VANCOUVER — Convicted cocaine trafficker Jarrod Bacon has won an appeal of his 2017 parole revocation by arguing that he never should have been released in the first place.
The lawyer for the middle gangster brother argued that the Parole Board of Canada had miscalculated Bacon’s statutory release date, letting him out 16 months too early.
Most federal prisoners get statutory release after serving two-thirds of their sentence.
Bacon got out in February 2017, and was ordered to live in a halfway house, not associate with criminals, and stay out of drinking establishments.
Then last September, the parole board revoked his parole for violating those conditions after he was caught drinking in a strip club with another known criminal and then providing police with a false identity.
But he went to the parole board’s appeal division and won his argument about being let out too early, according to a ruling released Tuesday.
Parole board members Howard Bruce and Steven Dubreuil said in the Feb. 21 ruling that the board had no jurisdiction to revoke the parole, given that Bacon had been released too soon.
“You state that your file information indicated that you were serving a sentence of seven years and two months and that your sentence was actually nine years and two months,” the board members noted in their ruling. “You thus argue that you should not have been in the community on statutory release as your eligibility date was not Feb. 11, 2017, but rather June 14, 2018, and by extension that you should not have been revoked by the board.”
They continued by saying that in Bacon’s case “the board did not have the jurisdiction to review your conduct while on statutory release.”
The pair set aside the ruling from September.
A board representative did not respond to a request for additional information about whether Bacon will remain in jail until June.
Bacon, now 34, was convicted in 2012 of conspiracy to traffic cocaine after being caught in a sting by undercover police. He was originally sentenced to 12 years, minus time served, but that was increased to 14 years on appeal.
When Bacon was released last year, he objected to being forced to live in a halfway house. He claimed his life would be in danger if he was in a facility known to others in the criminal underworld. The parole board described Bacon as a member of the Red Scorpion gang with “considerable influence on the gang environment in British Columbia.”
His brother Jonathan was gunned down in Kelowna in August 2011. Three men from a rival gang are currently on trial for the murder. And his other brother Jamie remains in pre-trial custody charged with counselling the murder of a former associate in December 2008. Jamie Bacon had been charged in connection with the Surrey Six murders in October 2007, but those charges were stayed by a judge last December. The Crown is appealing that ruling.
