What credit towards sentence should be given for jail time while waiting for a trial?

There was a time in Canada when an accused man (or woman) who was refused bail could languish in jail waiting for his trial and when he was convicted and sentenced to prison, he was given no credit for the time he spent in the jail waiting for his trial. Sometimes an accused person could wait as much as two years for his trial. If he was finally sentenced to prison for two years, he would have in effect have served as much as four years in custody when the crime he committed was deserving only of two years in custody. Many accused persons, rather than wait for their trial under these circumstances would plead guilty even if they were innocent so that they wouldn’t serve dead time in jail waiting for their trials.

Later, Canadian justice authorities realized that this was creating a terrible injustice to those who were serving dead time while waiting for their trials so they awarded two months credit for every month they spent in jail waiting for their trials. If a man was in jail for six months waiting for his trial and he was sentenced to two years in prison, he was given credit for twelve months. Because everyone in Canada who is sent to prison is entitled to be released after serving two thirds of his sentence (he remains on parole for the remaining one third) a person under these circumstances would be released after having served only four months of his sentence in prison.

(12a + 8b = 20) (24--20=4) a: double time credit while waiting for trial b: one-third automatically deducted from prison sentence.

Recently, the justice officials around the country felt that two months credit for every month in jail waiting for trials was too much credit so they are proposing that the credit be reduced to time and a half. This would mean that if an accused person sits in jail for six months waiting for his trial, he would get credit for eight months instead of twelve months. If he got sentenced to prison for two years, he would end up serving eight months of his sentence in prison and not the current four months. He would in effect, serve a total of fourteen months in custody for his crime.

Now there are many who recognize that accused persons should be given credit for dead time in jail but the credit they should be given for that dead time should be month for month only. That would be unfair. There is a vast difference between serving dead time in a jail waiting for a trial than serving the sentence in prison. In jail, the accused person will having nothing to do but sit around and play cards or watch TV or simply talk with other inmates. Over a long period of time, that can be extremely boring. In prison, the inmate can play sports in the yard, watch a weekly movie, go to the prison library, indulge in a hobby, go to church, get psychiatric treatment in necessary, sleep with his wife in special quarters once in a while, etc. You can appreciate why incarceration in a jail waiting for a trial is vastly different that serving a sentence in prison.

There is a man in Canada whose trial is current. He is charged with murdering 26 women and his current trial is in respect to six of those victims. (another trial will deal with the remaining 20 victims) If he is convicted, he will be given credit for the dead time he has been spending in jail for the two or more years he’s been in custody. The sentence for first-degree murder is automatically life in prison with eligibility to apply for parole after serving twenty-five years. I doubt that he will ever be released since if he is convicted of the murders as a serial killer, he is likely to spend the rest of his life in prison. Further, his lawyer claims he has a lower than average IQ and it is highly unlikely that a parole board member would stick his or her neck out suggesting that a serial killer with a lower than average IQ be released back into the community after serving the initial twenty-five years. This means that his dead-time credits would be purely academic.

Now you may ask, what does this mean if an accused person has served two years in jail waiting for his trial and he is later found innocent? When my task force in 1969 was dealing with the issue of compensating people charged with crimes and later found innocent after having served time in jail or prison, we looked into the cases where innocent person were found innocent at trial. Many had lost their homes and jobs while waiting for their trials. I am happy to say that in Canada, they too will be compensated.