Leigh Gwathney, Chair of the Board of Pardons and Paroles speaks during a hearing in Montgomery, Ala., on Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2023. Gwathney faced sharp questioning from Alabama lawmakers on Wednesday over what they perceived as her unwillingness to answer questions about the parole process. (Stew Milne for Alabama Reflector)
The chair of the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles Wednesday faced withering questions from Democratic and Republican lawmakers frustrated by what they perceived as her unwillingness to answer questions about the state’s parole process.
Members of the Joint Legislative Prison Oversight Committee accused Leigh Gwathney and the state board of ducking inquiries from the committee earlier this year about parole grant rates; possible racial disparities in the parole grant rates, and potential correlations in the parole grant rates and the risk to reoffend.
“Madame chair, you said that you would answer the questions that day we sat in your office,” said Sen. Clyde Chambliss, R-Prattville, the chair of the committee. “You said that, so what has been going on from the time that you said that you would answer the questions to today, disregard? How could we interpret it any other way? It has been months.”
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Throughout the 90-minutes before the committee, Gwathney would provide meandering answers to the pointed questions on the committee, defending the Board’s parole decisions, as well as the process and factors they use to reach a decision of granting someone parole.
“What we do, to the best of our ability, is to look at every individual who comes before us,” she said. “As long as I am on this board, that is what I will do.”
Members’ frustration boiled over more than halfway through Gwathney’s testimony when Chambliss, raising his voice, called out Gwathney’s name.
“Madame chair, madame chair, madame chair,” Chambliss said. “At our meeting in January, this group asked six or seven questions. You said you would answer those questions, your counsel wrote those questions down. I want the answer to those questions by the end of November.”
Gwathney was not able to respond to Chambliss as he tried to wrap up the meeting, giving each member of the committee a final statement before adjourning.
The Alabama Legislature overhauled the state’s parole system in 2019 after Jimmy O’Neal Spencer, who was misclassified by the Alabama Department of Corrections as a low risk offender, received parole in 2017. While on parole, he killed three people in the course of robberies, including a 7-year-old. Spencer was convicted of the murders and sentenced to death in 2022.
The Legislature gave the governor power to appoint the director of the Bureau of Pardons and Paroles, codified the length of parole and required at least one member of the board to be a current or former law enforcement officer.
But legislators have voiced frustration with the Board as its rate of parole grants plummeted, sometimes into the single digits, amid a decades-long crisis of overcrowding and violence in the state’s prisons. According to the fiscal year 2017 annual report obtained from the Alabama Bureau of Pardons and Paroles website, the rate at which the Board granted parole was 54%. Last year, the grant rate fell to 8%.
The parole rate has increased over the past year, with England telling members of the media it is now around 20%.
Gwathney spent most of her time before the dais explaining the parole guidelines as members continued to pepper her with questions about how it was created and how the parole board was using the guidelines to make their decisions.
Chambliss began the inquiry by asking Gwathney who developed the guidelines. Gwathney provided members with a score sheet also available on the Bureau of Pardons and Paroles website that is based on the guidelines.
The guidelines set criteria for how board members are supposed to judge whether a person should be granted parole and eventually released from custody. The score sheet includes risk factors and metrics for members to consider while a person is in custody of the Department of Corrections.
Bureau staff prepare an applicant’s file seeking parole and use the score sheet to evaluate the applicant’s fitness for parole, and offer a recommendation to the Board, but the discretion for deciding parole rests solely with the Board.
According to the July 2024 statistical report published by the Bureau of Pardons and Paroles, the Board only followed the recommendations from the parole guidelines in 25% of the cases. Over the past two year, the board’s rate of following recommendations, called a conformance percentage, has ranged from the mid-teens to the lower 30% range.
That drew the attention of committee members who wondered why the Board is not following the guidelines it has set.
“The bureau is saying they meet these criteria, and almost three-quarters of the time, the board says it doesn’t matter if they meet these criteria, we are not going to parole,” Chambliss said. “It seems like one of the two needs to be adjusted to reality. And I don’t know which. I am just looking at it and trying to figure it out. You set the rules, the Board sets the rules, they are called parole guidelines. I am having a hard time understanding conformance to your own rules.”
Gwathney responded by saying that none of the current board members are responsible for creating the rules by which they judge an applicant’s fitness for parole.
Rep. Chris England, D-Tuscaloosa, a longtime critic of the drop in parole rates, also criticized the board for not updating the guidelines, which it was supposed to have done as part of the changes made in 2019.
“You are about two years overdue,” England said.
Gwathney said the Board is in the process of updating the guidelines, but that it takes time.
Some on the committee were sympathetic about the parole rate the Board has granted.
“If there is a case where someone commits a murder, and an increased risk to offend, and the guidelines still say they are supposed to get out, I want you guys to do exactly what you are doing in making sure they go through that process,” said Rep. Matt Simpson, R-Daphne.
England was among the committee members who expressed the most frustration with Gwathney.
“What is even more ridiculous, is she said today that she would change the score sheet in favor of applicants to help them get out and it only managed to reach 8%,” England said to reporters after the meeting. “So how screwed up is the process, or the guidelines, that you have to change them to get up to 8%, like it is something to be happy and excited about, is ridiculous.”
England has filed bills for the last several years that could create some oversight. HB 40 creates an appeal process for applicants who have been denied parole, and mandates that the Board explain their reasoning when they deny an applicant parole in defiance of the parole guidelines.
“If the law requires her to do certain things, and they have not been done, and she says that is the reason it is not working, but you have been given the power to fix it and you haven’t, maybe you need a little oversight to make it happen,” England said.
Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner John Hamm presented for the first 30 minutes of the two-hour meeting, but for the rest of the meeting committee members focused their attention on Gwathney.
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