United States District Court, M.D. Tennessee, Nashville Division
MARIO A. LEGGS #302694, Petitioner,
v.
KEVIN GENOVESE, Respondent.
MEMORANDUM OPINION
WAVERLY D. CRENSHAW, JR., CHIEF UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE.
The
pro se Petitioner is a state inmate in South Central
Correctional Facility in Clifton, Tennessee, serving several
terms of incarceration arising from his 2001 conviction for
eight felonies ranging from aggravated robbery to reckless
endangerment. He alleges that the Tennessee Department of
Correction (TDOC) has miscalculated his sentences and seeks a
federal writ of habeas corpus pursuant to 28 U.S.C. §
2241. The Court will deny his petition for the reasons that
follow.
I.BACKGROUND
AND PROCEDURAL HISTORY
On
November 29, 2001, Petitioner was convicted in Davidson
County of eight felony counts of a multiple-count indictment
in case 2001-A-273 and was sentenced as follows:
• Count 2 - robbery - 6 years
• Count 3 - reckless endangerment - 2 years
• Count 4 - aggravated robbery - 12 years
• Count 5 - evading arrest - 3 years
• Count 6 - reckless aggravated assault - 4 years
• Count 7 - reckless aggravated assault - 4 years
• Count 8 - reckless aggravated assault - 4 years
• Count 9 - reckless endangerment - 2 years
(Doc. No. 22-2 at 7-14.) He was also convicted and sentenced
for several misdemeanors as part of the same
case.[1] The special conditions on the judgments
indicate that “counts 1, 2, 4, 6 and 12 are
consecutive, the other counts are concurrent, ” and
that the result is a “total sentence 22 years
11[months]/29 [days] @ 75% 11[months]/29 [days] @
75%.” (Id. at 7, 9.) The Tennessee Court of
Criminal Appeals reversed Petitioner's conviction on
Count 12 for evading arrest, which eliminated one of the
11-month 29-day sentences, and left his total effective
sentence at 22 years, 11 months and 29 days. State v.
Leggs, No. M2002-01022-CCA-R3CD, 2003 WL 21189783, at
*1, 11 (Tenn. Crim. App. May 21, 2003). Both parties have
confined their presentations to the cumulative 22-year felony
sentence (reached by adding the 6, 12 and 4 year sentences
for Counts 2, 4 and 6 above, respectively, which were ordered
to run consecutively), so the Court presumes the remaining
misdemeanor sentence is not at issue in this case.
Petitioner
entered TDOC custody on December 6, 2001, and began serving
his 6-year sentence for Count 2, along with all the shorter
sentences ordered to run concurrently with it. (Doc. No. 22-2
at 2, 3.) He was released on parole on August 20, 2010, and
returned to custody on July 31, 2012, for violating parole.
(Id. at 2.) He was released again on April 4, 2013,
and returned to custody on October 15, 2014, for another
violation. (Id.) On January 8, 2015, Petitioner was
convicted of a new count of attempted sale of a schedule I
drug, and was sentenced to another 4 years in prison, to be
served consecutive to his 2001 sentences. (Doc. No. 22-2 at
15.)
The
trial court had not awarded any pretrial jail credit toward
Petitioner's sentence at the time it sentenced him in
2001, but on February 3, 2015, it retroactively awarded him
pretrial jail credit for the period he spent in jail awaiting
trial from November 17, 2000 to November 29, 2001. (Doc. No.
22-2 at 2, 16.) This change required the Tennessee Department
of Correction (TDOC) to recalculate Petitioner's felony
sentences and the way the prisoner sentence credits he had
been accumulating in prison had been applied to them.
Petitioner
disagreed with the manner of that recalculation. After failed
attempts to get relief from the TDOC, both informally and via
petition for a declaratory order (see Doc. No. 2-1 at 2-21),
Petitioner submitted a petition for declaratory judgment to
the Davidson County Chancery Court. That court returned his
petition unfiled on April 28, 2016, due ...