The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
CT commuting sentences at historic rate
Trend with lengthy terms may not last much longer
HARTFORD — A lot changed during the 27 years Mack Young spent in prison.
New buildings popped up across Hartford, replacing many of the ones he had grown up around. Technology advanced beyond his imagination or understanding, and he swears the driving on Connecticut roads got so much worse.
But when Young was released to a halfway house in July, a month after the state’s Board of Pardons and Paroles formally commuted his 55year prison sentence, he wasn’t worried about any of that. He just wanted to hug his mother.
“That’s my best friend, even to this day,” Young said over a sandwich at a Hartford deli. “That lady came to see me every week, man, for 27 years. Snow? They clear the streets and she’s up there. Rain, trees fell? They clear the streets, she’s up there.”
Young was 32 when he stabbed and killed an acquaintance amid a fight over a debt, landing himself in prison for what he expected would be the rest of his life. But over his decades locked up, he earned a GED and a paralegal certification and became a respected mentor to younger prisoners, including as part of a program featured on “60 Minutes.”
So when he heard that the board was granting commutations for people serving long sentences, he sent in an application. When board members told him at a hearing that his request had been granted and they were ready to send him home, he was prepared for his chance.
“I just dropped my head, man, and thanked God for the opportunity,” said Young, now 59. “You don’t get that many shots.”
Young is one of nearly 100 people in Connecticut serving lengthy prison sentences — typically the result of serious offenses, including murder — to receive a commutation since the start of 2022, as part of a historic wave of clemency. All served at least 10 years in prison before their commutations, and most were sentenced during the “tough-on-crime” era of the 1990s, when prosecutors and judges dispensed decadeslong sentences for an array of offenses.
This wave, the result of a new focus from Connecticut’s Board of Pardons and Paroles, has followed an extended period during which the board gave out few commutations at all. According to official data, the state commuted only three sentences total from 2017 through 2021, including none in 2020, when the board stopped reviewing applications altogether.
But now, as quickly as the window for commutations opened, it appears to be closing again. In an recent interview, Board of
Pardons and Paroles executive director Richard Sparaco said that with so many people having applied for commutation in the past year, there likely aren’t too many more who are eligible and whose cases might appeal to the board.
To be eligible for commutation in Connecticut, someone must have served at least a decade in prison and be more than two years away from a chance at parole. If denied commutation, the person must wait at least three years and then reapply only if “new information” emerges.
“We’ve cycled through a lot of people who have been eligible for commutation,” Sparaco said. “And once all these individuals have applied, it’s very rare that we’re going to hear their cases again.”
Some in Connecticut will be glad to see commutations recede once again. At a news conference Tuesday, Republican lawmakers joined with families of crime victims to demand a halt to commutations immediately, leading Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat, to suggest the state “step back and see how the policy is working.”
“The seriousness of the topic demands a careful approach involving the General Assembly as well as stakeholders, especially victims,” the governor said in a statement.
But Young, who today works several jobs and is planning to start an organization that would help people leaving prison navigate their reentry, says he isn’t ready for this wave of commutations to end. He’s sure there are other people still in prison who could benefit from the second chance he got.
“Don’t hold our past against us, give us a chance to show that we’re different,” Young said.
‘Probably the highest it’s ever been’
Among the main forms of clemency available to an incarcerated person in Connecticut, commutation has often been somewhat of an afterthought.
The state’s Board of Pardons and Paroles distributes hundreds of pardons a year, typically to people who have already served their sentences and want their convictions expunged. Occasionally, it lets sick or incapacitated people out of prison through compassionate or medical parole.
But for much of recent history, commutations have been almost impossible to come by, as both politicians and board members have resisted releasing people serving long sentences for serious offenses.
“I remember in different administrations going back, there would be 80 applications for commutation at the prescreen and nobody made it,” Sparaco said. “It was kind of a rubber stamp: You got an application for commutation and it got denied.”
In 2019, the board paused commutations altogether to reevaluate its process, then continued the pause through 2020, despite calls for greater clemency amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Finally, in mid-2021, the state resumed commutation hearings, with slight tweaks to its eligibility criteria. The idea, Sparaco said, was to think critically in each case about whether a person truly had to remain in prison, while considering input from victims, among other factors.
“Is it in the best interest of justice to continue that individual’s incarceration?” Sparaco said. “Or have they done everything that correction can possibly do outside of just retribution?”
Young remembers when the first longtimer went home in late 2021, an ailing 49-year-old named Michael Cox who had spent nearly three decades in prison. Soon after that, a friend of Young’s also had his sentence commuted.
Suddenly people like Young, who had been handed decades-long sentences and told they might never get out, felt a new hope.
“I thought there was no light at the end of the tunnel,” Young said. “Dudes was going home, and now there was a light.”
Almost immediately, state data shows, applications for commutation began pouring in. After reviewing only a single commutation application in 2019 and 2020 combined, the Board of Pardons and Paroles received 49 in the second half of 2021, then an incredible 431 in 2022.
Of the 442 applications the board has acted on since resuming commutations, 97 have been granted and 279 have been denied, while the rest have been deemed ineligible. Those figures include 25 commutations granted (and 59 denied) already in 2023.
Sparaco, who has worked for the board for more than three decades, said he’s never seen a wave of commutations like this one. “In my career, it’s probably the highest it’s ever been,” he said.
