Bowling v. White
Annotate this CaseRonnie Lee Bowling, who is currently on Kentucky’s death row for two murder convictions obtained in 1992, was also convicted in 1996 of attempted murder. Bowling was sentenced to a twenty year term for the attempted murder conviction, to be served concurrently with the earlier sentence. The 1996 judgment failed to award Bowling his entitled jail-time credit that would mean he had served out that sentence in 2009. The Department of Corrections (DOC), however, treated the twenty-year sentence as though it had been served out at that time. In 2012, Bowling filed a petition for habeas corpus in a federal district court challenging his 1996 conviction. Before the federal court could exercise jurisdiction, it had to determine whether Bowling was “in custody” under the challenged conviction. The Supreme Court accepted certified questions from the federal court regarding the issue and answered (1) the DOC may award an inmate jail-time credit that was mistakenly left off the judgment of conviction and sentence entered when the trial court was statutorily commanded to award appropriate credit; and (2) whether the DOC properly did so in this case required fact-finding to be done by the district court.
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