In June, when the Virginia General Assembly approved Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s budget amendment reducing the number of people eligible for early release from Virginia prisons through a new expanded earned sentence credit law, prison reform advocates cried foul. About 500 people, who’d been expecting to go home immediately after the law went into effect on July 1, suddenly learned they were no longer eligible. Now, an incarcerated man has filed suit against the head of the Virginia Department of Corrections alleging his continued incarceration is unlawful, and demanding his immediate release.
“The impact he’s suffering is very similar to that of the stories I’ve heard now from hundreds of other inmates and their loved ones who are going through the same thing,” says attorney Elliott Harding, who is representing Derrick Renaldo Edmonds in the suit filed August 9 in Richmond Circuit Court against DOC Director Harold Clarke.
The expanded earned sentence credit law passed the General Assembly during a special session in November 2020. Its effective date was delayed by nearly two years to provide the DOC time to calculate new release dates and prepare for expanded reentry services. The new law increased the amount of “good time” an incarcerated person could earn from 15 percent up to 30 percent. The expanded earned sentence credits applied only to nonviolent offenses, but individuals who had sentences for both nonviolent and violent offenses could earn the extra time for their nonviolent crimes.
Critics of the law claimed it would result in thousands of violent criminals flooding an unprepared reentry system and putting the public at risk.
“Releasing a population of inmates early, 62% of whom are incarcerated for violent offenses, is not the solution to the growing crime spike across the Commonwealth,” the spokesperson for Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares wrote in an emailed statement in May.
When the opponents of the enhanced earned sentence credit failed to amend the new law during regular session, Youngkin added a budget amendment making anyone with a violent offense ineligible to earn expanded good time on their nonviolent charges, suddenly upending expectations and plans already made by hundreds of incarcerated people and their families. With support from several Senate Democrats who had previously voted for the new law, and the absence of several House Democrats at the time of the vote, the budget amendment passed.
Harding says the process was not only unfair but unlawful, leaving Edmonds and hundreds of others with feelings of grief, confusion, and isolation.
“That kind of goes to a fundamental aspect of this whole case … how arbitrary this was and how unplanned and how there’s no sense of clarity or certainty within the department or the General Assembly, really, as to what’s going to happen going forward,” says Harding, who notes that the budget amendment only prevents these people’s release under expanded sentence credits for the two years the budget is in effect.
Edmonds, who is serving a 35-year sentence for multiple counts of robbery and attempted robbery as well as using a firearm in the commission of a felony, had completed all the rehabilitative requirements for early release and had obtained health insurance and a DMV-issued identification card. As a result of the amendment, the suit says, he has suffered “severe mental anguish.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Corrections declined to comment on an ongoing lawsuit.
A hearing has not yet been scheduled.
At press time, the ACLU of Virginia filed a similar habeas petition in Albemarle Circuit Court challenging the rollback on behalf of another inmate.
Courteney Stuart is the host of “Charlottesville Right Now” on WINA. You can hear her interview with attorney Elliott Harding at wina.com.