The wave of commutations has drawn backlash from some families of crime victims, some of whom who want to tighten the circumstances under which someone can receive a commutation or even end commutations altogether. They argue that people who commit serious offenses, particularly as adults, should serve their full sentences, regardless of how they might change during their time in prison.
At last week’s news conference John Aberg grew emotional considering that the man who killed his 3-year-old grandson 16 years ago is eligible for a commutation. “This is a sentence he should not outlive,” Aberg said.
Natasha Pierre, the state victim advocate, said Wednesday that she doesn’t support commutation in any circumstance.
“I don’t care about the change they made,” she said of people serving long sentences. “Do your time, and then come out and make the world a better place.”
For others, though, relief for certain long-serving incarcerated people has felt long overdue. Alex Taubes, a New Havenbased attorney who has represented 42 people who have received commutations since 2021, said criminal justice reform efforts have often focused too heavily on people with short sentences or who are being held pretrial and not enough on those who committed serious offenses but have been locked up “for an excessive amount of time.”
‘Every case is unique’
Of course, not everyone serving a long sentence gets the break that Young got. Melvin Delgado was 16 years old in 1995 when he was charged as an accessory to murder in the killing of a rival gang member. After fighting the charges at trial, he was sentenced to 65 years.
Delgado appealed his case all the way to the state Supreme Court, only to see his conviction upheld. He sought other ways to shorten his sentence but without luck. Along the way, he turned away from gang life, married a woman on the outside and, with help from his wife and a cellmate, launched an online apparel business called Made in Prison.
When Connecticut’s parole board began granting commutation requests in large numbers, staff and incarcerated people alike told him he seemed like “the poster child for a commutation.” He’d been locked up as a teen. He’d done more than 25 years already. He’d showed genuine personal growth and even started his own business.
As it turned out, Delgado didn’t even make it past a pre-screening hearing. When his name was called, a board member quickly noted that Delgado will be eligible for parole in several years under a 2015 law limiting sentences for offenses committed by minors, making him a less compelling candidate for commutation. No one else objected and Delgado’s bid for a full hearing was denied. The whole proceeding lasted less than a minute.
“I was crushed,” Delgado said from MacDougallWalker Correctional Institute, where he remains incarcerated. “I just felt so much despair and hopelessness. I wasn’t mad — just sad and confused as to why I wasn’t being acknowledged for everything I’ve done to educate and rehabilitate myself.”
To people behind bars, as well as some who advocate for them, clemency can sometimes seem almost random. In some cases, two applicants who appear to have similar cases wind up with different results.
Sandy Lomonico, a criminal justice advocate who was once incarcerated (and later pardoned) and who now works with people seeking clemency, said she’d like to see more transparency in Connecticut’s commutation process. The Board of Prisons and Paroles provides relatively little detail about its decisions, she said, leaving the people who have been denied unsure what exactly went wrong.
“They deserve more of an explanation as to why they didn’t get commutation,” Lomonico said. “They deserve to know, this is what you need to be doing.”
Sparaco said commutation decisions depend on the circumstances of someone’s offense, the length of their sentence and their track record in prison, among other factors. Even if two people have received similar sentences on the same charges, he said, the specifics of their cases might be subtly different.
“Every single case is unique,” Sparaco said.
‘Kind of a one-and-done’
In the first days after the commutation process resumed in Connecticut in 2021, as people at Cheshire Correctional Institution worked through their applications, Young remembers a lot of conversation about the meaning of “remorse.”
“Some dudes will go, ‘I’m sorry what happened’ — that ain’t remorse, man,” Young said recently. “To me, remorse is paying it forward, doing things in a positive manner and helping others along the way.”
Since his release, Young has found a job at Hartford Hospital, as well as an ambassador role with the nonprofit Connecticut Harm Reduction Alliance. He aims to start his own organization helping people readjust after leaving prison.
At the halfway house where he continues to live, he seeks to guide his peers through their often-difficult reentry. “I tell them all the time, when you come home, whatever door I want through, I’ll help you get through that door myself,” he said.
Even after winning dozens of commutations, Taubes said there are “very many more people” like Young who deserve at least a chance at commutation. His office, he said, is currently preparing another batch of applications, which will be delivered to the Board of Prisons and Paroles shortly.
Taubes says he appreciates the board’s work over the past year but would love to see even more sentences reduced.
“Every Christmas, every birthday that passes, the families in Connecticut are missing their loved ones, and society is missing out on what they can contribute, and the taxpayers are paying excessive amounts for incarceration and supervision,” Taubes said.
Still, Sparaco insists that the boom in commutations is only temporary and that the numbers will soon fall more in line with historical patterns. Already, he said, applications have begun to slow, leading the board to cancel a planned prescreen review.
And while the governor and the state legislature do not have direct control over the commutation process, elected officials have often exerted influence over the process, contributing to rises or dips in clemency.
Meanwhile, though some people denied commutation may cling to the possibility of reapplying after three years, Sparaco said second-time applicants are unlikely to convince the board. For many of Connecticut’s longestserving people, this may truly be the only shot.
“Once we deny you, you’re not coming back, unless there’s something extraordinary,” Sparaco said. “It’s kind of a oneand-done.”