Alabama's parole stats have swung wildly in recent years, and some are calling the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles unreasonable in its reluctance to grant more inmates their freedom, reports AL.com's Ivana Hrynkiw.
Former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Sue Bell Cobb, who now runs a nonprofit that tries to help prisoners with medical conditions get paroled, even said of the parole-board chair, “I don’t know how she sleeps at night.”
First, some background.
Jimmy O'Neal Spencer was serving two life sentences for eight convictions back in 2017 when he was paroled and sent to a Birmingham homeless shelter. Within weeks he was committing crimes again and eventually was arrested for killing three people -- two women that he robbed, ages 65 and 74, and a 7-year-old boy he killed to get rid of him as a witness.
Those crimes, of course, horrified the state and prompted calls for a tightening up of the parole board.
At the time, just over half of inmates who were up for parole were being granted their release, and that percentage was on the rise. With Alabama's violent, run-down, overcrowded prisons pitting the state against the Justice Department in court, it made sense to try to lighten the inmate load.
Well, that's slowed to a crawl. In 2023, only 8 percent of those who came before the board were granted parole. The board's own guidelines suggest that rate should be more like 80 percent.
Of the three parole-board members, the biggest difference has been made by chairwoman Leigh Gwathney, who was appointed not long after the Spencer murders. Data gathered by the ACLU over a 10-week period last year shows Gwathney voting "yes" at about a 2.4-percent clip. She previously was an assistant attorney general, and over that same 10-week period, she voted "no" on every parole request that the AG's office opposed.
One of the points being made by the ACLU is that almost all paroles are also being denied for those who are assigned to work-release facilities, so we're sending the inmates out into the community already but still not granting them parole.
Janette Grantham, the director of Victims of Crime and Leniency, sees it differently.
“To me, the most important thing is we don’t have any new victims,” she said.
