Additionally, since November of 2019, the board, composed of three members, has had 4,700 requests for pardons, with about an equal numbers of Blacks and whites. Only 18 percent of Black applicants were granted pardons compared to 24 percent of white applicants.
This decreasing trend began when Jimmy O’Neal Spencer was charged with killing two women and a child in Guntersville in July of 2018 while on parole.
“It only took the one bad apple to have really changed this in the direction of ‘Lock them up, throw away the key,’” said Aimee Smith, an attorney who has represented clients before the board for about 20 years.
Overall during the fiscal year, the board denied parole to 3,584 prisoners and granted only 648, making the approval rate for the last year lower than half the average for the past decade, which was 37 percent.
Pardons have also decreased in the past couple years. The board granted just 27 percent of applicants in the last fiscal year, down from 79 percent two years ago.
The prison population is mostly made up of inmates incarcerated for violent crimes, lowering the approval numbers, according to the head of an advocacy group for crime victims.
“I mean, there are some horrible, horrible crimes, and unless you sit there each and every day and listen to all of them, you don’t realize how violent these people are,” said Janette Grantham, state director of Victims of Crime and Leniency, or VOCAL. “And when we let one of them out, they’re going to go live next door to somebody.”
For more reporting from the Associated Press, see below.
While board members have full discretion over paroles and pardons, there has been some effort to develop objective standards.
In July of 2020, the board revised its parole guidelines to “ensure the consistent review of certain common decisional factors for all offenders.” In fiscal year 2021, the guidelines recommended parole for 76 percent of inmates who were up for consideration, but the board followed the guidelines only 39 percent of the time.
Cam Ward, a former state senator who is director of the Bureau of Pardons and Paroles, which oversees supervision of parolees and probationers, said the board is not required to follow the guidelines.
“They’re within the law because the law is so flexible on how they get to make those determinations,” Ward said. “But I would hope that if they’re going to have these guidelines, you follow the guidelines.”
Ward said it would take legislation to give more weight to the guidelines.
“That’s the answer to those who are saying we just have such a low parole rate,” Ward said. “The answer is then you’ve got to have some more structure in place. So make it have teeth in those guidelines.”
State Representative Chris England, a Democrat from Tuscaloosa who is chair of the state Democratic Party, has been a critic of the board because of the decline in the parole rate and because of the racial disparity in paroles and pardons granted.
England said he would support legislation that would make the parole board apply the guidelines or explain why it didn’t.
