In courthouses across the state recently, inmates have made simple, quiet pleas for release, saying they've satisfied the state's punishment of life in prison.
There was no fussing, no political grandstanding. In a few cases, there wasn't even a debate.
"For us, it's an open-and-shut issue based on the law. No politics here," said Fred Flowers, an attorney in the southwestern North Carolina town of Shelby. He won a local judge's order this year for the release of an inmate sentenced to life for a murder and burglary committed in the 1970s. The inmate has not yet been released.
The state's higher courts have ruled that legislators limited life sentences imposed on crimes between 1974 and 1978 to 80 years.
Inmates have argued that credits awarded for good behavior, work release and educational endeavors have cut some of their sentences to as little as 30 or 35 years.
These cases are proceeding apart from those of 27 such inmates who were scheduled to be set free Thursday. But state officials have blocked their release until the courts decide whether those credits were legitimately awarded by prison officials. The debate this month has showcased tough-talking by Gov. Beverly Perdue and emotional pleas by the families of victims whose killers and rapists were to be freed.
Bobby E. Bowden, a Cumberland County man who once faced execution for the murders of a young mother and a store clerk, has become the poster child of this push.
"Bowden's motion got people perked up," said Staples Hughes, the state appellate defender whose office represented Bowden at the state Court of Appeals. "It spread from there."
In prison, word of one inmate's strategies for some sort of legal relief often spreads to other prisoners in camps far away. A roommate gets a transfer and shares the tips his former roomie taught. A mom clips a newspaper article about one inmate's situation and mails it to her son. One by one, the inmates scribble motions in cells across the state. Each asks to argue for himself before a hometown judge. Sometimes, an inmate might even bribe a savvier inmate with a week's worth of soda to help craft a motion for relief.
"Any sniff of information that may pass by another man is fully inhaled by someone like this," Flowers said about his client, Wilbur William Folston. "It becomes his passion, and his antenna was already up."
For one, a long wait
On Wednesday, in a modest courtroom in Yanceyville, an attorney for inmate John Reynolds agreed with an assistant district attorney that Reynolds' two life sentences equaled 80 years a piece. They drafted an order together and handed it up to Superior Court Judge Gary E. Traywick.
Traywick signed the order, which directed the Department of Correction to tabulate an exact release date for Reynolds, factoring in all the days he was due for good behavior credits.
No one from the Department of Correction, the Attorney General's Office or the Governor's Office attended the hearing.
For Reynolds, a 57-year-old convicted murderer and rapist, release won't be anytime soon. He received back-to-back life sentences in 1978.
One inmate's efforts
The end could be in sight, though, for Folston, who was convicted of murder in Cleveland County in 1976.
Folston appealed to a Cleveland County judge in 2006 to apply a limit of 80 years to his life term. He also asked that his good time credits be applied.
A judge there granted his request, though the state Attorney General's Office has since asked that the matter be put on hold until Bowden's case was decided.
Last week, Folston, who is in a prison in the western Piedmont, hand-wrote another motion, this time asking for help because he says he is being held illegally. A judge will hear that plea in December.
