Every night one of his neighbors was scheduled to be executed by the state of North Carolina, Glen Edward “Ed” Chapman would look up at the window slit in his cell and say to the black sky, “I’ll see you again.”

Saying goodbye was hard. Chapman and his peers who were also condemned to die formed a small community within the prison system. And whenever the state executed someone, that community would shrink by one member.

“I was close to those guys on death row,” Chapman said. “They were like family.”

One of the people killed while Chapman was on death row was Ernest Basden, sentenced to death in 1993 in a murder-for-hire scheme. After he got to prison, Basden stopped using alcohol and drugs and found God. His family had traveled around the state to build public pressure to convince then-Governor Mike Easley to grant Basden clemency and spare his life.

They failed. One cold winter evening, Basden’s family huddled in the mailroom of Central Prison in Raleigh to say goodbye, able to freely talk with and touch him in the last hours of his life.

“My mom had not hugged him in 10 years,” said Kristin Stapleford, Basden’s niece.

Basden was executed in the early morning of Dec. 6, 2002.

More than 20 years later, Chapman is on the other side of the bars, having been exonerated and released from prison, and is now joining Basden’s family in again urging a North Carolina governor to spare the lives of the men and women sentenced to death.

“We promised him that we would not give up the fight, that we would fight to see the death penalty abolished in North Carolina,” Stapleford said.

Stapleford and Chapman are members of a coalition of more than 20 social and criminal justice organizations and religious leaders calling on Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, to commute the sentences of the people on North Carolina’s death row to prison terms before he leaves office at the end of 2024. A Bolts and NC Newsline analysis shows there are currently 136 people on this death row—the fifth-largest number in the U.S.—whose lives would be spared if Cooper were to act. 

Commutation is one form of clemency, a broad power most U.S. governors have to change a person’s criminal conviction or prison sentence, most often due to individual circumstances of a person’s incarceration; whether they were convicted as a youth, for example. Former North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford, who held the office from 1961 to 1965, saw his clemency power as a form of grace.

“It falls to the governor to blend mercy with justice, as best he can, involving human as well as legal considerations, in the light of all circumstances after the passage of time, but before justice is allowed to overrun mercy in the name of the power of the state,” Sanford wrote in 1961, after shortening the sentences of 29 prisoners through executive clemency.

But what Cooper is being asked to do now is much broader.

This coalition of activists is calling on him to commute death sentences as an act of racial justice. In North Carolina—a state where people were legally enslaved for more than 100 years—just over 22 percent of residents are Black, but over half of those on death row are Black or African American, according to figures provided to Bolts and NC Newsline through a public records request. Of the dozen people who have been sentenced to death in North Carolina and later found innocent, 11 are people of color.

Advocates are now hoping Cooper will offer clemency for the 136 people on death row en masse, regardless of the circumstances of the crimes of which they are convicted, because of the injustices of the death penalty and North Carolina’s criminal legal system at large.

Granting clemency would not mean that the people on death row would be released from prison, nor would it mean the abolition of the death penalty going forward. The state constitution only grants the governor discretion to shorten a sentence as he sees fit. Cooper could, for instance, commute the sentences to life without the possibility of parole. Or, he could sentence them to life and leave the possibility of parole open. 

It’s similar to a petition made by advocates in Louisiana, who earlier this year asked Governor John Bel Edwards to commute the sentences of more than 50 people on that state’s death row. So far this mass request has been blocked by the Louisiana Board of Pardons. 

While North Carolina governors frequently granted clemency in the late 1970s until 2000, commutations became rare starting in 2001.

Executions have slowed as well—North Carolina hasn’t executed anyone since 2006, and North Carolina’s district attorneys pursue the death penalty at a much lower rate than in years past. But with Republicans controlling the state supreme court and holding supermajorities in the House and Senate, many anti-death penalty advocates are concerned that they could restart, especially if a Republican moves into the executive mansion.

The death penalty has been raised as a talking point in early debates among Republican gubernatorial candidates and has been an issue in previous elections as well. In 2017, top Republican legislators demanded Cooper and Attorney General Josh Stein, a Democrat now running for governor, resume executions after four prisoners at Pasquotank Correctional Institution were charged with killing four employees in a failed escape attempt. 

Two of those four men have since been sentenced to death.

A new governor couldn’t simply sign a slip of paper and reopen the execution chamber since the courts are the reason for the pause in executions. There are ongoing legal battles over the application of the Racial Justice Act, landmark legislation that gave people an opportunity to get off death row if they could prove racial discrimination had played a role in their death sentence. Democrats passed that bill in 2009, Republicans repealed it in 2013. Then, when Democrats controlled the state supreme court in 2020, it struck down the retroactive repeal of the law, allowing the claims that had already been filed to continue to play out through the present day. 

But conservatives now control the state supreme court, and advocates worry they could revisit that ruling, clearing a path to resume executions. There are also still legal questions about North Carolina’s protocols for using lethal injection drugs to carry out executions, though advocates worry North Carolina Republicans could find a way around that, as they have tried to in South Carolina and Alabama. 

Republican control of the other branches of state government has given those opposed to the death penalty a sense of urgency. At a recent rally, Kristie Puckett, the senior project manager of Forward Justice, told a crowd of around 200 supporters that Cooper was their last hope because of North Carolina’s current political climate.

“We can’t trust our legislature. We can’t trust the courts,” she said. “And so we are forced to rely on Governor Cooper.”

The coalition has staged marches, written letters and met with the governor’s staff. They’ve held film screenings on the “Racist Roots” of North Carolina’s death penalty and handed out postcards so residents can write Cooper directly. Soon, they’ll post billboards and travel to communities across the state to build support for the campaign as it enters its final year before Cooper leaves office.

“Our commutations campaign is very focused on 2024 because we have a sense of urgency that executions could resume, as they did in the federal system,” said Noel Nickle, executive director of the North Carolina Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. “I am concerned that the political climate of our state has become more entrenched in policies and practices that would lead to executions resuming.”

Cooper, who has had a mixed record on commutations, has been pressured for years by criminal justice reformers, many of whom have gathered outside the governor’s mansion annually calling on him to use his clemency powers. Cooper didn’t grant any commutation until March 2022—two years into his second term—shortening the prison terms of three people who committed crimes when they were children. In December 2022, after three weeks of protests outside his home, Cooper commuted the sentences of six more people.

So far, Cooper has made no public comment on the 136 currently on death row. In 2017, after the murders at the prison in Pasquotank, a spokesperson for the governor said Cooper supported the death penalty and had a “long history of upholding it” during his 16 years as attorney general. The governor’s spokesperson did not answer recent questions from Bolts and NC Newsline on whether he still supports the death penalty or if he was considering commuting North Carolina’s death sentences.

Puckett credited the annual campaign for getting Cooper to issue commutations last year. She doesn’t think he would have exercised clemency otherwise.

“That’s the only reason he’s doing something: because he’s forced to do something,” she said.

A lasting legacy

The North Carolina governor’s office is weak by design but clemency is one area where the executive branch has broad authority to commute prison sentences without approval from a parole board.

“This is a rare policy area where the governor has power, can exercise it, and doesn’t need to ask anyone else for permission,” said Christopher Cooper, a professor of political science at Western Carolina University (who has no relation to the governor).

Even so, it would be novel for a Democratic governor—especially in the South—to use their power to unilaterally empty their state’s death row. Louisiana’s John Bel Edwards, tried to grant the mass clemency request he received before he left office, but he was ultimately thwarted by the state board of pardons.

Cooper has already laid the groundwork for clemency on a systemic level. In June 2020, just after a white Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd, the governor established a Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice that he asked to make recommendations for ending racial disparities in the criminal justice system. One of the subjects they tackled was the death penalty.

Ken Rose, who was a senior attorney at the Durham-based Center for Death Penalty Litigation for 35 years before retiring in 2017, gave a presentation to members of the task force in November 2020 showing two strikingly similar maps of the United States: One showing where Black people were lynched across the nation between 1883 and 1940, an another marking the execution of Black defendants between 1972 and 2020. 

Later that year, the task force published a report noting the death penalty has a “relationship with white supremacy.” They did not recommend abolishing capital punishment, but they did propose ways to narrow its use. 

