by Dick Hall-Sizemore
Jason Miyares has struck out again.
Miyares, Virginia’s Attorney General, keeps asking the Virginia Supreme Court to interpret a statute, based not on how it is actually written, but based on what the General Assembly “intended.” The court’s response is that its function is to ask “not what the legislature intended to enact, but what is the meaning of that which it did enact. We must determine the legislative intent by what the statute says and not by what we think it should have said.”
At issue is the expansion of earned sentence credits for offenders in state prisons enacted by the 2020 General Assembly. This legislation and its implementation has had a convoluted history, which I described in an earlier post. In summary, the maximum number of sentence credits an offender can earn was increased from 4.5 days per 30 days served to 15 days per 30 days served. The legislation listed a large number of exceptions to the expansion. Among the offenses exempted from the expansion were Class 1 felonies (capital murder) and “any violation” of Sec. 18.1-32 (first degree murder).
The aspect of the legislation that Miyares keeps running up against is the omission of inchoate offenses in the list of exceptions. In legal terms, an inchoate crime is “a type of crime that is committed by taking a punishable step towards the commission of another crime. The three basic inchoate offenses are attempt, solicitation, and conspiracy.” Continue reading