Diehl v. Weiser

Petitioner-Appellee Scott Diehl pleaded guilty to three drug offenses in 2005. For each offense, he received a sentence that required him to serve a designated number of years in prison as well as a period of mandatory parole. He began serving his term of imprisonment for those sentences, which ran concurrently, on September 6, 2005. Diehl was released from prison at the discretion of the state board of parole in 2011, and he immediately began serving a five-year period of mandatory parole. Diehl absconded from parole from February 14 to March 28, 2013. He was arrested and returned to prison to serve the remainder of his mandatory parole term incarcerated. During this period of reincarceration, Diehl pleaded guilty in three additional cases arising from the time when he was on parole. He received new sentences that were to run concurrently with his outstanding sentences. In 2016, Diehl filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus with the district court arguing the DOC erred in using August 6, 2011, the date on which he was first released to mandatory parole, rather than September 6, 2005, the date on which he was first sentenced to prison, to calculate his parole eligibility date. The district court agreed with Diehl, rejecting the DOC’s argument that Diehl’s “sentence to imprisonment” on his original convictions had been discharged when he began serving his mandatory period of parole and was thus no longer relevant to his new parole eligibility date. The district court concluded that a sentence, for purposes of Colorado’s “one-continuous-sentence” rule, was comprised of two components: (1) a period of incarceration and (2) a period of mandatory parole. Although the imprisonment component of the sentence was statutorily discharged when Diehl began serving his period of mandatory parole, the district court noted that the statutory scheme provided Diehl’s overall sentence was not “deemed to have [been] fully discharged” until Diehl “either completed or [had] been discharged by the state board of parole from the mandatory period of parole imposed pursuant to” C.R.S. 18-1.3-401(1)(a)(V). Therefore, the district court concluded the DOC was required to calculate Diehl’s parole eligibility date using his first date of incarceration, September 6, 2005. The issue this case presented for the Colorado Supreme Court was whether the offender’s original prison sentences should have been included in the newly calculated continuous sentence for purposes of determining a new parole eligibility date. The Court responded in the negative. View "Diehl v. Weiser" on Justia Law