The task force also identified commutation as a remedy to address injustice, suggesting officials examine commuting sentences of people sentenced to death before July 2001, when North Carolina had a “quasi-mandatory” death penalty law that forced prosecutors to seek a death sentence in capital cases. More than two thirds of the people on the state’s death row are there because of that law, according to Rose.

“You have a lot of people on death row, still on death row, who wouldn’t be there if DAs had a choice for pleading cases to life,” he said.

Following another recommendation of the task force, Cooper created the Juvenile Sentence Review Board in 2021, which reviewed the sentences of people who committed crimes as children and recommended suitable applicants for clemency. Of the nine commutations Cooper granted in 2022, five were based on recommendations from that board. In a press release, his office acknowledged science showing children’s brains are different than adults’, and that state and federal laws treat minors differently in sentencing in criminal cases.

“As people become adults, they can change, turn their lives around, and engage as productive members of society,” Cooper said in a press release.

Kerwin Pittman, one of the members of the task force, thinks Cooper’s own political ambitions could make him reticent to use clemency more broadly. At 66 years old, he is a relatively young politician and could have decades left in public office.

“To just issue a blanket clemency to everybody, or commute everybody, he may not feel that is in his best interest,” Pittman said. “I’m sure he doesn’t want to make a misstep that’s going to come back and bite him.”

But this reluctance is frustrating to advocates who see Cooper as wasting his authority to commute sentences as he sees fit. 

“Why do you work so hard and be so shrewd to get to the top just to piss the power away?” Puckett asked. 

The exonerees

More than 20 organizations from across the state and country are working with the North Carolina Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty to persuade Cooper to use his clemency powers. Members of the European Union also came to Raleigh in November to meet with Cooper and Attorney General Stein to talk about the death penalty.

But it is exonerees like Alfred Rivera and Ed Chapman who are leading the charge—men who intimately know the hopelessness of death row but escaped it once they proved they should have never been convicted. 

Rivera is both a victim of violence and wrongful incarceration. After his father was killed in a robbery when Rivera was a toddler, his mother, left alone with five children to care for, started drinking. She died from cirrhosis of the liver seven years after her husband passed away. 

“This is the toll that it took on her,” Rivera said.

Two decades later, a jury sent Rivera to death row, convicting him for murder. But he was exonerated in two years, after the state supreme court ruled he should get a new trial because jurors hadn’t heard evidence suggesting he’d been framed. 

Chapman, meanwhile, spent 14 years on North Carolina’s death row before being exonerated in 2008 after a judge ordered a new trial and a district attorney dropped the charges. He had been sentenced to death for two murders he didn’t commit. There were serious issues with the investigation; police had withheld evidence, and a detective later faced perjury charges for lying on the stand.

Chapman struggled after he came home. He lost a job, isolated himself and used drugs and alcohol to cope. He moved to Florida, staying in a spate of recovery houses before sleeping on the streets for about a year. 

He felt guilty about how he was living, like he was wasting the second chance he’d been given. “I let those people down that fought for me,” he said.

The guilt, shame and remorse compelled Chapman to join the commutation campaign after he moved to Durham in 2022. Now he is fighting for a cause bigger than himself.

“I’m trying to be better than I was before,” he said.

On Aug. 19, 2023, almost 17 years to the day since North Carolina’s last execution, Chapman and the coalition met at Pullen Memorial Baptist Church and marched more than a mile to Central Prison to honor those executed there.

The crowd of roughly 200 held a vigil to remember the 43 people executed by the state since 1984. Dozens of people held signs with the names of those who were killed in the execution chamber within the prison behind them. They also called for an end to death row, chanting at cars driving past them on Western Boulevard.

It was the first time Chapman had been back at the prison since getting off death row. He got chills standing outside, knowing what it was like to live on the other side of the metal doors, behind the barbed wire. But he found strength standing beside death penalty abolition advocates and people like Rivera, those sentenced to death for something they didn’t do.

“I felt that the cause for me being there outweighed my anxiety,” Chapman said.

Innocent people like Chapman and Rivera are easy cases to make to the public. It is harder—and potentially poses a greater political risk—to show grace to those who did their crimes.

Rose has represented many people on death row. He’s found that those individuals can be caring and selfless, thoughtful and resilient. They can also struggle under the weight of the mental illness and the trauma they’ve endured. 

“I look at them differently because I’ve gotten to know them,” Rose said. “I think people can do really terrible things. I think people can do monstrous things. But I do not think that that makes them a monster.”

That is a sentiment shared by Lynda Simmons, another member of the commutations coalition. Simmons’ son Brian was murdered by a teenager named James Moore, in 2004. Simmons struggled for years with relentless waves of grief over Brian’s death. But in time, trying to make sense of a senseless act, she connected with Moore, who wound up serving 15 years for second-degree murder. The two traded letters, helping one another process the trauma and grief they’d both endured. 

As they were communicating through the mail, Simmons was also doing restorative justice work with people on death row. She’d share her story with the men at Central Prison, helping those sentenced to death connect with someone who had lost a loved one to an act of violence. There, working with men like Moore who had gone to prison when they were teenagers, she could see that Moore had done something terrible, but that action didn’t define his entire humanity. 

“Listening to them, I knew that when James murdered my son, that’s what he did,” Simmons said. “I believe with everything in me, that’s not who he was.”

Simmons has always been against the death penalty, but that belief was crystallized when she went to Moore’s sentencing hearing in 2005. When she walked into the courtroom and saw Brian and Moore’s friends and family on opposite sides, she saw the impact of the shooting echoing across generations and familial lines, lives irrevocably changed by a single violent act.

“I knew that they were victims, too,” Simmons said. “They didn’t shoot my son. And I don’t believe that they raised James to shoot my son.”

“I do believe that human beings are able to change,” she continued. “And when we execute people, we rob them of the chance to change.”

Politics vs. reality

Members of the North Carolina Republican Party have long campaigned on their support of the death penalty.

In 2010, the State Republican Party sent out a mailer slamming Majority Leader Hugh Holliman, a Democrat whose teenage daughter was raped and murdered, as a “Criminal Coddler” for helping pass the Racial Justice Act, legislation that offered people a chance to get off death row—but not, as the flier erroneously claimed, out of prison—if they could prove racial discrimination had affected their charging or sentencing. 

The front of the flier read: “Meet your new neighbors. You’re not going to like them very much.”

On the back were mugshots of two men sentenced to death: Wayne Laws and Henry McCollum. 

McCollum did eventually get out of prison, not because of the Racial Justice Act but because he was innocent, like Chapman and Rivera. 

Public support for the death penalty has declined since its peak in 1994, when 80 percent of Americans said they were in favor of capital punishment, and has been on the decline ever since. Now, just over half of Americans support the death penalty.

But in 2010, North Carolina’s politicking over capital punishment worked: Holliman lost the election, as did other Democrats targeted for their support of the Racial Justice Act. Rose said it was impossible to determine whether the misleading flier swung the elections, but it doesn’t change the fact that it was a politically salient issue at the time.

“There was a lot of political use of the death penalty for a long, long time, in a way that arguably shaped elections,” said Rose.

Today, the exonerations of people like Rivera, Chapman and McCollum are eroding public support for the death penalty further, said Rose. But that doesn’t mean Republican politicians won’t bring it up when it is to their political benefit. It resurfaced in 2017 because of the prison escapes, and has been mentioned this election cycle. 

During the first Republican gubernatorial debate, one candidate called for resuming executions under the death penalty. Lawyer and businessman Bill Graham polled second in the governor’s race a few weeks after releasing an ad advocating for the death penalty for drug dealers and human traffickers. (He still trailed the Republican frontrunner, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, and 42 percent of respondents were undecided, but the director of the Meredith Poll told WRAL the ads seemed to be helping Graham.)

“As a prosecutor, I went after violent criminals,” Graham said in the ad. “As governor, I’ll put ‘em in jail or in the ground.”

The Republican-controlled state supreme court has also shown a willingness to overturn precedents set by previous Democratic majorities. Earlier this year they issued new rulings on partisan gerrymandering and the state’s voter ID law, reversing Supreme Court opinions written in 2022, when Democrats were in control.

