it might have occurred. This Court said in Gomez that there was nothing wrong with that action and we reaffirm that statement here today. Accordingly, we deny Hall's petition in full.