OLYMPIA — State officials say the assistant attorney general who advised corrections officials they didn’t need to recalculate prisoners’ sentences after discovering a sentencing software error resigned on Thursday.
Ronda Larson submitted her resignation Thursday, Attorney General Bob Ferguson said. Larson will leave the office at the end of February, he said.
The move comes during multiple investigations into the error by Washington state’s Department of Corrections that resulted in wrongly calculated sentences for about 3 percent of the prison population. That led to the early release of more than 3,000 prisoners in the state since 2002.
A state Supreme Court ruling in 2002 required the Corrections Department to apply good-behavior credits earned in county jail to state prison sentences, authorities said. However, the programming fix ended up giving prisoners with sentencing enhancements too much so-called good time credit.