“If you were an ordinary court and you were honoring precedent and you were trying to build on that precedent and navigate that precedent, then they have a long, long way to go before they restart executions,” Rose said. “But if what you wanted to do is resume executions and kill the people that are currently on death row, you could do that, but you’d have to ignore the precedent.”

But the politics of the death penalty are often divorced from reality. The most common outcome of a death sentence in North Carolina isn’t an execution, but a long process of appeals that leads to a reversal of a sentence, said Frank Baumgartner, a political science professor at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a national expert on the death penalty.

“These things are reversed not because somebody put a paperclip on the wrong side of the paper,” Baumgartner said. “They’re reversed because evidence was withheld or because improper instructions were given to the jury, or, you know, something serious.”

Baumgartner maintains an internal database on capital punishment in North Carolina. According to his figures, 411 people have received death sentences since 1976; 190 of them, or 46 percent have been overturned.

Nationally, more than 8,500 people have been sentenced to death since 1972, Baumgartner said, wondering, “What are the odds that every one of them is guilty as charged?”

On death row, community

To live on North Carolina’s death row is to be constantly reminded of one’s mortality. The men housed on death row in Central Prison in Raleigh, can spend years, decades, entire generations together in their communal pod. Most of the people on death row have been there for 20 or 30 years. They grow old together; sometimes they die of natural causes. (There are two women on death row, incarcerated at a different prison.)

“Our memories of the dead become death row lore, significant to us, living on in our hearts and minds and dreams. We live together, die together, mourn together, and remember,” said Lyle May, who has been on death row since 1999.

That quote is included in “Bone Orchard: Reflections on Life Under Sentence of Death,” a book written by one of May’s peers, George Wilkerson, who was sentenced to death in 2006. The book, co-written with Robert Johnson, a professor of justice, law and criminology at American University, is a firsthand account of life on North Carolina’s death row. 

Most states keep those on death row in segregation, meaning the incarcerated are locked in their cells most of their days, for decades, until they win their appeals, die or are executed. But North Carolina’s death row is unusual in that it houses condemned people together. The consistent group setting makes people with death sentences in the state particularly suitable for commutation, Johnson argued, saying they have had time to develop social and emotional skills since they spend so much time out of their cells.

“You don’t get the feeling of a pressure cooker on North Carolina’s death row,” Johnson told Bolts and Newsline. “There’s the overshadowing threat of death, but there’s a lot of community.”

There are risks to the incarcerated if their death sentences are commuted. Breaking up the community established on death row, for one. There are also implications for their appeals. People on death row in North Carolina are entitled to attorneys in appellate proceedings. Plus, Johnson said he thinks people facing death sentences typically get more attention on their cases from criminal justice reformers and the media, compared to people serving life. 

“That is definitely a valid concern, them losing legal remedies if granted a commutation,” said Pittman, a member of the racial equity task force. “They could lose access to having automatic counsel in the appellate courts, as well as if somebody is on the row and somebody is innocent, they could lose access to their freedom through the court system.” 

Even still, Johnson said those on death row stand to gain much from clemency. They could have better access to rehabilitative programming.“We’d been told many times point-blank, ‘You are not here to be rehabilitated,’” Wilkerson writes in “Bone Orchard.”

Receiving clemency would also allow more opportunities for them to see their loved ones because of a less restrictive visitation policy, Johnson added.

And obviously, they won’t have a death sentence hanging over their heads. Only about 20 people have been added to death row since the last execution in the summer of 2006, according to the state’s roster. One of those is Wilkerson, who has been a part of the community since Dec. 20, 2006.

“We live shoulder-to-shoulder for ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years,” he wrote in the book, “and gradually this me versus them mentality I’d walked in with, melted away, leaving only us.”

Two miles from Wilkerson’s cell, on a warm, wet December afternoon, members of the clemency campaign met in a parking lot across the street from the governor’s mansion. They sang, chanted and chatted about their support for emptying death row. Nickle said the theme of the day was “community, compassion and commutation.” 

Cooper has yet to say publicly whether he will commute the death sentences, or if he is even considering such a broad use of his clemency powers. He will leave office at the end of 2024, giving advocates about a year to build support for emptying North Carolina’s death row.

Chapman and Rivera stood in a corner laughing amongst themselves as two people sang “We Shall Overcome” to the crowd. After a few minutes, the exonerees went separate ways. Rivera stepped onto the sidewalk, glancing at the signs that listed the birth date and day of execution of 43 people killed by the State of North Carolina. 

The rallies are a surreal experience for Rivera. The names on the signs aren’t just words to him. When he sees or hears the names of people still facing a death sentence, those who haven’t yet been executed, he can still see their faces, and he wonders how they’ve changed in the 24 years he has been free.

“I knew these guys personally,” Rivera said. 

He feels a sense of survivor’s guilt for having gotten off death row. He still thinks about what it was like living there, “the horrible conditions,” having to reckon with “how I went from that to this,” as he gestures at the wide open parking lot, the community of supporters. 

“Is it fair that people are still suffering under those conditions?” he asked. “I think about that, me being free and at these events.”

The post Inside the Urgent Campaign to Commute North Carolina’s Entire Death Row appeared first on Bolts.

“I hope that this board recognizes I am not the same person I was 23 years ago,” he said during his hearing before the Connecticut Board of Pardons and Paroles last week. He recounted mentoring young people and encouraging them to stay in school to keep them out of prison.

But members of the board questioned what made Smalls’ case extraordinary. “Participating in programs, that’s something that you’re expected to do,” said Rufaro Page, one of the board members. “Our policy is clear that there has to be something exceptional that occurred.”

“Aside from your receiving a lengthy sentence, I don’t see anything that is exceptional here,” she added. The board denied Smalls’ commutation. 

Page was echoing the wording of a new policy, unveiled on July 26, that requires people applying for a commutation in Connecticut to now show “exceptional and compelling circumstances” that merit reducing their time behind bars.

This new commutations policy replaced an earlier one rolled out in 2021 to reduce the long prison sentences that had been handed out in the 1990s and 2000s. Under the leadership of Carleton Giles, a former police officer, the board used the policy to grant 106 commutations. Almost two-thirds of the people whose sentences were reduced were Black.

But Democratic Governor Ned Lamont in April bowed to Republican furor over the commutations and paused clemency, Bolts reported in April. He removed Giles as head of the board, replacing him with Jennifer Medina Zaccagnini. Zaccagnini then put a hold on all commutations and supervised the release of the new policy in late July.

The board’s Aug. 30 hearings—held without Giles or the other two board members who’d been responsible for issuing the 106 commutations—were the first under the new policy, offering a peek into how it might change commutation decisions in Connecticut.

The three applicants heard on that day all fit the general bill of those who received commutations under the last policy. They were all Black or Hispanic, each serving decades in prison for a murder they committed when they were in their teens or early 20s, and all of them had been imprisoned for at least two decades. 

One of the applications was granted, and two were denied. Before the board was overhauled, between January and April of this year, it granted 87 percent of commutations applications once they made it to the hearings stage. 

Miriam Gohara, a professor at Yale Law School who has represented people applying for commutations, says it will take time to gauge how the revamped board will approach applications. “I think we need to give the board a chance to see what they’re going to do,” she told Bolts.

Still, the tone of these first hearings under the new policy was distinctly different from those held under Giles’ leadership, which focused more on how applicants changed in prison and on their conduct while incarcerated. Previously, board members had asked applicants about educational opportunities they’d taken advantage of, or how they’d use what they learned behind bars once they were free. Applicants’ experiences while incarcerated, by contrast, were mostly sidelined in last week’s hearings; the board appeared to pay more attention than before to what happened before the sentence, to the perspective of victims, and to the details of each crime.   

And it was clear that the rule requiring “exceptional and compelling circumstances” also set a higher bar for applicants to clear.

After denying Smalls’ commutation, the board heard from Corey Turner, who has been incarcerated for 27 years and who has maintained that he did not do the crime for which he’s imprisoned. During the hearing, Turner and his attorney recounted his own rehabilitative journey—he too has earned a G.E.D, taken parenting classes, and held jobs while incarcerated. 

