In re Lafayette

2006 VT 73, 910 A.2d 807, 180 Vt. 610, 2006 Vt. LEXIS 167
CourtSupreme Court of Vermont
DecidedJuly 26, 2006
DocketNo. 05-374
StatusPublished

This text of 2006 VT 73 (In re Lafayette) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Supreme Court of Vermont primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
In re Lafayette, 2006 VT 73, 910 A.2d 807, 180 Vt. 610, 2006 Vt. LEXIS 167 (Vt. 2006).

Opinion

¶ 1. Plaintiff Bryan Lafayette is a prisoner serving concurrent sentences for separate arson and second-degree murder convictions. He appeals from an order of the superior court rejecting his claim that the Department of Corrections has been improperly calculating the good-time credits to his sentence. He argues that according to the Department’s Sentencing Computation Guidebook (Guidebook), because he committed the arson before July 1, 1994, his good-time credits should be calculated under the version of 28 V.S.A. § 811 that was in effect at that time. We affirm.

¶2. On November 11, 1993, plaintiff was sentenced to probation and a suspended prison term of five to ten years for an arson he had committed in 1992. In 2000, while still on probation, plaintiff was convicted of a second-degree murder committed in 1999. The superior court sentenced plaintiff to twenty-five years to life for the murder. At the same time, the court revoked his probation and ordered him to serve the remainder of his underlying five-to-ten-year arson sentence concurrently.

Í 3. The Guidebook is based in part on 13 V.S.A. § 7032(c)(1), which instructs the Department to combine the sentences of prisoners serving multiple sentences. Section 7032(c) provides in relevant part:

In all cases where multiple or additional sentences have been or are imposed, the term or terms of imprisonment under those sentences shall be determined in accordance with the following definitions.
(1) When terms run concurrently, the shorter minimum terms merge in and are satisfied by serving the longest minimum and the shorter maximum terms merge in and are satisfied by discharge of the longest maximum term.

Therefore, plaintiff’s five-year minimum sentence merges into and is satisfied by serving his twenty-five year minimum sentence, and his ten-year maximum sentence merges into and is satisfied by-serving his life sentence. The result is plaintiff’s “effective” sentence, which is computed from his individual sentences and treated as a single sentence. See 28 V.S.A. § 722(3) (defining “[t]otal effective sentence” as “the sentence imposed under sections 7031 and 7032 of Title 13 as calculated by the department in the offender’s records”); see also Dep’t of Corrections, Sentence Computation Guidebook § VI(A), at 15 (Oct. 2000) (“The effective sentence is the single sentence arrived at after computations are made in regard to the individual sentences imposed.”). Accordingly, plaintiff’s effective sentence, to which any good-time credits he earns are applied, is twenty-five years to life.

¶ 4. Under 28 V.S.A § 811,

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Related

Bacon v. Lascelles
678 A.2d 902 (Supreme Court of Vermont, 1996)
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2004 VT 87 (Supreme Court of Vermont, 2004)

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Bluebook (online)
2006 VT 73, 910 A.2d 807, 180 Vt. 610, 2006 Vt. LEXIS 167, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/in-re-lafayette-vt-2006.