James Eason v. Walter Dunbar, California Director of Corrections, and Lawrence Wilson, Warden, California State Prison

This is an appeal from the denial by the district court, without an evidentiary hearing, of the appellant’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus. The district court assumed that the facts alleged in the appellant’s petition were true, but decided that the petition did not disclose a detention of the appellant in violation of his constitutional rights.

On January 3, 1947, the appellant pleaded guilty, in a Superior Court of the State of California, to two counts of first degree robbery. He was sentenced by the court to imprisonment “for the term prescribed by law.” The “term prescribed by law,” California Penal Code § 213, for first degree robbery was “not less than five years.” The appellant’s claim in this present proceeding is that his 1947 sentence was imprisonment for five years; that he learned, at some time after 1951, that the California authorities were regarding his sentence as a life sentence; that the California legislature in 1951 amended § 671 of the penal code to read, as it now reads, as follows:

The appellant claims that he is now being held as a prisoner for life pursuant to the 1951 amendment of Penal Code § 671; that that amendment, as applied to him,…