Turner has also served as a law librarian inside the prison, assisting his peers as a jailhouse lawyer. Someone who was incarcerated with Turner and has since been released from prison wrote a letter of support recounting that Turner had helped fellow prisoners interpret the law and craft legal strategies.

During the 47-minute hearing devoted to Turner’s case, though, panelists only asked him one question about rehabilitation efforts during his lengthy imprisonment.

After one board member asked Turner what was exceptional about his application, he replied, “This is not an environment that’s designed for human beings to flourish,” explaining that instead of turning to despair and violence, he had tried to heal from a traumatic life and become a better father and person. “The only evidence that is compelling that I have to bring before you today, ma’am, is myself, my lived example. That’s all I have. And I hope it’s enough for you.” 

“I think what’s compelling or exceptional is me,” he said. 

“I commend Mr. Turner for his rehabilitative efforts,” Zaccagnini, the board’s new chair, said later in the hearing. “However, it does not rise to the level of compelling and exceptional that would warrant a commutation of his sentence.” 

The board denied Turner’s application. Alex Taubes, who represented him and who was a vocal critic of Lamont’s decision to fire Giles in April, told Bolts after the hearing that Turner’s experience underscores how much Connecticut’s commutation policy has changed.

“They’re no longer providing people with second chances who truly earned them and deserved them,” Taubes said. 

Between 2015 and 2019, the Board of Pardons and Paroles granted just five commutations, at which point the board froze the process for two years. This stasis was decried by advocates in the early stages of the pandemic. “There wasn’t a functioning commutations system for a number of years,” Gohara says. Then, in 2021, the board revamped its approach and began accepting applications again; under its new policy, it considered 11 criteria when determining whether to shorten a sentence. Those included an applicant’s conduct while incarcerated, how serious and recent their conviction was, how shortening a sentence could benefit society, and whether an applicant had been rehabilitated while imprisoned.

These changes made what had been a rarely used power into a progressive tool. Board members publicly touted that they were using clemency to offer an avenue of release for incarcerated people who otherwise didn’t have a way out of prison. They began reducing long sentences given to people who committed crimes when they were younger than age 25, an acknowledgment of advances in the scientific understanding of brain development that shows young adults’ brains are still maturing well into their 20s. 

But Republicans blasted the board’s approach, staging an elaborate event earlier this year with victims’ families during which they called on Lamont to make the board stop commutations. The governor’s decision to replace Giles with Zaccagnini then paved the way for the new policy, which replaced the 11 “suitability” standards that were meant to guide board members with the provision requiring “exceptional and compelling circumstances.” 

David Bothwell, an advisor for the board, told Bolts in a statement that the new rules improve the process. “This policy puts the onus on the applicant to present to the Board extraordinary and compelling reasons that warrant commutation of sentence,” he said. “It does this through a procedure that is fair, open and transparent, and where victim input is acknowledged, valued, and respected.”

Bothwell said that eliminating the suitability criteria will allow “a broader range of individuals to make their cases to the Board.” He also laid out that, “in making a decision, the board will consider exceptional personal growth and development, efforts to improve his/her surroundings and the lives of those he/she share those surroundings with, the serious nature of the offense, prior criminal history, impact on the victim and victim’s family and the total length of sentence and time served.”

Lamont’s office told Bolts in a statement that the governor is “encouraged that Chairwoman Zaccagnini and the staff at the Board of Pardons and Paroles met with all of the involved parties and developed a revised process that takes into account their concerns.”

This summer, Lamont signed into law a bill that will expand parole eligibility for people convicted of crimes they committed before age 21. The law comes amid a wave of reforms nationwide meant to create more paths to release for people sentenced while young, and it targets a population that Connecticut’s prior commutations policy looked on favorably. Parole applications would be reviewed by the Board of Paroles and Pardons as well.

The Aug. 30 hearing also raised questions about whether applicants who maintain their innocence can still succeed in front of the board.

Although Turner and his lawyer emphasized his rehabilitation when they made their case to the board, his application was also rooted in his claim that he did not commit the crime he was convicted of, which seemed to bother the panel hearing his application. 

“We don’t retry cases,” Zaccagnini said. “That is for a court to decide.” At one point Joy Chance, another board member, asked Turner why he never mentioned the victims of his crime. “Ma’am, I didn’t commit this crime,” Turner said. “I’ve been in prison for 27 and a half years for a crime that I didn’t commit.” 

Chance doubled down. “Why wouldn’t you have expressed some kind of remorse for the victim, even if you say you didn’t do it?” she asked. “It’s not that I don’t care,” Turner responded. “I didn’t commit this crime.”

While the panelists were deliberating, Taubes interrupted them to say that Turner and he had focused their presentation on Turner’s mentorship, education and rehabilitation, and that it was the board that had brought up the innocence claim. “You’re using his innocence against him, and it is a travesty of injustice,” he said. 

Bothwell told Bolts that someone who maintains their innocence can apply for a commutation, and it is not a hindrance to their getting a commutation. 

Still, Taubes believes the hearing marked a change from how the previous board approached such cases. He named four clients who maintained their innocence but who received a commutation between 2021 and April of this year, including Norman Gaines, who was released from prison after his sentence was commuted in 2022 and who testified at a legislative hearing in March. “When I was talking to the panel at the Board of Pardons and Parole, that I would do my best to be a beacon of the community, I would like them to know I’ve been keeping my word,” Gaines said.

During the Aug. 30 hearing, the board did commute the sentence of Miguel Sanchez, who had received a 60-year sentence for a murder he committed when he was 17. Sanchez apologized to the family of the young man he killed, acknowledging that his reckless and violent actions profoundly altered the course of not only he and his victim’s lives, but those of their surviving family members, as well. 

“I have spent almost 60 percent of my life in prison due to my immature and irresponsible actions as a teenager,” Sanchez said. “However, I am no longer that immature youth. I remain in prison as a matured and educated middle-aged man, who at 45 years old has focused on helping transform not only myself, but others as well through education.”

The board commuted Sanchez’s sentence by 15 years; he could be eligible for a juvenile parole hearing beginning next year. Board members highlighted that he helped teach college classes to his incarcerated peers early in the pandemic, when outside volunteers weren’t allowed in prisons. They noted that his brother, a correctional officer at another state prison, offered to help him navigate a new life outside of prison, should he get released early.

The board did not explicitly ask Sanchez about “compelling and exceptional circumstances,” as they did with Smalls and Turner. They commended his rehabilitative efforts and the programs he has completed in the past 26 years.

“He has done everything possible, and then some,” Zaccagnini said. “He has gone above and beyond to assist others throughout his incarceration and give back.”

The post Connecticut’s New Commutation Policy Raises the Bar for Second Chances appeared first on Bolts.

LaDerrick Campbell has an IQ in the 60s. His defense counsel described him as “the most profoundly mentally ill client” they had ever encountered. Daniel Blank’s confession was coerced; one of the people he was convicted of assaulting explicitly stated that Blank was not his attacker. Jeremiah Manning suffers from a profound intellectual disability, and one of the sons of the woman he killed has testified to the state legislature that executing him will not bring his family solace. Jarrell Neal’s uncle killed two men as he waited unaware in the backseat of the car, then testified against him in exchange for a lesser sentence.

Each of these men await execution in Louisiana. A few weeks ago, 56 out of the 57 people currently on the state’s death row —including Campbell, Blank, Manning, and Neal—asked Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards to spare their lives by commuting their sentences to life without parole. Edwards, who is Catholic, recently announced he cannot square the death penalty with his pro-life views. It is one of the biggest mass clemency requests in American history, in a state where only two death sentences have been commuted in the past 50 years.

Clemency is often conceived of as a discrete and individual mercy—as an exception, the opposite of policy. On death row, we picture it as an eleventh-hour decision to spare a person’s life following efforts by advocates to highlight the tragic or unjust circumstances of their case. But here, the petitioners say that in highlighting people’s stories, they’re not trying to persuade public officials to handpick which of the 57 is most deserving of mercy. 

Instead, they’re hoping to showcase the systemic disparities that undergird each of their cases. What if clemency were a form of policy, they ask—not an individual act, but a collective response to the barrage of injustices that have made the state’s death row a cross-section of its poorest and most marginalized groups?

