Fishback

Richard David Fishback was charged with non-capital offenses in 1997.  Parole was abolished in 1995.  He took his case to the Virginia State Supreme Court on the basis that the trial court erred in failing to instruct the jury on the abolition of parole.  He had been sentenced to 18 years.  Virginia was among more than a dozen states to abolish parole in the 1990s amid a national push to crack down on crime. Virginia also lengthened sentences for some violent offenders and mandated that anyone convicted in 1995 and beyond must serve at least 85 percent of their term.  As a result, uninformed jurors during those five years gave some offenders inflated sentences, thinking they’d serve just part of their prison term before being paroled, advocates and attorneys say. Virginia is one of just a handful of states where juries decide on a sentence as well as guilt or innocence in non-death penalty cases

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But while Virginia took parole off the table in 1995, judges weren’t required to inform juries about that change until 2000 when Fishback won his case -- since then juries are instructed on the abolition of parole.  So what happened to all the prisoners who, like Fishback, were sentenced by juries who did not know that parole had been abolished.  These are the "Fishback" prisoners.

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Senate Bill 223 (2016), patroned by four Virginia Senators and thirteen Delegates sought to correct the errors of the past, and allow for re-sentencing of any person sentenced under the new law and truth-in-sentencing, by a jury, between 1995 and the June 9, 2000 Virginia Supreme Court decision in Fishback vs. Commonwealth. According to statistics provided to the Commission on Parole Review, by the Virginia Criminal Sentencing Commission, an estimated 471 truth-in-sentencing inmates who were sentenced by juries to the Fishback decision, received a sentence of more than 20 years.  They are still waiting for justice as Fishback bills put forward in the 2018 General Assembly have yet to pass.