The High Court made no order on an application concerning the release date of a prisoner at St Patrick’s Institution, finding that the prison service’s method for calculating the effect of lost remission complied with the relevant legislation and prison rules.
In a judgment delivered on 31 January 2006, Finnegan P. said the applicant had been sentenced on 6 October 2005 to three consecutive terms of imprisonment: nine months, followed by two terms of three months each. His release date with full remission would have been 16 January 2006. He was initially told that, after taking account of lost remission, his release date would be 6 April.
The court was told that the applicant had been convicted 29 times of breaches of prison discipline and had lost 98 days of remission. Applying the prison service’s method, the sentences were converted to 456 days, 98 days were added, and one quarter remission was then applied, producing 415 days. After credit for 64 days served between conviction and appeal, the time to be served was 351 days, giving a release date of 29 March 2006.
The judge accepted evidence from the institution’s deputy governor that the 6 April date resulted from human error, most likely when information was entered into a computer. A manual check was normally carried out, but the officer who would usually do it was absent. The deputy governor said release dates for 177 other inmates were then checked by computer and manually and found correct.
For the applicant, counsel argued that release dates should be certain and that lost remission should be applied in the way most beneficial to the prisoner. The judge rejected the characterisation of the system as random or uncertain, finding that lost remission was applied consistently and calculated with certainty.
The judge acknowledged that applying losses of remission only to the individual sentence during which they were incurred could produce an earlier release date for this applicant. But he found that the legislation and Prison Rules required remission to be applied to the total term, including cumulative sentences, rather than to separate components. He also said the alternative could lead to later release dates for other prisoners and create uncertainty in prison discipline decisions.
The court made no order on the application.