Freed by a clerical error

ONLY AFTER RENE Lima-Marin walked out and the gate of Colorado's Crowley County Correctional Facility shut behind him, on April 24, 2008, did he finally decide he didn't have to worry anymore. He was 29 years old and a free man, released after serving a decade of what had been a sentence of 98 years. His girlfriend, Jasmine, said he looked weird. He was thinner, his long hair cut short. But he could not be denied now, standing there in person. He had told her he was going to change in prison, and he told her now that he'd done it.

They moved in together. He became a father to her 1-year-old son. He found a job, then a better one, and then a union job, working construction on skyscrapers in the center of Denver. The family went to church. They took older relatives in at their new, bigger house in a nice section of Aurora. There was another child, also a boy, and a wedding timed for when he'd be done with his five years of parole. Eventually, the demands of everyday life papered over the past. Life became about bills, chores, church, and soccer with the boys. Days and weeks passed with only the smallest reminders of the person he'd once been.

Then on Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2014, he was getting ready for another day in the sky, installing glass windows in buildings high above the city. His cellphone buzzed with an unknown number. The woman on the line said she was from the Denver public defender's office. She didn't understand it all herself. The prosecutor was saying that his release from prison five years and eight months earlier — a lifetime ago, a life he'd managed to mostly will out of his mind — had been a mistake. A clerical error. A judge just signed off on the order. He had to go back.

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For the longest time, he had no words. Finally, he managed a question. Is this even possible? Officers came to get him that day. They let him hug his young boys one last time and then cuffed him out of their sight. And at a hastily arranged hearing, it was all confirmed. Rene Lima-Marin's next chance at freedom would be in 2054, when he would be 75 years old.

THE KIT CARSON Correctional Center is a medium-security state prison on an empty expanse of Midwestern plain, about as far from Denver as you can get and still be in the state of Colorado. One of about 700 inmates, Lima-Marin — now 36 — has found a few things to do that will keep him out of trouble: a business class in the mornings, a Bible-study group on Saturdays and Sundays, some chess in the common area. That still leaves too much time to think about what's happened.

The young man who went in 17 years ago was so different. His parents had brought him to America from Cuba when he was 2, in 1980. His father had been a welder who worked janitorial and carpentry jobs. His mother had been a nurse; she worked at a bank and sold cars. They argued often and eventually divorced. By then, Lima-Marin was 16 and had already served one term in a juvenile prison for stealing cars.

He stole cars with his best friend, Michael Clifton, with whom he'd formed a sort of two-person gang. "We were like brothers," Lima-Marin says. Their thing wasn't drugs or booze, but money. They both wanted to be players, with the right clothes, the right car stereos. "It was all about girls and having things and looking nice," Lima-Marin remembers. "And because we didn't have the money, we wanted to get and have all these things as quickly as possible."

Lima-Marin and Clifton both got jobs for a short time at a Blockbuster around the corner from their apartment; Clifton even became a manager. But by then, their social schedule came with a big budget. They were regularly throwing parties in the apartment. Friends crashed there all the time. To keep it all going, they needed more money than any day job could provide. Together, they devised a plan.

They knew how their Blockbuster operated, and so they knew how all the other Blockbusters in Denver operated, too. They knew that each location had a safe, and that at least one person on duty had the combination. They knew where the surveillance equipment was, and that all employees were instructed to cooperate during a robbery, to ensure everyone's personal safety. They thought they'd need guns, but not bullets. "We knew exactly how it would pan out, based on what we knew employees were trained to do," Lima-Marin says.

THE FIRST CALL to the police came at 9:16 a.m. on Sept. 13, 1998, from a Blockbuster in the center of Aurora. The manager had just arrived for work when two men smashed the window, sent him to open the safe, and left with $6,766. The suspects were wearing bandanas around their faces, and one carried a long rifle.

Later that night, it all happened again, this time at a Hollywood Video around the corner. But with another slight variation from the script. Two clerks were in the store, not just one. Lima-Marin and Clifton brought them both into a back room, forcing one to lie on the floor and the other to open the safe. "They put a gun to the back of my head and said, ‘This is where you're going to die,'" one of the employees, Shane Ashurst, recalled. The men took $3,735.

It took only a few days for police to connect the robberies to Lima-Marin and Clifton. The police got a warrant for Lima-Marin's apartment and car and found everything: the rifles, the surveillance tapes, the cash.

