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 offender's 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 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, see §
17-22.5-101, is comprised of two components-a period of
incarceration and a period of mandatory parole. Although the
imprisonment component of the sentence was statutorily
discharged when Diehl began serving his period of mandatory
parole, see § 18-1.3-401(1)(a)(V)(D), C.R.S.
(2018), the district court noted that the statutory scheme
provides that 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" section 18-1.3-401(1)(a)(V).
Therefore, the district court concluded that the DOC was
required to calculate Diehl's parole eligibility date
using his first date of incarceration, September 6, 2005.
¶6
The DOC appealed the district court's
order.[1]
II.
Analysis
¶7
We begin by addressing our jurisdiction to resolve this
appeal. We then set out the appropriate standard of review,
noting that we give considerable deference to the DOC's
interpretation of the statutory scheme for inmate and parole
time computations. Finally, we explain why the DOC's
interpretation of the relevant statutes is reasonable and the
new parole eligibility date for an inmate who was
reincarcerated for a parole violation and is then sentenced
for additional offenses should be calculated using the
beginning of the period of mandatory parole as the start of
the inmate's one continuous sentence.
A.
...