More than 3,000 prisoners in Washington State over the past 13 years have received the best Christmas gift they could have hoped for: Early freedom. Inslee said he had ordered immediate steps to correct the long-standing problem.
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The issue stemmed from the state Supreme Court’s ruling in July 2002 that required the corrections department to apply “good time” credits earned in county jail to state prison sentences.
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The suspect then reportedly tried to grab the officer’s weapon, at which point he was shot, the unnamed source tells The News. Williams, who was also at the home, confirmed the name of the deceased, but blocked a reporter from approaching Johnson.
The ramifications of the undiscovered-then-delayed correction of the technological error reach beyond the inmates and victims involved.
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“Frankly, it is maddening”, Inslee said.
The department changed its sentence computation coding to comply with the ruling; however the programming fix contained an inaccurate sequencing that over-credited good time for those offenders with sentencing enhancements.
The state claims a computer glitch is to blame for 3,200 offenders serving shortened sentences between 2002 and 2015. In some cases, inmates were released just a few days early, but at least one person who is still incarcerated had a release date that was off by about 600 days.
Not all of those affected by the miscalculation will have to get back to prison, though.
A new chief information officer at the Department of Corrections learned recently of the severity of the problem, according to a state news release. The family did its own calculations and found he was being credited with too much time.
“For reasons we still don’t yet fully understand, that fix never happened”, Brown said.
In an interview on “Q13 Fox News This Morning”, DOC Secretary Dan Pacholke apologized for the error, and said those released early likely include violent criminals.
Due to the highly sensitive and complex legal matters that this software bug caused by being left unresolved, the IT manager alerted superiors, who in turn informed the Governer’s office, who had to go public with the news.
The DoC is now trying to track down released inmates to make some of them finish their prison terms. A broad fix to the software problem is expected to be in place by early January.
An independent investigation is already in process by former federal prosecutors Robert Westinghouse and Carl Blackstone, with Islee promising “the proper level of accountability depending on the results of [the] investigation”.
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“The agency should be held accountable for this breach”, he said. State officials are working to identify and locate the inmates prematurely released, returning five of seven identified so far into custody.
