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2002 emails reveal officials' early concerns over ruling that led to mistaken release of prisoners

A newly-released email from 2002 sheds new light on concerns from top officials about whether the Department of Corrections system could handle changes to prisoners’ sentences.

The email is dated ten years before the DOC said it first discovered the computer programming error that mistakenly released about 3,000 prisoners early; the family of one of those prisoners’ realized he had been released too soon.

KIRO 7 was the first to show the email to Senator Mike Padden, Chair of the Senate’s Law & Justice committee, which is investigating the error in addition to the governor’s independent investigations.

“Government’s messing up,” he said. “That’s what you feel. And it’s hurting real people.”

Padden said if top officials were identifying potential problems back in 2002, he wants to know why they weren’t watching closely enough to catch the huge mistake that persisted for more than a decade.

The error began in 2002, after a court ruling known as the King decision.

It changed the way DOC applied good behavior time credits to some prisoners' sentences.

The 2002 emails show top officials were immediately concerned.

Paul Weisser with the Attorney General’s office wrote at first, "the decision probably won't result in the offenders serving more or less time.”

Then he went on to write, “I suspect many offenders' (hundreds or thousands) time structure will have to be individually recalculated," and added that “I don’t think the OBTS can accommodate the rule the court announced in King on a system wide basis.”

OBTS is the Offender Based Tracking System that was replaced by the state’s current prisoner tracking system, OMNI, in 2008.

Joe Lehman, Secretary of the Department of Corrections at the time, responded to Weisser’s email. He said, “He points out a real problem with work that will have to be done by records staff.”

What was done? All that is clear is that the DOC provided programmers with the wrong code.

DOC spokesperson Andrew Garber said the department did have checks in place, but that so few offenders were affected at first that “no problems turned up when the programmers ran their checks to make sure the program was operating properly.”

Even as the courts sentenced more offenders with enhancements, and the sentencing miscalculation affected more of them, releasing more offenders early, he said the checks he referenced detected nothing.
Padden said that doesn't add up.

“There were all sorts of opportunities for the Department of Corrections to get this right, and they didn’t,” he said. “They should have focused on it more. It should have been a higher priority.”

KIRO 7 asked to speak with Weisser, but the Attorney General’s office cited attorney-client privilege and deferred to the Department of Corrections.

The DOC said that “the department does not want to set a precedent by waiving its attorney-client privilege when it comes to interviews with state attorneys,” and did not allow KIRO 7 to speak with Weisser about what preceded or followed the 2002 email exchange that raised these concerns.

Joe Lehman did not return calls.

Senate lawmakers have launched a website, www.fixDOC.org, asking current and former DOC employees for tips on how the system error persisted for so long.