SEATTLE — A 45-year-old man in prison for life after killing a Bellevue woman in a DUI crash received a lighter sentence on Friday because of changes to the state’s three strikes law.
Judge North resentenced Robert Jackson Junior to 33 years in prison.
Jackson who joined the proceedings by video has a history with law enforcement that includes a mistake that came to light in 2015. That's when the state said due to a computer miscalculation, the Department of Corrections released more than 3,000 offenders early. Jackson was one of them.
Jackson was let out of prison four months before he should have been and for one family what followed was grief.
"On November 11th, 2015, Robert Jackson killed my daughter and left her two young boys without a mother,” said Jane Noel.
Noel says that shortly after Jackson was released, he killed her daughter, Lindsay Hill, in a drunk driving crash. Hill was Jackson’s girlfriend at the time, and she was a passenger in the car when he crashed in Bellevue. Jackson was charged with vehicular homicide and hit and run. He was convicted, and it was his third strike which meant life in prison without parole.
"Him in custody with no chance of parole gives me and my grandsons great comfort and a sense of closure and now this,” Noel said.
A law that went into effect last year calls for the resentencing of people incarcerated under the three strikes law if one of their strikes was second-degree robbery with no weapon or injury.
“Right now, I am asking the court to have mercy on my life,” Jackson told the court. “They incarcerated a good man for an accident that was not intentional at all, and I am sorry for it. And I will be sorry for the rest of my life.”