WAVERLY D. CRENSHAW, JR., Chief District Judge.
The pro se Petitioner is a state inmate in South Central Correctional Facility in Clifton, Tennessee, serving several terms of incarceration arising from his 2001 conviction for eight felonies ranging from aggravated robbery to reckless endangerment. He alleges that the Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC) has miscalculated his sentences and seeks a federal writ of habeas corpus pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2241. The Court will deny his petition for the reasons that follow.
On November 29, 2001, Petitioner was convicted in Davidson County of eight felony counts of a multiple-count indictment in case 2001-A-273 and was sentenced as follows:
(Doc. No. 22-2 at 7-14.) He was also convicted and sentenced for several misdemeanors as part of the same case.
Petitioner entered TDOC custody on December 6, 2001, and began serving his 6-year sentence for Count 2, along with all the shorter sentences ordered to run concurrently with it. (Doc. No. 22-2 at 2, 3.) He was released on parole on August 20, 2010, and returned to custody on July 31, 2012, for violating parole. (
The trial court had not awarded any pretrial jail credit toward Petitioner's sentence at the time it sentenced him in 2001, but on February 3, 2015, it retroactively awarded him pretrial jail credit for the period he spent in jail awaiting trial from November 17, 2000 to November 29, 2001. (Doc. No. 22-2 at 2, 16.) This change required the Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC) to recalculate Petitioner's felony sentences and the way the prisoner sentence credits he had been accumulating in prison had been applied to them.
Petitioner disagreed with the manner of that recalculation. After failed attempts to get relief from the TDOC, both informally and via petition for a declaratory order (see Doc. No. 2-1 at 2-21), Petitioner submitted a petition for declaratory judgment to the Davidson County Chancery Court. That court returned his petition unfiled on April 28, 2016, due to Petitioner's unpaid fees and court costs from previous litigation. (Doc. No. 2-1 at 22.)
Meanwhile, Petitioner was denied parole on February 23, 2016 (Doc. No. 2-2 at 8), and also administratively challenged that decision. The Tennessee Board of Parole rejected his appeal on July 11, 2016. (Doc. No. 2-2 at 2.) He filed the present action by delivering it to the prison mail room on August 3, 2016. (Doc. No. 2-3.)
Petitioner seeks relief pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2241, which provides in pertinent part that "The writ of habeas corpus shall not extend to a prisoner unless . . . He is in custody in violation of the Constitution or laws or treaties of the United States." § 2241(c)(3). The Sixth Circuit has held that "when a prisoner begins in the district court, [28 U.S.C.] § 2254 and all associated statutory requirements . . . apply no matter what statutory label the prisoner has given the case."
In this case, however, Petitioner's attempt to obtain state court review of his claims was rebuffed due to his inability to pay court fees, and Respondent has not asserted failure to exhaust as an issue. A de novo review of Petitioner's claims plainly establishes that this case fails on its merits regardless of whether the claims might be considered procedurally defaulted. It is thus unnecessary for the Court to analyze the legal effect of the state court's refusal to allow Petitioner to exhaust.
The TDOC Director of Sentence Management Services, Candace Whisman, has explained by affidavit that Prisoner Sentence Reduction Credits (PSRC) are awarded for good behavior and program participation in prison. (Doc. No. 22-2 at 1.) Tennessee law authorizes the award of up to 8 days each of behavior and program credits, for a total maximum of 16 PSRC per month served. Tenn. Code Ann. § 41-21-236(a)(2)(A). That credit "results in a reduction of the amount of time an inmate must serve on the original sentence or sentences." § 41-21-236(j). Consequently, when an inmate earns credits while serving his sentence, the combination of days served and credits earned will cause the sentence to expire or "flatten" at some point before the original expiration date of the sentence.
Ms. Whisman has explained that such "credit applies to the currently active
That roughly explains, albeit with hypothetical figures, how Petitioner's sentences were calculated up until the retroactive award of pretrial jail credit in February 2015. From the time he was incarcerated in December 2001 through December 2014, Petitioner earned a total of 1,153 PSRC. (Doc. No. 22-2 at 5-6.) During the years he was actively serving multiple concurrent sentences, his credits were applied to each of those sentences each month. For example, the 4 credits Petitioner earned in December 2001 (Doc. No. 22-2 at 5) were no doubt reflected on six separate Tennessee Offender Management Information System (TOMIS) calculation sheets for Counts 2, 3, 5, 7, 8 and 9, because he was serving all six sentences that month; but they were still only 4 credits, not 24 credits. In fact, an award of 24 credits in a month would violate Tennessee's statutory limit 16 PSRCs per month. Accordingly, Petitioner's claim goes awry when he begins his computation by adding up credits as applied to all six of those sentences. (See Doc. No. 2 at 5.) According to Petitioner's flawed calculation, he had more than 2,300 PSRC by January 2015, which is mathematically impossible in light of his 117 months of incarceration to that point (Doc. No. 22-2 at 5-6),
As of January 9, 2015, TOMIS calculations indicated that Petitioner had begun serving his 6-year sentence on Count 2 on the date it was imposed, November 29, 2001, and had earned 286 behavior credits and 197 program credits for a total of 483 PSRC toward that sentence, which had flattened that sentence long before the expiration of 6 years. (Doc. No. 201 at 3.) The TOMIS sheets do not reflect expiration dates on individual sentences, but according to Ms. Whisman's affidavit, Petitioner was originally deemed to have flattened his 6-year sentence on Count 2 and begun serving his 12-year sentence on Count 4 on August 3, 2006.
