Escape or "Out of Bounds" ??

California's Supreme Court has upheld an appeals court's decision to throw out the "three strikes" conviction of a man charged with escaping from a Soledad prison.


Court records said the case began in the early hours of June 18, 2008, when inmate Robin Bailey lifted the bars from his cell window after he'd carefully sawed them off with a hacksaw blade.  He had arranged a lump of clothing under the blanket in his upper bunk until it looked more less like the shape of a sleeping man, the records state.  On the back of his prison-issued denim jacket, Bailey had "blackened out" the bold yellow letters reading "CDC PRISONER" until they were barely visible.

Using tools taken from a prison maintenance area, he cut through a metal screen and four fences.

That's when he was stopped in his tracks.

Bailey didn't step outside to freedom — instead, he "had actually sawed his way further into the facility," a high court justice later wrote.
Around 7:30 a.m. that morning, correctional officers discovered the prison's maintenance area had been broken into and tools were missing. One officer noticed a cut in the fence.

About 20 minutes later, a gunner on the roof spotted Bailey hiding behind a box, "darting his head back and forth," according to court documents. After the officers took him back into custody, they found wire strippers and a hacksaw blade nearby, and more blades were later discovered in Bailey's cell.

Months later, Bailey argued in Monterey County court that he was only trying to get closer to an inmate in another part of the prison to assault him, and therefore he shouldn't be convicted of escape.

"It was no escape at all," he testified. "When I reached the maintenance area, I reached my final destination as far as leaving out of my cell."

Local prosecutors argued that even though he never left the prison grounds, Bailey "was not where he was authorized to be. ... Even if you believe that he only left his cell so he could go stab somebody, it was still an escape under the law."

Court records indicate Bailey admitted in letters to his children and to prison officials that he had indeed planned to escape. A sergeant testified that an accomplice was supposed to pick him up. The plan failed, the sergeant said, because it took Bailey "so long to cut out of the G wing fence" and sawing through the metal was louder than he'd expected.

Bailey was convicted of escape "without force or violence" in Monterey County court.
Because he had five previous serious felony convictions, he was sentenced to the mandatory 25 years to life under California's three strikes law.  He appealed the verdict.
The appeals court judges, who chose to rely on the "plain language" of the escape statute, ruled that Bailey had not, indeed, left the prison's outer boundary. But then the legal issues got stickier.
The state Attorney General's Office asked the court to reduce Bailey's conviction to attempted escape, arguing that an attempt is assumed to be included in the charge of escape.

"This, however, is not the law," Associate Justice Kathryn Werdegar wrote after the state Supreme Court reviewed the case. "Attempt to escape contains a specific intent element not present in escape."

Bailey's actions, Werdegar wrote, may constitute an attempt — assuming, she said, that was his intention — and they may violate prison rules, but he was specifically convicted of escape and his actions did not add up to "a completed escape."

The high court's unpublished opinion was filed Thursday.
Bailey has since been transferred to another state prison in Vacaville.