The U.S. Supreme Court has declared that executing someone with an intellectual disability is unconstitutional, a criterion that fits 40 percent of the people on Louisiana’s death row. Thirty-nine of the 57 have been diagnosed with brain damage or serious mental illness. Three quarters are people of color, the vast majority of them Black. Many allege prosecutorial misconduct and sorely deficient legal support. “We are executing the most vulnerable people in our population,” said Calvin Duncan, an exoneree who served as a jailhouse lawyer to many on death row for about 19 of the 28 years he spent wrongfully locked up. 

Time is running out. Edwards leaves office in early January, and the frontrunner to succeed him staunchly supports the death penalty. The next few months will determine whether Edwards translates his philosophical opposition to capital punishment into action by trying to speed up the process and by commuting every death sentence he can before his term is up. 

The petitioners must first convince the Louisiana Board of Pardons, which must recommend cases to the governor before he can grant clemency and has already signaled the process may be lengthy, though Edwards, who has appointed the board’s five current members, can ask the board to consider capital cases in a meeting. His office did not respond to a direct question about whether he would do so

Not only is this a last-ditch effort to forestall the state executions of these 57 people—it’s also a call for Louisiana to end the use of the death penalty once and for all, in keeping with the growing number of states that have abandoned the practice. In the last six years, five state legislative attempts to repeal capital punishment have failed.

“It’s an indictment on the system,” said Cecelia Kappel, an attorney for the Capital Appeals Project, the firm that organized the petitions. “This entire system is broken, and I would want to see the death penalty in Louisiana be on trial, as opposed to our individual clients and their individual circumstances.” 

Much of the debate around capital punishment focuses on wrongful convictions. Louisiana’s death row has a long history of exonerations, where people’s convictions are reversed after new evidence comes to light suggesting they did not commit the crime for which they were sentenced to die. But these clemency petitions argue that, whether the petitioner maintains their innocence or not, the underlying factors present in each case mean they should not be put to death.

Louisiana’s application of capital punishment is deeply rooted in racial bias, going all the way back to its origins: Enslaved people comprised thirteen of the first sixteen executions on Louisiana soil. The state historically consigned a high number of people to death, but there hasn’t been an official killing since 2010, when a death row prisoner waived his right to appeal his case. “We are moving away from the death penalty as a country, and Louisiana is no exception,” Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told Bolts. In the two parishes that historically imposed the death penalty most often—including East Baton Rouge, once called Louisiana’s “official slaughterhouse” because all state executions took place there—there has been no new death sentence handed down since 2015. 

Prosecutors in Louisiana have great discretion on whether to seek the death penalty, and only do so in a tiny fraction of eligible cases. Take the case of Jarrell Neal, one of Kappel’s clients, who rode along with his uncle and brother while they went to settle a drug-related dispute. According to Neal’s clemency petition, he was waiting in the car unaware while his uncle shot two people to death. But as they drove away, his uncle handed him a gun and told him to shoot at the officers pursuing them, and Neal complied.

Neal’s uncle agreed to testify against him, pled guilty to manslaughter and is now out of prison. His brother was ultimately prosecuted for second-degree murder. But for Neal himself, prosecutors sought the death penalty, even though he did not hit or injure the officers he shot at. “He was represented by one lawyer, no investigator, no co-counsel, no paralegal,” Kappel told Bolts. Neal’s defense presented no evidence, and a jury sentenced him to death after deliberating for less than two hours. “I feel tremendous guilt that my brother has had to take the fall for my uncle and me,” Neal’s brother wrote in a 2018 affidavit. 

A 2015 study on racial discrepancies in Louisiana’s death penalty cases by the political scientist Frank Baumgartner found a strong connection between the race of the victim and the likelihood of a capital sentence. For instance, although Black male victims accounted for 61 percent of all homicides between 1976, the year the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty, and 2015, only three people—none of them white—have been executed for killing a Black man during that time. Meanwhile, a person of any race was 48 times more likely to be put to death for killing a white woman than for killing a black man. The last time a white person was executed for killing a Black person was in 1752, over a half century before the Louisiana Purchase.

For every harrowing statistic you can throw out about death penalty disparities in Louisiana, Calvin Duncan witnessed it personified in the men he knew on the row. “It’s not textbook stuff to me,” he told Bolts. “I worked with those guys for 19 years…I got to see them grow up. I watched them grow old. I saw the vulnerable side of them and they all wanted something better in life.” 

Working as a jailhouse lawyer at Angola State Prison after his conviction in 1985, Duncan pored over their legal files and saw evidence of innocence, abuse, poverty, trauma, disability, and insanity. He saw coerced confessions. He saw just how young many of the men had been when the state sentenced them to death. Though Duncan was never on death row, there was a lot of overlap with his own case—Duncan is Black, and he was only 20 when he was arrested for a murder he didn’t commit. He ultimately lost 28 years, five months, and two days to prison before being freed in 2011 and fully exonerated in 2021. 

And for many on death row, it seemed like Duncan was the first person who had really looked closely at their legal case. “Nobody on our death row came from a family that had any money to get adequate representation,” he told Bolts. 

Louisiana death row prisoners secured the right to have lawyers represent them in their post-conviction appeals in 1999, and access to pro bono legal services has also expanded significantly in the last few decades. The fact that qualified and well-resourced lawyers are now scrutinizing these cases has led to an astonishing 82 percent of convictions being overturned on appeal and at least 9 exonerations since 1999. All of this costs a lot—over $15 million a year, according to a 2019 report by Bill Quigley, an emeritus professor at Loyola Law School. The money for death penalty representation stems largely from the state’s public defender fund, hoovering up nearly 10 percent of its budget for just 11 cases in 2018 and 2019, local news site WDSU found. Capital cases “threaten the solvency of the entire Louisiana statewide public defense system,” Remy Starns, then the head of the Louisiana Public Defender Board, told the site.

“Money is the blood flow of the legal system,” Quigley, who also worked on pro bono capital appeals in the 1980s and 1990s, when none of the current infrastructure yet existed, told Bolts. “Louisiana executed quite a number of people” back then, he said, and “those people were represented in the most pathetic way possible.”

But even with access to representation, people on death row often fail to get courts to give their case a second look—even when they evince traits that should make them ineligible for execution. “There are very strict procedural requirements for when you need to raise a claim—and many of these individuals are simply unable to get back into court to present evidence of their intellectual disability,” said Maher. 

Clemency is the chance to right past wrongs when every other avenue has failed. “Clemency power dates back hundreds of years, to a time when an all-powerful monarch possessed the absolute power to punish or pardon,” Maher told Bolts. “It is an act of grace, an act of mercy, but it can also be an act of justice.”

At first, many on Louisiana’s death row felt strongly ambivalent about the prospect of a mass clemency request. Clemency can reduce the consequences of a conviction, but it doesn’t change the conviction itself. Some want a new trial and a chance for release. Settling for life without parole is a bitter pill to swallow when you have evidence that you didn’t even do the crime for which you were sentenced to death. “This is not justice for them. These people have been wronged from beginning to end,” Kappel said.

As hard as it has been to conceptualize the prospect of life without parole as a win for people who never got a fair trial to begin with, Kappel said it was important to recognize the “unique opportunity” that Edwards’ admission has afforded those currently living on death row.

Clemency is generally understood as a case-by-case practice, but there is some precedent for a mass request: notably, Illinois in 2003, when the outgoing governor, Republican George Ryan, commuted the sentences of 167 people. 

That process in Illinois started with a request very similar to the one lawyers made on behalf of those condemned to die in Louisiana. Lawrence Marshall, a professor at Stanford’s law school who at the time was the legal director of Northwestern University’s Center for Wrongful Convictions, recalled in an interview with Bolts the conundrum he and his colleagues faced in the lead-up to the request: “Did we go in and ask for a blanket clemency? Or did we instead cherry-pick a few particularly sympathetic cases, with the hope that those would get some real attention in ways that a blanket commutation might not?” 

They ended up choosing a blanket clemency request, and Marshall’s reason echoes those of the Louisiana advocates. “It felt like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he said.

