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Winkler v. Moore4/25/2002
sbehavior, there should be only one month of gain time ineligibility. That being the case, Cross is entitled to 405 days credits on his Group 5 offenses and 612 days credits on his Group 6 offenses.
Lastly, the Department and the petitioners assert that the first overcrowding statute should be considered to have gone into effect on June 15, 1983, despite the fact that this Court's charts in Gomez showed it as going into effect on June 16, 1983. They assert that they have essentially disregarded that part of the opinion because they believed it was a mistake and that it would cause too much upheaval, both to the Department and to the parties. The Department brought this issue to the Court's attention on rehearing in Gomez and, while we did not specifically address the matter in the opinion, we considered the issue and concluded that the Department's reliance upon an attorney general opinion was not correct. For that reason, the chart was published showing the first overcrowding statute going into effect on June 16, 1983.
We reiterate the determination made in Gomez that the statute became effective on June 16, 1983, when the bill was filed in the Office of the Secretary of State, not on June 15, 1983, when the Governor signed it. See State ex rel. Schwartz v. Bledsoe, 31 So. 2d 457, 460 (Fla. 1947) (holding that a bill becomes a law when "approved and signed by the Governor and by him filed in the office of the Secretary of State"). However, the parties agree on this issue and assert that a change would disadvantage numerous inmates as well as disrupt the entire system of calculating gain time since other gain time statutes were also enacted as a part of the same act. We see no reason to disrupt this already established procedure of applying the statute retroactively by one day as the Department has done for nearly twenty years, so long as this application benefits the inmate population and decreases the upheaval already caused by Lynce. Therefore, we have changed the chart to indicate that we will treat the statute as if it had gone into effect on June 15, 1983.
CONCLUSION
Based on the foregoing we hereby deny Mark D. Winkler's and Christopher Hall's petitions for writ of habeas corpus. We hereby grant mandamus relief to James Cross to the extent that he is entitled to additional credits on his Group 5 offenses and his Group 6 offenses because the Department erroneously withheld overcrowding gain time credits for two months instead of one month.
It is so ordered.
WELLS, C.J., and SHAW, HARDING, ANSTEAD, PARIENTE, LEWIS, and QUINCE, JJ., concur.
Three Cases Consolidated:
Two Original Proceedings - Habeas Corpus
One Original Proceeding - Mandamus
Appendix not available
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