Herein described is a system and a method of detecting and correcting data bit errors using a sequence of one or more codewords transmitted through a communication channel without intersymbol interference. Each of the one or more codewords incorporates or encodes one or more parity bits. The codewords are processed by a Non-ISI Meta-Viterbi detector that utilizes a Meta-Viterbi algorithm. The Non-ISI Meta-Viterbi detector comprises an event weight processor, a computational circuitry, a parity syndrome calculator, and an error correction circuitry. The Non-ISI Meta-Viterbi detector receives an output generated from a symbol detector and processes the received output using a trellis having 2t states. In a representative embodiment, the overall implementation complexity of the Non-ISI Meta-Viterbi detector is bounded by no more than χ+(⅔)2t2t operations, wherein t represents the number of parity bits used in a codeword and χ represents codeword length in bits.