Marshall and his fellow lawyers went all out. They staged a thirty-mile relay from a prison to the governor’s mansion where 31 men who had been wrongfully convicted, sentenced to death, and later exonerated each walked a mile, carrying a piece of parchment addressed to Ryan. It garnered national press attention. Later that night, they put on a production of the play The Exonerated, which features A-list actors telling the story of wrongfully convicted people. “There was only one person watching the play, and that was the governor,” he said. “The 150 other people were watching the governor watching the play, looking for any signs into what he was thinking.” 

Ryan eventually granted clemency to all 167 people on death row, even bestowing a full pardon on four. “My concern basically was if I had left office and didn’t do anything about it and woke up one morning and found some innocent person had died, I would have to live with that the rest of my life,” he said later.

Marshall acknowledged how focusing on wrongfully convicted people can scan as an “implicit endorsement” of capital punishment for the many people on death row who are guilty of the crimes for which they were convicted. Here, though, it proved strategic. “Wrongful convictions was definitely the road into his thinking. But once we got in there then we convinced him, I think, that if the system can’t get it right, as to who did it,” he said, “just the pure objective fact of who did it—How can we trust that system?” 

Like Ryan in 2003, Edwards is in the final months of his gubernatorial tenure and has expressed qualms about the death penalty. But it’s hard to know whether he will take similar action for the 57 people currently on death row. Edwards, of course, is not the all-powerful monarch of yore—in fact, he lacks even the outright power that Ryan had to commute capital sentences in Illinois. The Louisiana state constitution says that the governor can only grant clemency “upon favorable recommendation of the Board of Pardons.” Even if Edwards is inclined to grant blanket clemency, he lacks the legal authority to do so to everyone who applied, Quigley said, though he could endorse a blanket approach once people’s petitions make it to his desk.

This means each person who petitioned would need to pass an initial review, undergo a Division of Probation and Parole investigation, and then attend an individual pardon board hearing before the five-member board, most likely with victims’ family members in attendance. This process can generally take as long as a year, according to the board’s executive director. The board includes two longtime state corrections employees, a former district attorney, a public defender-turned-judge, and the official victims’ advocate. If a majority of members vote to recommend commutation, Edwards can still decide not to grant it, but the reverse is not true: Edwards is barred from pardoning anyone who the board declines to endorse. 

Meanwhile, at least one local prosecutor has spoken out against the mass request for being too hurried. In a letter to the pardons board, East Baton Rouge DA Hillar Moore said that the process is not allowing enough time for prosecutors to prepare opposing arguments for any pardon board hearings that may take place. He also argued that the news of the clemency applications has “caused significant confusion” for several victims’ families.

But groups like Louisiana Survivors for Reform will be trying to counter the narrative that all crime victims want vengeance for the violence perpetrated against them or their loved ones. “The death penalty feels like one of the greatest lies that is told to victims, in terms of transparency around finality, in terms of ‘closure,’” said Katie Hunter-Lowrey, an organizer with the Promise of Justice Initiative who coordinates the Louisiana Survivors for Reform coalition. She noted that capital appeals can stretch on for decades, forcing families to relive the trauma of their loved one’s murder over and over in court. “So many of the survivors that I interact with and victims’ loved ones want what happened to them to never happen to anyone else again, and the death penalty is not a deterrent. And it’s not violence prevention.” 

At least two close relatives of victims oppose the execution of the person sentenced to death for their loved one’s murder; others strongly support it. 

Edwards, who leaves office on Jan. 8, hasn’t yet issued any official statement on the 56 clemency petitions. According to the board’s policy for capital cases, the governor can schedule hearings and set a case on the agenda; Edwards’ office responded to Bolts’ request for comment but did not answer whether the governor would use this authority to expedite cases. On June 14, he said at a Rotary Club meeting that he would not try to influence the pardon board’s decision-making process: “I think they have to exercise their own judgment.” 

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, a Republican who styles himself as tough on crime and supports the death penalty, is currently the leading candidate in the race to succeed Edwards. He has indicated that the attorney general’s office will oppose any and all clemency applications. But his gubernatorial run could also temper his hand. Kappel pointed out that Landry’s strongest opponent, Democrat Shawn Wilson, has already come out against capital punishment. 

“I think that we are moving away from the death penalty, and it is not the winning campaign issue that perhaps in the past it was,” she said. 

Duncan, for one, is hopeful that the increased attention to these cases that the parole hearings will bring may contribute to a shift in Lousianans’ consciousness about capital punishment—and that the board itself will recognize what he already knows to be true about the men on death row.

“I think if the public knew, if the outside world knew that these are the people that we consider fit to execute—I think they would really change their minds.”

The post The Death Penalty on Trial in Louisiana appeared first on Bolts.

The GOP had staged the event to protest a rise in clemency in the state. After years of a near-total freeze in commutations—a rare path out of prison for hundreds of people who are serving decadeslong or life sentences in the state—the board granted several dozens in 2022. That fell short of reformers’ demands but the GOP still took issue. “I am calling on Governor Lamont to stop this right now,” said John Kissel, the highest-ranking Republican senator on the Judiciary Committee, who was accompanied at the event by families of violent crime victims.

Governor Ned Lamont, a Democrat, followed Kissel’s call on April 10, removing Carleton Giles, a former police officer, as chair of the board. Giles, who is Black, had authority as chair to decide which board members would hear commutations, and Republicans painted him as the architect of the rise in releases. 

Lamont appointed Jennifer Medina Zaccagnini to replace him as chair. Within days Zaccagnini put a hold on all commutation hearings until further notice. 

Lamont’s move dismayed state advocates who have pushed Connecticut to reduce its prison population and address persistent racial disparities in incarceration.

“For a parole chairman—who is a police officer, who was doing his job according to the law—to be removed for such a small number of releases, it sends a chilling effect that could set us backward in criminal justice reform for years, if not decades,” said Alex Taubes, an attorney who has represented dozens of people who received commutations from the board. 

Connecticut drastically lengthened prison terms starting in the late 1980s. This led many people who committed violent crimes as teenagers or young adults to receive prison terms that makes it likely they’ll die behind bars unless they receive clemency. 

“The longest sentences have not generally gone in Connecticut to the worst criminals. They go to the people with the worst lawyers,” Taubes told Bolts. “That’s why the group of people who are eligible for commutations is disproportionately Black and brown people, who don’t have the kinds of networks and connections that allow them to get the lesser sentences in the first place.” 

Roughly 700 people are serving life sentences in the state and can expect to die in prison without clemency, according to a study by the Sentencing Project. The majority of them are Black. (Only 13 percent of Connecticut’s overall population is Black.)

Those disparities meant clemency has overwhelmingly benefited people of color. The board identified that nearly two-thirds of the people who received commutations in 2022 are Black, and a quarter as Hispanic. “Stopping the commutations is a racist policy,” Taubes said.

Taubes and like-minded advocates have pressured the board to give people growing old behind bars a second chance but they’ve been frustrated by what they see as a dysfunctional system. Connecticut is one of six states where the power to commute a prison sentence is vested entirely in an independent body with no direct role for the governor. The board has “unfettered discretion” in how it uses its commutation powers, an unusually broad mandate that has at times proved paralyzing. During the early pandemic, as other states acted to relieve prisons, the board was accepting no applications and issuing no commutations. 

Even over the past year, under Giles, the board kept the pathway to clemency very narrow. In 2021 and 2022, it restricted the criteria to be eligible to even ask for a commutation, for instance forcing people to wait two additional years to apply. It also decided that people who are serving sentences of life without parole are ineligible to receive a commutation. Miriam Gohara, a professor at Yale Law School who has represented two people applying for commutations, insists that state statute says they should be. “That was something that they should not have done, but I think they did it as an opportunity to try to assuage their critics,” Gohara said.

The board is denying most applications. Its statistics show that, in 2022, more than three-fourth of applicants were rejected. 

But the board also took steps to flex its clemency powers. In 2021, it began taking applications after a two-year hiatus. Its first commutation in two years shortened a sick man’s 75-year sentence so he would be eligible for compassionate parole, a program meant for people with long sentences and serious medical conditions. 

They also took a new look at people who were sentenced to long terms as kids or young adults, a population that makes up the bulk of those granted commutations in 2022. In recent sessions, some legislators proposed expanding release opportunities for people who committed crimes before age 25, pointing to scientific research that shows the brain keeps developing until the mid-20s; while their bill proved unsuccessful, the board soon appeared to heed their arguments. 

