Wells appeals from the denial of his petition for a writ of habeas corpus, see D.C.Code § 16-1901 (2001), arguing that due process requires, at the least, that he receive credit toward District of Columbia sentences he is now serving for some twenty-five months during which he was at liberty after he was paroled by Virginia authorities but before District of Columbia parole officials executed a parole violation warrant against him. We affirm.
I.
In September 1989 Wells was sentenced in the District of Columbia to a prison term of 15-45 months for attempted distribution of phencyclidine. In July 1990 he was released on parole until the expiration of his term (March 1993). In August 1990 and again in June 1991, however, he was re-arrested in the District and charged respectively with attempted distribution of cocaine and unauthorized use of a motor vehicle (UUV). These charges coincided more or less with his arrest on drug charges in Virginia, for which he was convicted in state court and received a ten year prison sentence beginning in July 1991. He was separately convicted of the District of Columbia charges and, in November 1991, sentenced to three to nine years in prison for the attempted cocaine distribution and 180 days for the UUV. These sentences were expressly made to run consecutively to each other and, by operation of D.C.Code § 23-112 (2001), to the sentence being served in Virginia.
In February 1992, on the basis of his intervening crimes in the District of Columbia, the D.C. Parole Board issued a warrant charging appellant with violation of his parole. Through an administrative error not explained in the record, the warrant either was not lodged with the Virginia correctional authority as a detainer or, if it was, that authority lost track of it.
Some twenty-five months later, in June 1998, appellant was re-arrested in the District and charged with first-degree child sexual abuse. The following month, his parole violator warrant was executed and a revocation hearing was conducted, at which he admitted a number of parole violations related to the 1990 and 1991 rearrests and, in reference to the 1998 rearrest, conceded that he had had sexual contact with a thirteen-year-old niece. Regarding this crime, the hearing official’s comments noted that the incident was “clearly a case of carnal knowledge” and that force had been used in the offense (though appellant disputed this fact). On August 21, 1998, the Board revoked appellant’s parole.
II.
Appellant first argues broadly that the government “lost jurisdiction” over him because of its failure to execute the parole violator warrant between 1992 and 1998, with the result that he may not be made to serve either his unexecuted sentences in the District or the back-up prison time stemming from his parole violations. This argument has no merit. In Moody v. Daggett,
Appellant’s more plausible argument is that because the failure to file the detainer in Virginia (or the loss of any record of it by Virginia officials) resulted in his release from prison and readjustment in the community — where, for example, he became gainfully employed — he should be given credit toward his unserved prison sentences for the time he was at liberty. There is, admittedly, support for the principle that “ ‘a convicted person is entitled to credit against his sentence for the time he was erroneously at liberty provided there is a showing of simple or mere negligence on behalf of the government and ... that the delay in execution of sentence was through no fault of his own.’ ” Clark v. Floyd,
This court’s decision in Davis v. Moore,
Application of this “extreme circumstances” exception does not avail appellant. First, nothing in the record implies that the failure of the District parole officials to lodge the parole warrant as a detainer— or, as the case may be, the failure of Virginia officials to maintain a record of the lodged detainer — was “more than sim-pie neglect.” Merritt, supra. Second, the “unfairness” of re-arresting Wells does not rise to the level shown in cases where rearrest has been deemed unfair, such as Johnson v. Williford,
Affirmed.
Notes
. The government represented below merely that, through “a clerical error,” the Virginia officials "had no record of a ... parole de-tainer from the District of Columbia.”
. The record indicates that in the first year of serving his Virginia sentence appellant inquired of his attorney about “outstanding de-tainers.” The attorney replied that a check had revealed that no current detainers related to appellant appeared in the database of the Virginia Department of Corrections.
. Noble held that a previous congressional enactment providing for loss of accrued “street time” when parole is revoked was not repealed by a later statute passed by the Council of the District of Columbia.
. In Merritt, U.S. District Court Judge Harold Greene ordered the defendant to be given credit for time during which he had been at liberty, in part because a U.S. Marshal's Office had "affirmatively” refused to execute a federal sentence detainer upon the defendant's release by Maryland authorities, and because the release had resulted from "a carefully-considered decision of the competent Maryland agency that he, and the community, no longer require[d] his incarceration.” Merritt,
. Stated differently, appellant’s expectation of continued liberty was inherently somewhat diminished in comparison to a person released unconditionally.
