Up to 20,000 Colorado Inmates May Be Behind Bars Past Their Release Dates

As many as 20,000 prisoners in Colorado may have
been kept in incarceration longer than they were supposed to
because of a foul up in the rewarding of time off for good
behavior.
According to the Denver blog Westword, a federal lawsuit filed
by four state prisoners alleges that:

the DOC [Department of Corrections] is misapplying
state law in the way it calculates the mandatory release date (MRD)
of its inmates. Under state statutes, inmates can get up to fifteen
days a month of “good time” by following the rules, cutting their
sentences in half. They can also shave a month off their time every
six months through completing training and counseling programs —
“earned time.” The DOC does award such sentence modifications, the
lawsuit states, but then fails to apply them when figuring out the
MRD. Since the actual release date influences a host of other
decisions, from what sort of programs inmates are offered to when
the prisoner actually gets a chance to meet with the parole board,
the failure to apply good time and earned time ends up keeping
inmates behind bars past what the prisoners contend is their
statutorily mandated release date.

The lawyers for the prisoners are looking to turn the suit into
a class action, because of how many inmates could have been
affected by the alleged error. One of the prisoners, Randal
Ankeney, already won his release in an appeals court. During that
case, the DOC insisted the awarding of time off was at their
discretion. The judge disagreed. The current federal lawsuit, filed
by Ankeney and three others, will test whether the appeals ruling
will apply to the estimated 20,000 inmates in Ankeney’s
position.

Ankeney, incidentally, was apparently
a rising star in the Colorado GOP before pleading guilty to
sexual assault in 2008.