It was a string of robberies, but of course it wasn't just that. In the eyes of the law, everything about the two friends' spree was important. Both men received two counts of first-degree burglary and three counts of aggravated robbery, for each of the three employees they made cooperate at the two stores. That surprised Lima-Marin. "I didn't rob three people," he says. "I robbed two stores." Then came the kidnapping charges: three counts of second-degree kidnapping, because they'd forced three employees to move from one part of a store to another.

Lima-Marin wasn't just facing more charges than he expected: The prosecutors were pursuing those charges with surprising zeal. Back in those days, public alarm nationally had reached a near-frenzy over so-called superpredators, juvenile offenders so impulsive that they killed or maimed without giving much thought to the consequences. Demographers and social scientists were predicting greater crime waves to come, citing data suggesting that a small percentage of young criminals were responsible for a huge swath of violent crime. The solution, many prosecutors and police thought, was to lock them away for as long as possible until their wild years were behind them.

Colorado's 18th Judicial District, in Arapahoe County, was proudly out in front of the trend. In 1987, the county had debuted a sentencing protocol called the Chronic Offender Program, or COP, to deal with young kids predisposed to committing violent crimes. The perfect target of COP was someone who seemed, on the surface, to be a lot like Lima-Marin: a violent criminal who was young, and therefore statistically more likely to commit more crimes if allowed back on the streets.

Lima-Marin says he had been ready to plead out, but when the COP prosecutor at the time, Frank Moschetti, came with an offer of 75 years, Lima-Marin knew he couldn't accept that deal. Under pre-COP sentencing policies, the plea offer might have been based on concurrent, not consecutive, sentencing, drastically reducing the time he'd have to spend behind bars. Lima-Marin's only alternative was to roll the dice at trial.

On Jan. 31, 2000, a jury found both Lima-Marin and Clifton guilty on all eight counts. The sentences were to be served consecutively, for a total of 98 years. Offered the chance to say something before the judge and jury, Lima-Marin was too stunned to speak. Judge John Leopold seemed to sympathize: "I am not comfortable, frankly, with the way the case is charged," he said as the two men stood before him.

SO HOW DOES a sentence like this vanish? How does 98 years become 10? He remembers first learning about the possibility of life after prison shortly after arriving at the medium-security Crowley County Correctional Facility, when he received a visit from a public defender assigned to handle his appeal. As he recalls, his lawyer surprised him by telling him that she didn't think he ought to appeal at all. The best possible scenario had unfolded, he remembers her saying: "You no longer have 98 years. What you have is 16 years." When he said he didn't understand, the lawyer offered no explanation. He says she never even mentioned a clerical error.

From what he could gather, she'd looked at his case file for the first time before meeting him, and when she read it, she saw that his release date was consistent with a 16-year sentence, as if his sentences were running concurrently. Since this matched the most favorable outcome he could expect from an appeal, he remembers her saying, it made no sense to bother filing one. She handed him a sheet of paper, he signed it, and he never saw her again.

Back in his cell, Lima-Marin wondered how this was possible. Other inmates told him that if he wanted to make sure his lawyer was right, he should ask to see what everyone called his "green sheet," the official Department of Corrections record of his sentence and parole eligibility. The green sheet was gospel, he was told; whatever was on the green sheet, the DOC would follow. Sure enough, his green sheet confirmed what his lawyer had said: 16 years.

He was granted parole in April 2008, six years before the end of his 16-year sentence. He was 29. His entire adult life up to that point had been spent in prison. He had no money, no job, and no professional qualifications. Jasmine supported him while he got back on his feet.

Soon, his life gained a new shape. "I remember talking to a friend. I said, 'Look at where I am. I was in prison for the rest of my life. Now I have two boys, we both have nice jobs, we both have cars.' I was kind of proud of what I had accomplished." Then the call came.

LAST MARCH, LIMA-MARIN'S new public defender filed a motion with the court arguing that Lima-Marin no longer deserved prison, and that to send him back amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. His life outside prison proved he'd changed.

In a lengthy reply on behalf of the state, district attorney Rich Orman described Lima-Marin's five years and eight months of accidental freedom as a great stroke of luck. The fact that Lima-Marin lived like a model citizen for five years, Orman argued, should have no bearing. "Plainly said," Orman wrote, "the Defendant had no business getting married and starting a family."

In April 2014, a judge sided with Orman, ruling against Lima-Marin's motion to be released. An appeal is still pending.

Excerpted from an article originally published by Matter and the Marshall Project, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Reprinted with permission.