Fleeting taste of home, liberty

“It’s over,’’ the 34-year-old convicted drug dealer told his mother, who had taken a flight from her home in Texas. “It’s over.’’

But it wasn’t. A few hours later, Rios and his wife say, they were in her Clinton apartment preparing to eat a lunch of rice and beans cooked by his mother, who is 63, when the doorbell rang. Six officers from the state Department of Correction and a Clinton police officer crowded around him and said he had to return to Boston because of a mistake. They gave little explanation.

Outside the apartment, the officers handcuffed Rios and drove him not to Boston but to MCI-Concord, a medium-security prison, Rios said. Once he arrived, he said, he had to strip, put on a gray jumpsuit, and enter a cell, where a prison administrator delivered stunning news: Someone had misread Rios’s sentencing document when he entered the prison system in 1996 and hit a “3’’ instead of a “4’’ on a computer keyboard, incorrectly making him eligible to receive time off for good behavior.

Rios actually had 11 more months to spend in custody, because he had served only 14 years and one month of a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years.

There was more bad news.

Under such a sentence, Rios was ineligible to return to the halfway house where he had lived almost four months while working at a Chelsea supermarket bagging groceries. So Rios was moved to Northeastern Correctional Center in Concord, a minimum-security prison with a fence topped with barbed wire.

“I was in shock,’’ Rios said Wednesday in a prison interview. “You have all these people convicted of violent crime who earn good time, get paroled, get out. I worked hard not only to earn good time but to prepare myself to go home.’’

Relatives and supporters of Rios and advocates for prisoners say the bizarre episode illustrates more than just how an errant keystroke can turn someone’s life upside down. It also demonstrates how controversial, decades-old mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenses fail to recognize that some inmates are ready to live beyond prison walls.

Prison officials, who appeared apologetic to Rios during the recent Globe interview, do not dispute that but say their hands are tied. “Due to his mandatory minimum sentence, the Department of Correction is unable to expedite his release,’’ Harold W. Clarke, the department commissioner, said Thursday in a one-sentence statement.

Clarke has publicly supported State House efforts to change mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug crimes.

Almost one in four of the state’s 10,263 criminally convicted inmates, or 2,366, are serving mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent crimes, according to the state. Such sentences, Clarke has said, have caused prison overcrowding and cost Massachusetts millions. (Some 1,734 of the total prison population have mandatory minimum sentences for violent crimes.)

A legislative conference committee is considering bills to relax such sentences. But the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association opposes that for drug traffickers, saying the punishments “provide penalties that are uniform and predictable, and promote truth in sentencing.’’

Rios had no criminal convictions before a Worcester jury found him guilty in 1996 of cocaine trafficking, and he was a model prisoner, according to his family.

While at medium-security MCI-Shirley for 10 years, he entered a program for inmates who fixed computers and donated them to local schools. He rose to become the inmate network administrator and hoped to do similar work after he was freed on April 15.

For eight months before his release, Rios worked at Market Basket in Chelsea and was highly regarded, according to Amir Pajazetovic, a manager. Pajazetovic said he could not believe the state put him back in prison.

This week, Rios’s sister, Dennisse Rios-Blood, of Tucson, wrote Governor Deval Patrick “begging for a little mercy.’’ She implored him to commute Rios’s sentence before her brother’s new official release date of March 26, 2011.

Patrick, who supports repealing mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug crimes, said yesterday through a spokeswoman, Kimberly Haberlin, that he has not seen the letter. But requests for commutation must first go to the Governor’s Council and then the Advisory Board of Pardons, which makes a recommendation to him. That process can take a year.

Rios is among 19 state inmates who have been freed at the wrong time over the past seven years, according to state statistics. All of the others, however, had been held too long, including a mentally ill prisoner who served more than four years beyond his rightful sentence.

After a Globe Spotlight Team report on the first 14 sentence mistakes in April 2007, the prison system announced it was scrapping its system for calculating inmate sentences and devising a new method.

Nonetheless, five more inmates were subsequently released at the wrong time, including Rios and another prisoner who was freed on the same day, 56 days late, according to state records. Both April 15 errors were discovered by a department unit responsible for catching sentence miscalculations, according to Diane Wiffin, a correction department spokeswoman.

A soft-spoken man with flecks of gray in his dark hair, Rios grew up in Leominster and dropped out of school in the ninth grade.

At age 19, he was arrested with several other men on Aug. 1, 1995, in a State Police drug raid at a Super 8 motel in Leominster. Rios was allegedly spotted near a toilet where some cocaine had been flushed.

He was convicted at trial, as a “joint venturer,’’ of helping to traffic at least 214 grams of cocaine that day and the month before.

Rios and his appellate lawyer, Wendy Sibbison, of Greenfield, say he was not a drug trafficker but hung out with them.

Based on the quantity of cocaine and the requirements of the state’s drug laws, the judge had no choice but to sentence Rios to a mandatory minimum of 15 years, Sibbison said.

But soon after Rios entered prison, officials began deducting days from his sentence for participating in vocational and educational programs, according to his records. Rios said he never questioned it, and advocates for prisoners are not surprised.

“The Department of Correction has an entire unit devoted to calculating these issues,’’ said Barbara Dougan, the Massachusetts project director for Families Against Mandatory Minimums. “I don’t think it’s fair to put the burden on him for not understanding the intricacies of our sentencing law.’’

Rios’s return to prison caused considerable upheaval in his life. He and his wife, Berenice Rios, were married by a justice of the peace in 2008 in a prison visiting room after meeting through a Christian organization. They had a bigger wedding planned in Texas six days after his release, but had to postpone it.

For now, Rios said he keeps busy by working in a prison auto-body shop, and he seemed remarkably composed. “I’m still trying to learn to better myself,’’ he said. “It does nobody any good, especially me and my family, to have a bad attitude.’’

Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com.