PROVIDENCE — Are the state laws surrounding probation violations stacked against convicted criminals who serve their time and then attempt to move on and lead normal, productive lives?

Or do the laws, rather, give judges sufficient discretion to go easy on first-time offenders, but get tough on those who offend again?

The House Judiciary Committee heard both points of view yesterday, as it considered a bill that would hamper judges’ ability to impose long prison sentences on probation violators.

The committee heard from Richard Beverly, 40, of Pawtucket, who now owns a construction business that, he said proudly, did half a million dollars in business last year.

Beverly said he committed a robbery more than 20 years ago, was convicted of breaking and entering, and got a 10-year sentence. He was paroled after 2½ years, and had been out of prison for four years when someone implicated him in another robbery.

Beverly said he wasn’t involved in that crime, but was still found guilty based on police officers’ testimony. He was sent back to prison for another 7½ years, even though he had less than 4 years left on probation, he said.

Beverly had been back in prison for three years when he finally got access to the police tapes from the incident. He said the officers had testified in court that they’d seen two suspects, and said Beverly fit one of the suspect descriptions they’d relayed to the police dispatcher. But on the tapes, he said, the officers “never mentioned a second suspect,” that is, the one they said was Beverly.

Legislation from state Rep. David Segal, D-Providence, would address such cases by limiting the amount of time a judge can send a person back to prison for a probation violation. In the scenario Beverly described, Segal’s bill would have meant the judge could only send Beverly back to prison for the amount of time he had remaining on probation.

Segal has also introduced a bill to change state law so a defendant would automatically be exonerated in a probation-violation case if the defendant is acquitted of the charge that constituted the probation violation.

Testifying in favor of that bill, the state’s chief public defender, John J. Hardiman, described a case in which a defendant was accused of murder, and was on a three-year suspended sentence for a previous offense. The defendant was found not guilty by a jury, but the judge could not vacate the finding of a probation violation without consent from the attorney general’s office. The defendant stayed in prison, Hardiman said.

In the case of probation violators, state law also does not provide for automatic release from prison if a person has been accused of a crime, but a grand jury has failed to return an indictment or the state has failed to file information to support the charge.

Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch registered strong opposition to both bills. Lynch argued that when a judge sends a probation violator back to prison, the prison sentence is based not on the probation violation, but on the original offense for which the person was convicted. “When a convicted offender is sentenced to probation or suspended sentence, the offender makes a contract with the state that for the exchange of ‘conditional liberty’ instead of imprisonment, that offender will ‘keep the peace and be of good behavior’ for the continuum of their probation or suspended sentence period,” Lynch said in written testimony.

Lynch said cases such as the one Hardiman described — cases in which incarceration on a probation violation continues after a person is acquitted of the charge that constituted that violation, or after a grand jury fails to return an indictment — do not contain an inherent contradiction, because to obtain a criminal conviction, the state must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused committed a crime. Imprisonment on an earlier charge, triggered by a probation violation, only requires “reasonable satisfactory evidence” that the person failed to keep the peace and exhibit good behavior.

But the bill’s backers argue it’s that lower standard of proof that leads to stories such as the one Beverly told, in which people are punished for things they didn’t do.

“There are people in prison for crimes they have not been convicted of by a jury of their peers,” Segal said.

egudrais@projo.com