Lewis v. Stancil.
2026 COA 8. No. 25CA0087. Inmate and Parole Time Computation—One Continuous Sentence—Earned Time—Nunc Pro Tunc Orders.
February 12, 2026
A jury convicted Lewis of first degree murder and tampering with physical evidence. The trial court sentenced him on January 28, 2016, to life without parole in the custody of the Department of Corrections (DOC) on the first degree murder count and 18 months on the tampering with physical evidence count to run concurrently. At the time of sentencing, Lewis was serving sentences for several prior convictions that had an effective sentence date of May 17, 2013. On May 21, 2020, the court of appeals reversed the first degree murder conviction and remanded for a new trial (the tampering with physical evidence conviction was not affected). On June 2, 2021, the DOC discharged Lewis’s previous sentences and the tampering with physical evidence sentence based on his accumulated earned time, and it released him to five years of mandatory parole as of April 5, 2021. The April date would have been Lewis’s mandatory release date if he had not been serving the first degree murder sentence, but Lewis remained incarcerated pending his new trial on the murder charge. Lewis was retried in December 2021, convicted of second degree murder, and sentenced to 28 years in DOC custody. The trial court entered the sentence nunc pro tunc to January 28, 2016, and granted Lewis credit for 319 days of time served. Lewis is currently serving the 28-year second degree murder sentence and remains subject to the five-year parole term on the discharged sentences.
Lewis sought mandamus relief requiring DOC to apply his earned time credits to his “one continuous sentence,” which he claimed comprised sentences from his prior convictions that he was incarcerated for as of the nunc pro tunc date and the sentence from his later conviction that the court backdated, even though, after the effective date of the later conviction, the DOC applied the credits to discharge the prior convictions. DOC moved to dismiss Lewis’s case for failure to state claims upon which relief can be granted under CRCP 12(b)(5). The district court granted the motion.
On appeal, Lewis argued that the DOC improperly calculated his second degree murder sentence and parole eligibility date (PED) under the one continuous sentence rule. Lewis asserted that because on January 28, 2016, he was still serving the sentences that were later discharged, the DOC must consider those sentences and the associated earned time credits when calculating his release date for the second degree murder conviction. He thus maintained that he is entitled to a writ of mandamus requiring the DOC to recalculate his PED by applying the one continuous sentence rule to the discharged sentences and the second degree murder sentence; that is, because the discharged sentences had an effective sentence date of May 17, 2013, the DOC should calculate his PED from that date and not from the nunc pro tunc date of his second degree murder sentence. Under CRS § 17-22.5-101, when an inmate is committed under several convictions with separate sentences, the DOC must construe all sentences as one continuous sentence. The DOC interprets “sentence” in this section to mean only an active sentence with a prison component. As a matter of law, when the DOC discharged Lewis’s earlier sentences on June 2, 2021, and he became subject only to the parole term, the earlier sentences were no longer operable. So, when the trial court sentenced him for second degree murder six months later, that sentence was his one continuous sentence and he remained subject to the parole term. The nunc pro tunc order did not impact Lewis’s discharged sentences because it could not revive them. Accordingly, the DOC did not have a clear duty to apply the discharged sentences to the calculation of Lewis’s second degree murder sentence, so Lewis did not state a claim for mandamus relief when he requested a new PED calculation.
Lewis also contended that the DOC was required to apply his previously awarded earned time credits to his second degree murder sentence because the trial court made that sentence retroactive to January 28, 2016. However, the application of such credits is within the DOC’s discretion, so Lewis was not entitled to mandamus relief compelling the DOC to apply his earned time credits in calculating his second degree murder sentence.
The judgment was affirmed.