Incarcerated people across Virginia are hoping a new lawsuit from the ACLU might help them get out of prison when they expected to instead of unexpectedly serving more time.
Antoine Anderson is serving time at the Coffeewood Correctional Center near Culpeper, and he was expecting to be released this month. But after Governor Glenn Youngkin amended the budget to change who was eligible to earn sentence credits, he’s still behind bars.
Geri Greenspan is an attorney with the ACLU who represents him.
"Mr. Anderson was expecting to drive his daughter to college. He has been incarcerated for his daughter's whole life, and he’s missed so many milestones," Greenspan says. "He wanted to be there for this one. And he had told her that he would be. He then had to tell her on Father's Day that he actually wasn't coming home."
The ACLU is now suing the Department of Corrections to say that the governor's budget amendment does not change the sentence credits that Anderson has already earned.
"That's a fine argument if the law had been in effect since 2020. But it wasn't," explains Virginia legal expert Rich Kelsey. He says the delayed enactment of a 2020 law expanding sentence credits means it did not go into effect until after the governor amended the budget.
"So they were never actually accruing the time because the law had never actually been in effect," he adds.
If the ACLU is successful, thousands of incarcerated people could also challenge the new budget amendment that's keeping them incarcerated longer than they were expecting.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
