Alston

We must decide whether state prison officials had a clearly established duty to seek out original court records in response to a prisoner’s unsupported assertion that he was being overdetained in violation of the United States Constitution.

I

A

Cornelius Alston was twice sentenced to a term of imprisonment in the Hawaii state prison system under two separate, unrelated sentencing orders. He was convicted of second-degree robbery in 1991. While on parole from the robbery sentence in 1997, he was convicted of two counts of promoting a dangerous drug and was sentenced to ten years in prison on the first count and five on the second. The judgment, issued November 20, 1997, stated: “Sentences are to run concurrently.” Alston’s release date was calculated as August 4, 2007, by the Offender Management Office of Hawaii’s Department of Public Safety (“DPS”).

On December 10, 1997, the sentencing judge ordered that Alston’s sentences for the drug offenses “run concurrent with each other and any other sentence Defendant is serving.” There is no evidence that DPS ever received a copy of this order.

Until 2005, DPS had a practice of treating sentences issued at different times for…