In Washington state, glitch that led to convicts being freed too soon was not corrected for 13 years

Jeremiah A. Smith was fresh out of prison, having done five years for robbery, burglary and assault. It took him just 12 days to get locked up again, this time on suspicion of first-degree murder.

Police said the 26-year-old broke into a tattoo and head shop in Spokane, Wash., and shot Ceasar Medina in the neck and chest. Medina, 17, was watching the shop that May night in 2015.

Trouble is, Smith shouldn’t have been out on the streets. He had been mistakenly released three months early because of a state computer glitch.

Ninety more days behind bars might not have turned around Smith’s life. But it might have saved Medina’s.

Smith’s case is part of a broader breach at jails and prisons across the U.S. in which computer glitches, clerical errors and other breakdowns have opened the cell doors for thousands of convicts to walk free before their sentences have been fully served.

In Michigan, 62 sex offenders were mistakenly released in 2009 because of clerical errors; all were later rearrested.

A computer error in the California prison system resulted in the early release of 1,450 inmates in 2010 and 2011 as part of an effort to ease overcrowding (none could be returned to custody, having been handed irrevocable paroles).

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And Nebraska prison officials mistakenly used a flawed formula that shaved 750 years off the collective sentences of 200 of the state’s worst criminals in 2014.

The state of Washington, though, set what appears to be the high-water mark by mistakenly releasing 3,300 inmates, an exodus that continued for 13 years before it was corrected.

Even when state Department of Corrections officials learned that a computer problem had been prematurely springing inmates for a decade, they failed to fix it for three more years. It was during this stretch that Smith was freed.

Twenty-nine other inmates, also wrongly released during the 13-year period, committed an assortment of felonies and misdemeanors during the time they should have still been in prison.

“There were systemic errors over several years that undermined the core mission of DOC, which is to protect the public,” said Gov. Jay Inslee, who apologized to victims’ families and the public for the early releases. “The series of errors, of omission and commission, combined for tragic results.”

Last week, as the state continued to calculate the full effects of the 13-year breakdown, state Atty. Gen. Bob Ferguson issued an internal report that lays much of the blame on flawed advice given by one of his assistants.

In an assessment of the damage done, Assistant Atty. Gen. Ronda Larson wrote that if a wrongly released inmate should “immediately go and kill the victim” of his earlier crime, the “likelihood that DOC will be sued and lose in a tort lawsuit is unreasonably high.” Yet, the report shows, she didn’t press for an instant software fix, or a hand calculation of sentences.

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The miscalculations surfaced after the family of one victim contacted the Department of Corrections to complain that the perpetrator in their case was being freed too soon.

Officials checked to see whether other inmates had been mistakenly scheduled for premature release, leading them to the programming problem. The error had been entered into the system as officials attempted to adjust the formula for giving prisoners credit for good behavior, a task made necessary by a 2002 court ruling. But the Department of Corrections took no immediate action while the unearned good time credits continued to pile up.

When word of the glitch finally reached Inslee’s office last December, he ordered state officials to make a correction and to review individual sentencing records of the entire 12-prison, 18,400-inmate system to determine whether some inmates should be put back behind bars.

The latest update, in March, showed that more than 1,000 of those released early from 2011 through 2015 had since earned enough community credits — by staying out of trouble — to complete their sentences. But 116 were rearrested and returned to prison to finish out their terms. On average, sentences had been incorrectly reduced by 55 days.

Inslee also brought in former federal prosecutors Carl Blackstone and Robert Westinghouse to examine the problem from start to finish. They determined that the delay in correcting the problem “can be traced” to Larson’s 2012 memo stating it was unnecessary to calculate sentences by hand.

Although this “will result in offenders being released earlier than the law allows for the time being,” until the software is fixed, she wrote, “the DOC has been releasing them earlier for a decade and a few more months is not going to make that much difference.”

She figured a fix would be completed soon. Another top official estimated six months.

“I was told that not many inmates would be affected” if the computer change wasn’t immediately made, Larson said in an interview. “The second incorrect thing is that we thought [the glitch] would be fixed in two months. Given what we know now, those assumptions were wrong. Garbage in, garbage out.”

What followed was 36 months of scheduling — and scuttling — the computer reprogramming effort. Investigators said they found no persuasive explanations for the repeated delays.

It was clear, they added in their 52-page report, that Larson understood that if DOC released one defendant earlier than the law allows, this could potentially cause harm to a victim and significant liability to the taxpayers. The early release of “hundreds” of inmates would greatly increase the odds that innocent people would be victimized and the taxpayers would be compelled to pay significant damages.

But the issue was kept from higher-ups, including the attorney general, governor and prisons director, investigators said.

A month after Inslee was told of the glitch, it was fixed. A month after that, Larson resigned amid a public uproar and political accusations, joining three other top officials who left the attorney general’s office and Department of Corrections as a result of the scandal.

They included Dan Pacholke, appointed just months earlier to head the Department of Corrections. “It is my hope that with this resignation,” he said, “the politicians who would use this tragic event for their political purposes will have satisfied their need for blood.”

As for Smith, there are probably no more early releases in his future. He was convicted of murder and is facing life in prison.

Anderson is a special correspondent.

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