Mississippi’s appeals court on Tuesday reversed its previous decision to let stand an erroneous sentence that kept a man imprisoned five years longer than the maximum sentence.

In 2015, a trial court in Choctaw County sentenced Marcus Taylor to 15 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to conspiring to sell opioid painkillers. But the plea petition was erroneous; it incorrectly cited the maximum sentence for conspiracy to sell schedule III controlled substances as being 20 years. In fact, the maximum sentence was only five years, and should have ended in 2020. 

At the time of his sentence, nobody in court, including Taylor’s then attorney, realized the error, which only came to light when Taylor claimed eligibility for parole in 2023. In May this year, five years after he ought to have been released, the Mississippi Court of Appeals acknowledged that he was serving a sentence 10 years longer than the maximum. But it refused to rectify the error because Taylor, now 43, had applied for post-conviction relief after the three-year deadline to file had already passed. 

Now, the Mississippi Court of Appeals has withdrawn its own opinion and ordered Taylor’s release. 

“When a trial court acts outside the scope of its authority, its actions are void,” the Tuesday order says. “As over a century of precedent firmly establishes, our Judiciary has the inherent power to correct this error.”

Joe Hemleben, Taylor’s attorney, said, “The court made the right decision to correct, rather than condone this injustice.”