But before Petitioner reached that point, the trial court's retroactive award of pretrial jail credits changed the entire calculation. Suddenly, Petitioner was deemed to have started serving his 6-year sentence on Count 2 (as well as the shorter, concurrent sentences for Counts 3, 5, 7, 8 and 9) on November 17, 2000 — approximately a year before the start date used in the previous calculations. Factoring in 377 days of pretrial jail credit for those counts also resulted in the retroactive addition of 96 days of pretrial behavior credit (8 days per month of the pretrial jail time), pursuant to statute. See Tenn. Code Ann. § 41-21-236(e)(1) and (2); (Doc. No. 22-2 at 2). When TDOC recalculated Petitioner's sentences with all of that retroactive credit, it determined that Petitioner had flattened his 6-year sentence on Count 2 on July 29, 2005, approximately a year earlier than previously calculated. (Doc. No. 22-2 at 3.) Petitioner had then begun serving his 12-year sentence on Count 4, and the 103 PSRCs he earned over the next year (see Doc. No. 22-2 at 5 for credits awarded August 2005 through July 2006), which had previously been applied toward Count 2, were applied to Count 4 instead.
This simple reallocation of credits is apparent in comparing the January 2015 and April 2015 TOMIS calculations for Count 4. In January, only 670 PSRCs had been applied to Count 4. (Doc. No. 2-1 at 4.) By April, Petitioner had only earned 36 more PSRC. (Doc. No. 22-2 at 6.) But the total PSRCs applied to Count 4 as of the April TOMIS report had jumped to 809: 670 (PSRC earned as of January under old calculation) + 36 (new PSRC earned from January to April) + 103 (PSRC previously applied to Count 2 but now applied to Count 4) = 809. (Doc. No. 2-1 at 8.) Petitioner went on to earn 12 more PSRC in April, which flattened his 12-year sentence on Count 4 as of April 30, 2015. (Doc. No. 22-2 at 3, 6.) He began serving his 4-year sentence on Count 6 that day, and had earned 265 PSRCs toward that sentence through October 2016, when Ms. Whisman performed the calculations in her affidavit. (
The reallocation is also confirmed by comparing the combined PSRC totals for both Counts 2 and 4 between January and April 2015. The TOMIS calculations indicate that as of January 2015, Petitioner had earned a total of 1,153 PSRCs toward his sentences on Counts 2 and 4,
All of the determinative facts above can be summarized in this simple chart:
Between January and April, some of Petitioner's existing PSRC had been reallocated from Count 2 to Count 4, but it was all still accounted for, plus he had earned 36 more PSRC. By October 2016, he had earned 277 more credits (Doc. No. 22-2 at 6), almost the maximum that could have been awarded in that time period. In short, the PSRC that Petitioner believes was deleted from his Count 2 calculation was simply shifted to his Count 4 calculation, and any change in credits reflected on the calculations for Counts 3, 5, 7, 8 and 9 is inconsequential, because those credits are merely duplicative of the credits applied to Count 2. The end result of the recalculation is that between January 2015 and April 2015, Petitioner's projected total sentence expiration date for the convictions in question moved from October 2, 2020, to September 9, 2019.
The relevant records thus clearly disprove Petitioner's claim that any PSRC have been deleted from his sentence calculations. This claim has no merit.
Petitioner, who has been paroled twice and violated the conditions of his parole twice, complains that the Tennessee Board of Paroles committed a "flagrant abuse of [its] authority" when it denied him parole in February 2016. (Doc. No. 2 at 10.) But he is only entitled to federal habeas relief if he is imprisoned in violation of the federal Constitution or laws. 28 U.S.C. §§ 2241(c)(3), 2254(a). Prisoners do not have any due process liberty interest in early release on parole except where they have "a legitimate claim of entitlement to it," which does not exist in the Constitution and can only be found in state law.
Petitioner has also filed a motion to show cause (Doc. No. 26), in which he alleges for the first time that he is being imprisoned based upon judgments that are legally invalid because they do not reflect a "file-stamp." But he acknowledges that each judgment order is signed by the state court judge and bears a "Date of Entry of Judgment." (
Likewise, Petitioner's "petition for writ of mandamus" (Doc. No. 28) reasserts his previous arguments and requests the Court to "forthwith award writ to the Petitioner" or to order Respondent to show cause why the writ should not issue. (
The petition for the writ of habeas corpus will be denied, and this case will be dismissed, for the reasons set forth above.
An appropriate Order shall enter.