Court Opinion

ID: 9428198
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:23:03.892031+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:12.154040
License: Public Domain

Justice Blackmun,
with whom The Chief Justice joins, concurring in the judgment.
Were the Court writing on a clean slate, I would vote to affirm the judgment of the Supreme Court of Florida. My *37thesis would be: (a) the 1978 Florida statute operates only prospectively and does not affect petitioner’s credits earned and accumulated prior to the effective date of the statute; (b) “good time” or “gain time” is something to be earned and is not part of, or inherent in, the sentence imposed; (c) all the new statute did was to remove some of petitioner’s hope and a portion of his opportunity; and (d) his sentence therefore was not enhanced by the statute. In addition, as the Court’s 18th footnote reveals, ante, at 34-35, the statutory change by no means was entirely restrictive; in certain respects it was more lenient, as the Court’s careful preservation for this prisoner of the new statute’s other provisions clearly implies. Ante, at 36 and this page, n. 22.
The Court’s precedents, however, particularly Lindsey v. Washington, 301 U. S. 397 (1937), and the summary disposition of Greenfield v. Scafati, 277 F. Supp. 644 (Mass. 1967), aff’d, 390 U. S. 713 (1968), although not warmly persuasive for me, look the other way, and I thus must accede to the judgment of the Court.