“You’re talking about younger individuals who were sentenced in the ‘90s for sentences that we would not give out as a state anymore,” said Representative Steven Stafstrom, a Democrat who co-chairs the Judiciary Committee. “We are living in a very different era, I think in the nation but certainly in Connecticut, in terms of how long folks should be sentenced for certain crimes, particularly crimes that were committed at a very young age.”

“What these commutations did is modernize or correct the sentence, based on what today’s sentencing guidelines would be,” he said. 

Julio Rodriguez is among the people who benefited from this second look. After more than 22 years in prison after being convicted as an accessory to murder, he was sent to a halfway house in July after the board commuted over two decades off his 50-year sentence. 

“When we was younger, some of us don’t even know what the heck we was doing. We was just doing it under peer pressure, under the gangs, under drugs’ influence,” he said. “It’s kind of like hard for somebody that came really young like that and grew up in jail and never had a chance to become somebody.” He added, “We became men in there, grandfathers. We was kids.”

Rodriguez was 19 when he went to prison. Now, he has a job detailing cars, and he says he wishes the public knew about all the people he left behind in prison who, like him, bettered themselves even though they had years left on their sentences. 

“There’s people in there that deserve a chance,” he says.

The decisions made by Lamont and his new appointee, Zaccagnini, have put their hopes on hold.

“Maybe it’s time to take a pause and let the legislature weigh in on what they think the rules of the road ought to be and make sure the advocates on both sides are at the table so we have a full discussion,” Lamont told The CT Mirror. After the board held a meeting with state officials and lawmakers last week, Lamont’s spokesperson said there would be no new commutations until “an expeditious review” of the board’s policies.

The governor’s office did not respond to requests for comment. 

Lamont has generally taken a different tack on criminal justice than his predecessor, Democrat Dan Malloy. Malloy promoted initiatives that reduced punishment for drug possession offenses and expediting pardon and parole processes, advocating for what he called a “second chance society.” Malloy also pressured the board to grant more parole applications.

Lamont largely ignored calls by criminal justice reformers to use his soft powers—that includes the authority to fire and appoint the board’s members—to push for more releases during the pandemic. When the GOP made the inverse argument this year, he acted to force a pause.

Connecticut Republicans have mounted tough-on-crime attacks for years, including targeting Lamont and other Democrats in the run-up to the 2022 midterms. In 2021, they convened multiple press conferences about car thefts. But Republicans did poorly last fall. Lamont won re-election by double digits and Democrats expanded their legislative majorities. 

“Voters in Connecticut sent a clear message in the fall that they were not buying whatever narrative the Republicans were trying to sell on crime,” said Gohara.

Despite these defeats, Republicans kept up their attacks on the board for being too willing to approve applications. At the press conference last month, they warned that “serious criminals” and “violent offenders” were being let out of prison decades before the end of their sentences. 

The board granted zero commutations in 2020, then only one in 2021. In 2022, it granted 71, a surge but still a small share of Connecticut’s incarcerated population. As of April 1, 2023, there were 10,010 people in the state’s unified system of prisons and jails. 

“This is why this whole thing is kind of absurd: the board has been relatively conservative in its approach to its power,” says Democratic Senator Gary Winfield, co-chair of the Judiciary Committee. “People saw a spike, recognized an opportunity to put victims in front of everybody and say, ‘We’re doing the wrong thing,’” he added.

Michael Lawlor, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of New Haven and under secretary of criminal justice policy and planning under Malloy, champions commutations as an important tool for rehabilitation.

“Should we have some type of avenue to consider some of these folks for a shot at release before they die?” he asks. “Without this option, there’s no hope at all that they will ever get out, and there’s no incentive to behave yourself, and there’s also no incentive to do anything constructive: take courses, express remorse, demonstrate that you’re a different person.”

Despite losing the chairmanship, Giles will remain on the Board of Pardons and Paroles as a regular member. Both legislative chambers voted to reappoint him to that position in April, even though some Democrats joined Republicans in opposing him. Two other board members who decided on commutations with Giles also survived legislative votes.

But Giles will no longer be in charge of the commutation process and he lost the prerogative of shaping the rules and deciding who gets to hear commutation applications.

Taubes says Giles’s demotion is a blow to reformers’ hope of using clemency to lessen incarceration. “If parole boards become subject to the political whims of the moment, let alone the least common denominator of some Republican misinformation campaign, then we will never be able to realize the potential value of parole boards in criminal justice reform,” he said.

Similar dynamics have percolated in other states like New York or Virginia, where reformers hope that state officials will staff the boards responsible for commutations or parole with people who are more open to second chances, while Republicans have sought to block changes. In Pennsylvania, which has near-record numbers of people serving life sentences, then-Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman worked to make the state’s Board of Pardons much more amenable to clemency and faced heavy GOP attacks over it in 2022, only to win his U.S. Senate race. 

Fetterman appointed formerly incarcerated Pennsylvanians and decarceral activists to work for the board. “We’ve all been in need of mercy and forgiveness at some point,” Celeste Trusty told Bolts last year after she became secretary of the board. (Trusty left the board this year after Fetterman went to Washington.) “But that’s not applied at all to how we sentence people.”

Gohara is dismayed that Connecticut, a former leader in criminal justice reform, now seems to be turning its back to that perspective.

“If it’s happening in Connecticut,” she said, “then you can only imagine, ‘Where else would be vulnerable to this?’”

The post Connecticut Governor Scrambles Pardons Board and Halts Clemency appeared first on Bolts.

When the pandemic started in 2020, Celeste Trusty worked furiously to alert public authorities of the dangers the virus posed to people trapped in Pennsylvania’s crowded prisons. As state director of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a criminal justice reform group, she also called on the state’s Board of Pardons to “broadly provide clemency” and “do everything within their power to provide relief to those who have been crushed by the justice system.”

Last month, Trusty was appointed secretary of Pennsylvania’s Board of Pardons—the same body she recently pressured, and which reviews applications for pardons and commutation of life sentences. She now vows to bring the outlook she displayed from the outside into her new role. 

“If this is our only shot to get these people out, we need to be doing everything we can to really change and quicken the process so that people aren’t just shut down whenever they apply,” she told Bolts. “We’re completely ignoring the human capacity to change.”

Trusty, who has worked with incarcerated people in various roles, is walking into a dire situation. Due to draconian sentencing laws, Pennsylvania is home to near-record numbers of people sentenced to die in prison. More than 5,300 Pennsylanians are serving life without the possibility of parole, according to a study by the Sentencing Project, and thousands more face sentences that are so long as to be the functional equivalent. Nearly two-thirds of them are Black.

For these thousands of aging incarcerated Pennsylvanians, whose stories were captured last year in the podcast What is Life, there is little hope other than receiving a commutation, which requires a recommendation by the board and then approval by the governor. And those are very rare. 

Clemency used to be much more common. One governor in the 1970s commuted over 250 life sentences. But as tough-on-crime norms hardened, life sentences soared. Clemency rules were harshened in 1997 after one man committed several murders upon his release. According to data by the pardons board, a total of only six commutations were issued between 1997 and 2014.

Commutations did pick up when Governor Tom Wolf came into office in 2015, and even more so when John Fetterman became lieutenant governor in 2019. That role has also made Fetterman chair of the board of pardons, and he has gone further than is usual for a politician in embracing clemency, ending the application fee and pushing the board to recommend more commutations. Since 2019, Pennsylvania has commuted 37 life sentences. 

Fetterman, a Democrat who is now running for U.S. Senate, appointed Trusty to her new role on the board’s staff. (Trusty had been working for Fetterman’s campaign since the spring of 2021.) 

Trusty she says she will use it to push for more changes. But the clock may be ticking to significantly expand clemency in the state. Pennsylvania elects new statewide officials this fall, and any number of the winners could choose to effectively shut down commutations again. By 2023, the state will have a new governor, attorney general, and lieutenant governor; any one of those officials has de facto veto power over commutations.

In a wide-ranging interview, Trusty spoke with Bolts about the role she intends to play in reforming the state’s clemency process and the human capacity for change. 

