CRIMINAL PROCEDURE
Court of Appeals of Alaska (2022)
Scott Anderson
In Mosquito v. State, 504 P.3d 918 (Alaska Ct. App. 2022), the court of appeals held that a parole compliance law only applied to compliance on or after the law took effect. (Id. at 922–23). The legislature amended the initial version of a law which provided 30 days of parole credit for 30 days of compliance so that it would apply to parolees who began parole before 2017, but it did not clarify whether the parole credit applied to compliance before 2017 as well. (Id. at 920). A parolee argued that the law required pre-2017 compliance credit, and the court of appeals agreed to decide the case even though the parolee had already served his time because a definitive decision would be in the public interest. (Id. at 919). The parolee relied on the retroactive language in the law which applied the law to people who began parole before 2017, as well as the fact that a similar law for probation explicitly applied only to probation time on or after the effective date. (Id. at 921). The court disagreed, reasoning that one aspect of the law could be retroactive without making the entire law retroactive. (Id.). The court also noted that the state legislature later passed a law clarifying that this law did not apply retroactively and the purpose of this law was to incentivize good behavior, so it would not make sense to apply it to past compliance. (Id. at 922). Thus, the court of appeals held that the parole compliance law providing 30 days of parole credit for 30 days of compliance applied only to compliance on or after the law took effect on January 1, 2017. (Id. at 922–23).