Is the Washington DOC to blame for a deadly crash?

Who’s to blame when a man who was mistakenly released from prison is involved in another crime?

That’s the question KIRO Radio’s Mike Salk and Rachel Belle tried to answer following a report Monday that a Washington state prisoner who was among the thousands of prisoners mistakenly released early because of a computer glitch was charged with vehicular homicide.

Gov. Jay Inslee announced that a software coding error has wrongly released as many as 3,200 offenders early since 2002. Robert Jackson was one of those individuals, let out of prison four months too soon, after being convicted of robbery with a deadly weapon. He allegedly fled from a Nov. 11 wreck in Bellevue that killed his girlfriend and has been charged with vehicular homicide and felony hit-and-run. If not for the glitch, he’d have been imprisoned until Dec. 6.

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Salk and Belle agreed that while there is no doubting the immense tragedy of the situation, it might not be fair to connect the Department of Corrections’ error with the blame, likening it to the butterfly effect or “Sliding Door” phenomena &#8212 where any single decision could alter future outcomes.

Rachel Belle: That goes for big decisions like what college you go to or if you decide to walk down the street and get coffee, you could get hit by a car.

Mike Salk: Yeah, there’s a sliding doors element to this story. And while, look, I feel horrible for the family, and it’s a tragic case, I’m finding it hard to truly connect the two stories… It makes me upset, it makes me mad. I hate the fact that this would happen to a young boy (who allegedly saw the dead victim) or to a woman who died. It’s awful that there was someone who came out of jail and did this. It’s even worse that he should have been in jail during the time it happened. But it’s not like he was supposed to be in jail for the rest of his life. He was supposed to be released (four months) later.

Belle noted that Jackson reportedly had a lengthy criminal history and other traffic-related offenses, and that his re-offending might have just been a matter of time.

RB: He could have gotten out months later; the same thing could have happened.

MS: Something worse could have happened. He could have crashed into tons of people and caused even more death. The sliding doors part of it makes it difficult for me to be even more upset at the DOC. I’m upset at Robert Jackson, I’m upset that there was a person who went out and committed crimes, got let out of jail and then committed another even more heinous crime, and I hope he’s gonna go back to jail for a much longer period of time than he was there the first time. But it wasn’t like he was serving a life sentence and got out 25 years earlier because of a glitch. He got out a month earlier and my guess is something like this would have or could have happened &#8212 it had nothing to do with the glitch.

Belle added Jackson is the first of the 3,200 inmates known to have re-offended when they were supposed to be in prison.

“Who knows if other things will come out,” she said. “I’m sure this was kind of dug up after the Jay Inslee mistake was brought to light, but, like you say, it’s tragic either way you look at it.”