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Appeal
from the District Court, Chaffee County District Court Case
No. 16CV30043, Honorable Patrick W. Murphy, Judge
Attorneys
for Petitioner-Appellee: The Law Office of April M. Elliott,
P.C., April M. Elliott, Denver, Colorado, Reppucci Law Firm,
P.C., Jonathan D. Reppucci, Denver, Colorado
Attorneys
for Respondents-Appellants: Philip J. Weiser, Attorney
General, Nicole Suzanne Gellar, First Assistant Attorney
General, Denver, Colorado
OPINION
HART,
JUSTICE.
[¶1]
This habeas corpus appeal requires us to determine how the
Department of Corrections ("DOC") should apply the
"one-continuous-sentence" statute, section
17-22.5-101, C.R.S. (2018), to an offender who was eligible
for and released to parole, committed additional crimes while
on parole, and was sentenced for those subsequent crimes
concurrent with his initial sentence. The central question is
whether the offenders original prison sentences should be
included in the newly calculated continuous sentence for
purposes of determining a new parole eligibility date. We
conclude today that they should not.
I. Facts and Procedural History
[¶2]
Petitioner-Appellee, Scott Edward 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.
[¶3]
Diehl was released from prison at the discretion of the state
board of parole on August 16, 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.
[¶4]
On December 8, 2016, Diehl filed a petition for writ of
habeas corpus with the district court, arguing that he was
being unlawfully denied consideration for discretionary
parole. He contended that 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.
[¶5]
The district court agreed with Diehl. In doing so, the court
rejected the DOCs argument that Diehls "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 Colorados
"one-continuous-sentence" rule, see §
17-22.5-101, is comprised of two components— a period
of ...