10th Circuit decides good-time case
8/31/06
In a blow to federal prisoners hoping that good-time litigation to reduce prison time by seven days for every year of the sentence would be successful, the 10th Circuit has affirmed a Colorado district court decision denying federal prisoner Glenn Wright’s habeas challenge to the Bureau of Prisons’ interpretation of the good-time statute. Wright v. Federal Bureau of Prisons, 451 F.3d 1231 (10th Cir. 2006).
Unfortunately, the 10th Circuit’s holding means that every circuit in the country considering these cases has by now made at least one ruling in favor of BOP’s reading of the statute. Most have found, like this court, that the statute is sufficiently ambiguous to justify the court’s deference. FAMM will continue to work for prisoners on this issue, supporting Wright’s petition to the U.S. Supreme Court and, if necessary, seeking legislative change.
Wright argued that “term of imprisonment” plainly refers to the imposed sentence, but if the term is ambiguous, the court would be compelled to reach the same interpretation by using the rule of lenity to construe the statute. Wright urged the court to agree that as a result of its misinterpretation of the law, the BOP under-calculated the amount of good-time credit he could earn. In contrast, the BOP interprets the statute to read that good time is based on time actually served, rather than sentence imposed . Thus the best-behaved prisoners serve more than 87 percent of their sentences because the BOP will only apply the 54 days of good time to the time served. As the credit is applied after each year, the sentence is diminished and thus the final credit is shortened as well.
The court found the words “term of imprisonment” to be sufficiently ambiguous to justify granting the BOP’s interpretation under Chevron, U.S.A., Inc. v. NRDC, Inc., 467 U.S. 837 (1984). “Term of imprisonment” shows up three times in the first sentence of section 3621(b); the sentence dealing with good time calculation. The first two instances unambiguously mean “sentence imposed” and common sense as well as rules of statutory construction would indicate that it means the same thing the third time it appears in the same sentence. It is only in § 3624 (d) that “term of imprisonment” appears to mean “time served.” In the court’s view, this was sufficient to render the third appearance of the phrase in (b)(1) “ambiguous” and therefore worthy of deference. the court specifically expressed concern that, under the alternate construction of the statute, “an inmate could receive credit for time when he was not in prison at all.”
Wright and FAMM (which filed an amicus brief in the case) argued that even if a phrase could have a different meaning the third time it is used in the same sentence, the “rule of lenity” should be used to interpret the statute’s meaning. This rule holds that a court should construe ambiguous criminal statutes in favor of the accused. The court rejected this argument on the grounds that the denial of good time (96 days in the case of petitioner Wright) was not related to criminal punishment. The court found a significant difference between “a substantive criminal statute” and this statute relating to the serving of a criminal sentence.