By Kevin Canfield
Tulsa World
TULSA, Okla. — Tulsa County sheriff’s officials believe that the Department of Corrections is legally obligated to pick up inmates from the Tulsa Jail within 45 days after they have been judged and sentenced.
The opinion is based on a 2007 Oklahoma County District Court ruling ordering DOC to pick up inmates at the Oklahoma County Jail within 45 days. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals lifted a stay in the case, and the lower court order has been in place ever since.
Undersheriff Tim Albin said the Sheriff’s Office believes the appeals court ruling set a precedent.
“This decision applies to every county in the state, not just Oklahoma County, and we want DOC held to the same standard,” he said.
Sheriff Stanley Glanz filed a petition in Tulsa County District Court last week asking the court to order the Department of Corrections to pick up all state inmates who are awaiting transfer to state prisons from the Tulsa Jail.
The petition cites the appellate court ruling.
The Tulsa Jail has been overcrowded for nearly a year. Friday’s inmate count was approximately 1,750, 36 over official capacity and 100 over the functional capacity of 1,650. That included 120 DOC inmates.
Albin said it’s not unusual for DOC-ready inmates to spend more than 180 days in the jail, so a requirement that DOC inmates be picked up within 45 days would help.
“As it stands now, we have no clue how many inmates they’re going to pull or who they are going to pull,” he said. “We don’t know whether they’re going to take males, females. This way we’ll know.”
DOC spokesman Jerry Massey said the state agency believes that the court’s ruling applies only to Oklahoma County because the lawsuit was filed there and specifically addressed conditions in the Oklahoma County Jail.
“We think it affects only Oklahoma County and that the statute addresses the larger issue” of when DOC inmates are to be transferred out of county jails.
State law does not require that DOC-ready inmates be transferred from county jails within a specific time.
In its 2007 ruling, however, the appellate court found that the lack of a specific time limitation does not allow for “the indefinite postponement or non-completion of an inmate’s transfer to DOC.”
The ruling goes on to say that the 45-day requirement imposed by the lower court complies with the appellate court’s “standard for reasonableness.”
The Oklahoma County case was filed by public defender Robert Ravitz on behalf of Kevin Merritt and other inmates in the then-overcrowded Oklahoma County Jail.
Ravitz argued that Merritt and other inmates were being held “for weeks, sometimes months” after valid judgments and sentences had been issued ordering them into DOC custody.
He also argued that failure to transport inmates to prison in a timely manner was a violation of state law and that inmates were being denied the “statutory benefits of D.O.C. custody not available to them while incarcerated in the county jail.”