The Law: Credit for Time Served

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In Asheville, N.C., Federal Judge J. Braxton Craven pondered the remarkable fact that one Eddie Patton, by establishing that he had been unconstitutionally imprisoned, had won a new trial at which he lost even more of his liberty.

Patton's ironic encounter with justice began in 1960 when he was arrested for armed robbery. Lacking bond, he stayed in jail until his trial at which, without counsel, he was found guilty and sentenced to 20 years in the state penitentiary. Three years later, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Gideon v. Wainwright that every defendant, even if indigent, is entitled to counsel, Patton was one of the many prisoners in U.S. jails to apply for a post-conviction hearing.

Punishment Ceiling. Represented by counsel at his second trial in February 1965, Patton pleaded not guilty, and at this point his experience differed sharply from that of Clarence Gideon. Patton was found guilty a second time. In pronouncing sentence, the trial judge said, "I would give you five more years than I am giving you, but I am allowing you credit for the time you have served. Judgment of the court is that the defendant be imprisoned for a term of 20 years."

Back in the state prison, and five years worse off than before, Patton filed a petition for habeas corpus in the U.S. District Court. There the state argued that no one had forced him to seek a second trial, that if it turned out badly for him, it was his own fault. In asking for a new trial, argued States Attorney Theodore Brown, Patton must be deemed to have consented to wiping out the consequences of his first trial. Furthermore, said Brown, a defendant is not entitled as a matter of law to credit against his second sentence. Besides, since the maximum allowable sentence was 30 years, Patton was lucky to have gotten only 20. Patton's lawyer answered that the second trial judge's claim to have taken into account the time already served "kept a promise to the ear and broke it to the heart." He argued that the sentence received at the first trial should represent a "punishment ceiling."

Empathy for the Judge. In his opinion, Judge Craven noted that he himself had once been accused of punishing a prisoner for obtaining a new trial, that he had some "empathy" for the second trial judge. Nevertheless, Craven held that when a harsher sentence is imposed there must be a clearly discernible reason for it, and he could find none at all in the trial record. Patton, in fact, was regarded as a model prisoner. Ruling that "a prisoner may not be denied credit for time served, nor punished for obtaining a new trial," Judge Craven decided that there had been a violation of the due-process and equal-protection clauses of the 14th Amendment. Patton, he concluded, need only serve out the 20-year sentence originally imposed.