In December, Department of Correction officials and a lawyer for the state's attorney general said in court that prison officials never authorized the release of inmates sentenced to life in the 1970s and never promised them they were going home.
E-mail messages and memos exchanged within the department show that his staff considered the releases certain.
Dozens of communications between Oct. 9 and Oct. 22 show that Correction officials planned to release the inmates by month's end and began prepping them for life outside. Staff officials talked with their families, assigned them parole officers to ease the transition and told the sex offenders to register with the sheriffs of their home counties.
But in Wayne County Superior Court, two months later, Department of Correction Secretary Alvin Keller denied authorizing their homecomings.
"I never ordered anyone's release," Keller said. "We never - I never ordered the release of anybody."
His testimony and the correspondence followed a ruling by higher courts that life sentences imposed during four years in the 1970s amounted to 80 years, thanks to laws in effect at the time. Good behavior credits slashed those sentences in half, and completed classes and working shaved off more time, state law and prison regulations mandated.
The communications were among 1,200 pages of internal documents The News & Observer obtained through a public information request.
They show that the Department of Correction, with guidance from the Attorney General's Office, was moving to release the inmates - until Oct. 22, when Gov. Bev Perdue stepped in.
She vowed to block their release and lambasted the courts for allowing them to be freed. Weekly news releases warned the public about the inmates and urged the courts to keep them behind bars. Perdue's poll numbers climbed, even while she took criticism from Republican leaders that she acted too slowly.
On Monday, a spokeswoman for Perdue, who appointed Keller, referred questions about the discrepancies between the documents and the testimony to the Department of Correction. Keller said in a statement late Monday that the Division of Prisons was working up a "worst-case scenario, the unconditional release of affected inmates, should it have been required by the courts."
"At the same time, attorneys representing the agency were researching and preparing arguments against the release of these inmates."
He reiterated that he never ordered any inmates released, a spokesman said.
A spokeswoman for Attorney General Roy Cooper declined to comment.
The fate of more than 40 inmates is in limbo. The case is bound for the N.C. Supreme Court on Feb. 16, where justices will determine whether Superior Court Judge Ripley Rand was right to rule that prison officials cannot continue to confine two of the inmates, whose cases were heard in Wayne and Wake counties.
Plans for release
At the hearings before Rand in December, prison officials testified that they never told the inmates they would certainly be set free.
Besides Keller, both Kenneth Royster, superintendent of Raleigh Correctional Center for Women, and Enoch Hansberry, assistant superintendent for programs at New Hanover Correctional Center, testified that they alerted the inmates that a release was only a possibility.
But Mary Lu Rogers, a Division of Prisons administrator, dispatched orders to wardens on Oct. 13, saying that "per the secretary's office," they should "personally meet with the inmate and advise him/her of their release on [Oct. 29]." Documents show that she told the wardens to gather medical information and help the inmates figure out where they planned to live. The wardens complied,e-mailing Rogers to let her know the message was delivered.
Director of Prisons Bob Lewis, who is two ranks below Keller, sent a memo to wardens on Oct. 16 explaining that the ruling compelled them to turn the inmates loose. He urged them to alert all prison staff members about the matter.
Lewis explained in the released memo that the court decision meant that the sentences of some 1970s lifers amounted to 80 years and that credits cut that to 40 years, and less in some cases. "As a result of this ruling, the Department of Correction is mandated to calculate the affected inmates' sentences in this manner," Lewis wrote.
Keller ordered each inmate to be assigned a parole officer to help the inmate make the transition into the outside world after more than 30 years in prison.
Carlton Joyner, an official of the Division of Community Correction, wrote in ane-mail message on Oct. 20, "Secretary Keller has directed DCC to assign a PO for each inmate."
Keller drafted a letter to send to victims and their families. It was not clear from the released records whether the letters were sent. In the draft, Keller wrote that the DOC would release the inmates Oct. 29.
"Please note that this is not a discretionary release by the Department of Correction and the Department has no legal authority to hold the inmate beyond the scheduled release date," he wrote.
What were inmates told?
During one of the December hearings, Tiare Smiley, a lawyer in the Attorney General's Office who was representing the Department of Correction, argued to Judge Rand that prison staff never informed inmates they would be sent home.
"They never told them they were absolutely being released. They never deducted the credits. They have never told them they were out the door," Smiley told Rand in December, according to a transcript from Wake court.
Smiley said that the 1970s lifers were never awarded the credits that could reduce their sentences.
Those credits had already been tabulated in an internal computer system. Beside a tally of their credits, one word appeared: "applied."
In November, after the DOC laid out another strategy to keep the inmates behind bars, Department of Correction computer programmers modified the program to prevent these credits from being applied, according to e-mail sent among those working with the computer system.
Smiley insisted in court, however, that the credits recorded as applied were never counted.
"They have never been awarded. And there's just no evidence to the contrary," Smiley told Rand during arguments.
An unusual message
Attorneys representing the inmates declined to comment on the matter Monday, saying they couldn't publicly address discrepancies while the case is pending before the Supreme Court.
The state's last message to the inmates came in an unusual way.
On Oct. 22, Perdue said in a news release that the inmates' sentences would be 80 years, as they were never due credits for good behavior and had never been awarded them. She said they could be released in another 40 years or so.
Prison officials didn't draft their own memos this time. Prison officials dispatched the wardens to visit the inmates once more, according to the released documents. They were told to read them the governor's press release.
