Article from Reason by C.J. Ciaramella.

What do Kim Kardashian, Joy Reid, and The Federalist have in common?

They’re all aghast at the case of Matthew Charles, a Tennessee man who was recently sent back to federal prison after two years of freedom when an appeals court ruled he had been released in error. Now criminal justice reformers and thousands of others are calling on President Donald Trump to commute Charles’ sentence.

Charles was released early from federal prison in 2016, having served 21 years of a 35-year sentence for selling crack to a police informant. Federal prosecutors then appealed, arguing that, because Charles had been originally been classified as a “career offender,” he was ineligible for the retroactive sentencing reductions put into place during the Obama presidency.

Despite a request from a federal judge asking prosecutors to drop their appeal, citing Charles’ “undisputed rehabilitation,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office pressed on. A federal appeals court ruled that, by the letter of the law, Charles should never have been released from prison.

Read the entire article at Reason.

Image Credit: By St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons