The Colorado Supreme Court concluded on Tuesday that state law did not entitle a man to receive credit for the time he spent in non-residential community corrections, notwithstanding the court’s own 34-year-old analogy suggesting a deduction was possible.

When Ryan Wallace Bonde was terminated from a non-residential community corrections program and resentenced to prison, his trial judge declined to credit him for his time spent in the non-residential program. Bonde appealed that decision, raising an unusual argument constructed from an unrelated legislative change and a key passage in a 1991 Supreme Court decision.

According to the state, approximately 3,600 people are serving sentences in community corrections at any given time. Designed to be stricter than probation but not as harsh as prison, community corrections allows defendants to live in the community and receive support, while still being confined in a residential facility.

Defendants may progress into non-residential community corrections, where they live on their own but still experience supervision and abide by program rules. In Larimer County, where Bonde served his sentence, there were 1,042 people in the community corrections program in 2019. Non-residential participants had a higher success rate than those serving in residential facilities.

In 1991, the Supreme Court addressed the question of what happens when a defendant serves time in non-residential community corrections, but violates the terms and is resentenced to prison. By 5-2, the court ruled such defendants are not entitled to have their non-residential time deducted from their prison sentence.

Then-Chief Justice Joseph R. Quinn noted defendants can only benefit from time served in “confinement.” The court’s majority viewed defendants serving non-residential sentences as “not substantially different from an offender paroled from a prison,” whose circumstances are unlike confinement.

“To credit the community correctional offender with time served on nonresidential status would result in the anomaly of granting credit for presentence ‘confinement’ for a period of time during which the offender was never actually ‘confined’ in any meaningful sense of that term,” Quinn wrote in People v. Hoecher. 

Fast-forwarding to May 2020, Bonde had served 1.5 years of his sentence — first in residential community corrections and then non-residential community corrections — when Larimer County terminated him for a violation. District Court Judge Laurie K. Dean resentenced Bonde to four years in prison, the same length as his community corrections sentence.

While she gave him some credit for his time in community corrections, she did not deduct the entirety of his non-residential time from the new sentence.

Bonde appealed, arguing the Supreme Court’s conclusion in Hoecher was no longer valid. Because the court likened people serving non-residential sentences to parolees, and the legislature changed the law in 1995 to allow time-served deductions for nonviolent parolees, Bonde argued the court’s underlying logic led to a different result three decades later.

A three-judge panel for the Court of Appeals waved aside that claim.

“We read Hoecher as doing no more than analogizing a nonresidential offender to a parolee to frame the court’s analysis,” wrote Judge W. Eric Kuhn, “not binding the outcome to how a parolee’s time is treated.”

Bonde appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing Hoecher‘s analogy to parolees meant that if they were now granted time-served credit, so should he. Alternatively, he argued non-residential community corrections does constitute confinement — specifically, confinement to Colorado’s 104,000 square miles.

In its May 27 opinion, the Supreme Court stood by its broader point from three decades earlier: that non-residential community corrections involves a degree of freedom not equivalent to “confinement.” Therefore, a person in Bonde’s shoes is not entitled to presentence confinement credit.

“Compared to their residential counterparts, offenders serving nonresidential community corrections sentences are allowed to pursue regular employment, enroll in academic courses, participate in vocational training programs, and meet with family members,” wrote Chief Justice Monica M. Márquez.

She added that lawmakers had changed the community corrections provisions multiple times since 1991, and none of the amendments granted presentence confinement credit to defendants like Bonde.

“In sum, any policy-based request to grant comparable PSCC for nonresidential community corrections sentences is better directed to the legislature,” Márquez concluded.

The case is Bonde v. People.