Background
Andrew Toms was charged in Champaign County with aggravated battery with a firearm and related offenses arising from an August 2020 shooting. On September 20, 2022, on the day trial was set to begin, Toms entered a fully negotiated guilty plea to one count of aggravated battery with a firearm. Under the agreement, the State dismissed three additional felony counts and a misdemeanor charge, and Toms received a 15-year IDOC sentence at 85%. Critically, the plea expressly included 762 days of credit for pretrial custody — a figure Toms himself corrected mid-proceeding when the prosecutor misstated it as 262 days.
Nearly two years later, Toms filed a pro se petition for mandamus arguing he was entitled to 2,256 days of credit rather than the 762 days specified in his plea, claiming 1,524 days were improperly withheld. He grounded his argument solely in the County Jail Good Behavior Allowance Act (730 ILCS 130/1 et seq.), which provides good-behavior credit to persons serving fixed-term sentences in a county jail.
The circuit court denied the petition, ruling that Toms had received the benefit of his bargain under a fully negotiated plea agreement and that contract principles barred any unilateral modification, citing the Illinois Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in People v. Wells. Toms timely appealed.
The Court’s Holding
The Fifth District affirmed on two independent grounds. First, the County Jail Good Behavior Allowance Act simply does not apply to Toms’s situation. By its plain terms, the Act covers persons who “commence a sentence of confinement in a county jail for a fixed term of imprisonment.” Toms was not serving a fixed county-jail sentence — he was in pretrial custody awaiting trial and was ultimately sentenced to the Illinois Department of Corrections. The Act therefore provided no legal basis for additional credit.
Second, and independently, the court held that People v. Wells, 2024 IL 129402, bars Toms’s claim. Under Wells, a fully negotiated plea agreement is treated as a complete and final expression of the parties’ bargain, and neither party may unilaterally seek modification. Because 762 days of credit was an express, unambiguous term of Toms’s plea — confirmed by Toms’s own mid-hearing correction — he was bound by that term and was not entitled to additional credit not included in the agreement.
Key Takeaways
- The County Jail Good Behavior Allowance Act applies only to defendants serving fixed-term sentences in a county jail, not to defendants who were held in a county facility as pretrial detainees and later sentenced to the IDOC.
- Under People v. Wells, when a fully negotiated plea agreement expressly specifies the amount of sentencing credit, that figure is a binding contractual term — courts will not award additional credit outside the agreement’s four corners.
- A defendant’s own in-court correction of the credit amount (Toms interjecting “No, no” when 262 days was misstated) can reinforce the conclusion that the specific figure was a material, negotiated term rather than an incidental recitation.
- Illinois courts may take judicial notice sua sponte of records from other pending appeals involving the same party when doing so aids disposition of the case at hand.
Why It Matters
This decision reinforces the strict contractual framework Illinois courts apply to fully negotiated plea agreements following the Illinois Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling in Wells. Defense counsel negotiating plea agreements must treat every sentencing-credit figure as a material term — once a specific number is incorporated into a fully negotiated plea, post-sentencing efforts to obtain additional credit will be foreclosed regardless of what statutory schemes might otherwise provide.
The opinion also clarifies the limited reach of the County Jail Good Behavior Allowance Act, confirming that pretrial detainees who are ultimately sentenced to the IDOC fall outside the statute entirely. Practitioners should not rely on the Act as a vehicle for challenging credit calculations in cases where the defendant’s eventual sentence runs to a state correctional facility rather than a county jail.