You’ve long worked on reducing incarceration from an outsider position. How are you  approaching this transition to an insider role?

It’s great to be able to walk into work and carry all of these folks with me who have mentored me throughout my journey as an advocate, to try to help liberate people who have mentored me and might still be fighting for freedom. It’s really interesting for me to come into this role with that advocacy background and a good understanding of the struggles that folks are going through while they’re applying, that families are going through while their loved ones are applying, and really taking that to heart and looking at how we can improve this process to be more transparent, more accessible, and more compassionate for everyone involved. 

The board recently hired people who had themselves received clemency. How can broadening the perspective of the people involved in the clemency process can make a difference?

Having the expertise of George Trudel and Naomi Blount, the two folks you are talking about the lieutenant governor hired, is invaluable for the folks who are currently applying. Both Georgia and Naomi had been sentenced to life without parole, and they fought for decades for their freedom. They are taking that experience and trying to help guide those folks who are going through it. They also provide great guidance to the folks who work on the board staff. People who are experts don’t necessarily need to be coming from academia, they don’t necessarily need to have a PhD. Who better to work in these positions and lead in these roles than folks who have been impacted by that system and who have that direct knowledge?

In 2019, the board lifted the fee that people had to pay to apply until then. What other changes can the board make to alleviate the burden of applying?

I want to recognize the improvements that have been made over the last few years. As you mentioned, there’s no fee to apply for a pardon or commutation; that was a huge barrier before. There are wonderful organizations in the community that do pardon clinics, who will help people apply. At the same time, there’s still so much more that can be done. Since clemency is the only option for so many people, we need to be making sure that we’re working to make the process easier, simpler, more transparent. One of the things we constantly hear from folks is when they send their application they don’t hear anything for a while. We really want to make sure it doesn’t feel just like a black box.

How can more of the burden be shifted onto the state? For instance, can the state ensure that people going through the process have access to counsel?

Pennsylvania has historically underfunded legal support, and the Board of Pardons. This leaves so many people to navigate this often confusing process on their own, with family members, or with the support of our legal aid and advocacy communities. We are committed to taking whatever steps we can as an agency to help improve this process. We also released a new application that reduces some of the burden of gathering records on applicants and places some of that work on the Board of Prisons and our partner agencies.   

Far more people are sent to prison for life in Pennsylvania than in neighboring states. What explains the scope of life sentences there?

Pennsylvania is an outlier with life without parole and virtual life without parole sentences, and that is not something that I think any Pennsylvanian should be proud of. One of the big things is mandatory life without parole sentencing for first degree and second degree murder. Second degree murder, that’s felony murder: Even without the intent to cause that great harm, those folks are sentenced to life without parole. We have over 1,000 people in Pennsylvania serving life for second degree murder, and 70 percent of those folks are Black. These folks, who were largely young adults when these things occurred. We’re removing them from society for the rest of their lives, and that’s something that is just beyond me. 

When we send people to mandatory life without parole, we’re completely ignoring the human capacity to change. We all have caused harm, every single one of us has. We’ve all been in need of mercy and forgiveness at some point. But that’s not applied at all to how we sentence people. 

How do you see your role when it comes to confronting this stark racial disparity?

The issue starts with how we handle the legal system from start to finish. In every single step of the legal process, you see disparities, and then when you look at people who have resources to hire best attorneys, that’s going to have an impact as well. 

We are pulling and removing so many Black and brown people from their communities, pulling them out of the workforce, pulling them out of being able to provide for their families. Communities need elders, people who have lived in a community for 50 years and know everybody’s kids. We’re removing so many of those possible mentors and leaders from a community forever because they might have done something at a young age. We’re doing a disservice not just to people who we’re putting in prison, but to people who need those mentors and elders. We need to look at the impact of what we’re doing not just on the people inside of our prisons, which is of course a huge issue, but on our communities at large. 

Commutations were almost never granted for decades as the prison population exploded, but that’s changed in recent years. There were more commutations of life sentences in 2019 alone than over the previous 20 years combined. What prompted this shift?

Looking at the last few years, you see how important it is to have people in power who care about clemency and second chances. There have been 47 commutations of life sentences in the last 25 years. 41 of those came out of the Wolf Administration. It shows that, when we care, we’re able to impact lives. Think about those 41 people who now are home, who are able to work and contribute to the community, who are able to take their experience and mentor folks in their community, who are able to parent and grandparent in their community. 

Why do you think people in power have grown more supportive of clemency?

There has been a gigantic shift in the last decade. We’ve seen incredible results from research showing that folks who were convicted of violent offenses and sentenced to life or extremely long sentences are able to come home and be incredibly productive members of society. You look at the recent juvenile lifers in Pennsylvania; they’ve come home, and so many are making the community and the world better and using their platforms to uplift stories of other folks who haven’t had the opportunity for relief yet. That helps shift the conversation where more people feel comfortable talking about second chances for people who might have caused great harm.

There’s something about this that resonates with everybody. Something about seeing old men and women who are walking with a walker, who could not hurt a fly if they tried, who have served 50 years in our state prison, who do not need to be there anymore—whether that tugs at your heartstrings, or whether that tugs at your wallet, there is something about criminal legal reform and second chances that I think really appeals to everybody. 

Pennsylvania made commutations harder in 1997 after someone committed murders upon his release from prison, requiring a unanimous vote from the five-member board instead of a simple majority. How much of an obstacle is that rule to expanding clemency?

When that was changed in 1997, clemency really shut down. To get five people to agree that someone who has caused great harm is ready to come home and be productive, no matter how remorseful they are, no matter how much work they’ve done—it is hard to get five people to agree on anything. If you need a simple majority, if you need three people to see that you are a human being willing and ready to come home, I think that’s really one huge change that could open up clemency to so many more people.

One of the huge obstacles for clemency comes out of that one case that could derail absolutely everything. Reginald McFadden behaved in a way that was awful, and we are still today seeing what one terrible case can do to thousands of incredible cases. But one thing I hear constantly is that the folks who are applying know what one bad decision can do to the rest of the people who deserve to come home. And they bear that every single day. That’s a burden that I can’t even imagine, on top of everything else that they’re going through. 

There are more than 5,000 people in Pennsylvania serving life without parole, yet we are discussing 41 commutations as the most in decades. Each commutation is meaningful, but the sheer gap between those numbers is so striking. What do you think about the asymmetry between these two figures?

The issue is that Pennsylvania needs to create more mechanisms outside of clemency. We need to expand and continue to build upon clemency, but it can’t be the only way because clemency is hard, and it does take long. As much as each of those 41 people should be celebrated and their story should be told, we should be really holding our commonwealth to a higher standard. 

And we don’t know what administrations are going to look like in the next years and decades; we can’t rely on the boost in clemency that we’ve seen in the last few years. 

What other mechanisms would you want to see?

A lot of it is legislative. We need to look at felony murder reform. Over 1,000 people are serving mandatory life without parole for felony murder. They did not intend to take a life, and they are given the same exact punishment as a first degree case. 

Then, medical and elder release mechanisms. When you look at our prison population, largely because so many people serve life without parole and virtual life sentences, people are getting old and sick. You should be allowing opportunities for folks to seek relief. If they are old, if they are sick, their continued incarceration serves no further purpose outside of just vengeance. Why are we then turning a blind eye to the benefits of second chances? 

So many folks are afraid of approaching the subject.  It’s about who is willing to stand up and say, ‘This is not okay. These are the people who need the opportunity to be heard and supported, and come home to our community.’

I challenge everybody to go inside of a prison and meet these people who are serving life without parole. They have changed my life on a grand scale. You start to see that, yes, they might have caused great harm at one point, but some of these folks are doing more with their lives while they’re inside, with no opportunity and no hope for relief, then a lot of the folks who have never been impacted by the criminal legal system. They’re not the same person they were when they were 18, or 25. They’re 40, 50, 60, 70, even 80 and 90 now, and they’re not that same person that a court of law said, ‘That’s it, you did this, and now we’re gonna completely ignore your capacity to change.’  

We need to make sure that our laws reflect evidence and science, and the innate understanding that you and I and every single person is not the same as we were when we were younger. We all change. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity

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