Court Opinion

ID: 9884371
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-10-06 02:54:07.908063+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:48:37.991135
License: Public Domain

BARNES, Judge.
I respectfully dissent. The reasoning articulated by Judge Mathias in Robinson, and repeated in his dissent in Crow, persuades me that either the DOC or local sheriff of the facility where an inmate is detained, and not the trial court, ought to be the governmental entity that should control the calculation of earned credit time as is contemplated by Indiana Code Section 35-50-64. Our supreme court, as the majority acknowledges, will soon decide this question. I look forward to their definitive statement. In the meantime, we are faced with an increasing number of cases that pose the question Jackson asks here, and it is our responsibility to answer this query as best we can.
I acknowledge that the abstract of judgment that trial court judges are asked to fill in and complete contains a box that asks them to supply the DOC with the number of days that the defendant "was confined prior to sentencing." In the usual course of business, trial courts have made that mathematical calculation and, in the event there was no contrary evidence or information concerning a specific defendant's "bad behavior" pre-sentencing, the DOC routinely doubled these days as "good time" credit days earned.
*555It is my understanding that what has occurred recently is that in some limited instances, trial courts have calculated the days incarcerated, then doubled them for "good time" credit, before entering the days "confined prior to sentencing" on the abstract of judgment. The DOC has then doubled these days, resulting in quadruple "good time" pre-sentencing credit, presumably not a result contemplated by the legislature, trial courts, or any entity in the eriminal justice system.
As Judge Mathias observed in his dissent in Crow, local sheriffs already have the statutory and administrative rule authority to deprive inmates housed in their jails of "good time" credit for violating rules of which the inmates have been given prior written notice, but only after a hearing for which due process is given, and inmates may appeal such caleulations to the sheriff. These provisions parallel the DOC's authority to make "good time" credit calculations for its prisoners. Compare Ind. Admin. Code tit. 210, r. 3-1-17 with Ind.Code §§ 35-50-6-4, 35-50-6-5, and 35-50-6-5.5.
There are no similar provisions governing and cireumsecribing a trial court's decision to award or deny pre-sentencing "good time" credit; therefore, I agree with Judge Mathias that such determinations should be left "exclusively to the penal authority in charge of the defendant at the time in question, whether the sheriff or DOC." Crow, 797 N.E.2d at 325 (Mathias, J., dissenting). Despite possible occasional deficiencies in how the DOC or a local sheriff may calculate "good time" credit, uniformity, due process, and an apparatus in place to address these issues all favor such determinations being made by the DOC or local sheriff, not the trial court. Thus, it follows, as was held in Hatchett v. State, 794 N.E.2d 544, 546-47 (Ind.Ct.App.2003), that a trial court's failure to include "good time" credit in an abstract of judgment does not render a sentence facially erroneous.
There are other obvious questions that need to be answered in this arena. Should the Post-Conviction Rules be modified to address what is an "erroneous sentence"? What recourse, if any, does an inmate have when he or she believes the DOC or local sheriff has illegally or improperly taken away "good time" credit and he or she has exhausted the administrative remedies for challenging such a decision? However, these are corollary issues that beg the immediate question. I am persuaded by Hatchett, Robinson, and the dissent in Crow that the sentence in this case was not facially erroneous. I would affirm the trial court's denial of the motion to correct erroneous sentence.