446
Opinion of the Court
cant factor entering into both the defendant's decision to plea bargain and the judge's calculation of the sentence to be imposed." Ibid.
Respondents argue that this reasoning does not apply to overcrowding credits because, when petitioner pleaded nolo contendere, he could not reasonably have expected to receive any such credits. The State, after all, could have alleviated the overcrowding problem in various ways: It could have built more prisons; it could have paroled a large category of nonviolent offenders; or it might have discontinued prosecution of some classes of victimless crimes. Respondents thus argue that the 1992 statute does not violate the Ex Post Facto Clause because, like the California amendment at issue in Morales, it "create[d] only the most speculative and attenuated possibility of producing the prohibited effect of increasing the measure of punishment for covered crimes." 514 U. S., at 509.16 Given the fact that this petitioner was actually awarded 1,860 days of provisional credits and the fact that those credits were retroactively canceled as a result of the 1992 amendment, we find this argument singularly unpersuasive. In this case, unlike in Morales, the actual course of events makes it unnecessary to speculate about what might have happened. The 1992 statute has unques-16 The support for our conclusion in Morales that the Act was merely speculative has no counterpart in this case. In Morales, we first relied on the fact that the amendment affected a class of prisoners—multiple murderers—who had little chance of being released on parole. Second, we found that the amendment did not alter the date of the prisoner's initial parole suitability hearing, and therefore only affected those initially deemed unsuitable for parole. Lastly, we recognized that the parole board "retain[ed] the authority to tailor the frequency of subsequent suitability hearings to the particular circumstances of the individual prisoner." 514 U. S., at 511. Simply put, we rejected the inmate's claim in Morales, because it could not be said with any certainty that the amended statutory scheme was more "onerous" than at the time of the crime. See id., at 509-510 (quoting Dobbert v. Florida, 432 U. S. 282, 294 (1977), for "refusing to accept 'speculation' that the effective punishment under a new statutory scheme would be 'more onerous' than under the old one").
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