Parole-eligible Virginia prisoners face one of the nation’s stingiest boards. So state lawmakers made parole decisions more transparent with passage of two new laws, the most recent signed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) on April 4, 2024. Just six months later, the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) fired off an angry letter accusing the Parole Board of playing games to skirt its new transparency requirements.

Meanwhile, Youngkin—who slow-walked a law expanding prisoner sentence credits shortly after his 2022 inauguration then reversed course two years later—has once again flip-flopped. The budget he submitted to the state General Assembly on January 7, 2025, takes a razor to sentence credits that the governor agreed to months ago.

As PLN reported, state lawmakers in 2020 amended statutory earned sentence credits (ESC), awarded for good behavior and participation in rehabilitative programming. But just before the first prisoners were to be released in July 2022, the newly elected Youngkin stepped in with a budget amendment that barred credits for those convicted of violent felonies. That year’s General Assembly, also newly elected and more Republican, fell in line to pass it, and that stranded 560 prisoners in their cells after they had been promised release. [See: PLN, Jan. 2023, p.50.]

Youngkin never implemented the rest of the ESC law until the GOP lost control of the state legislature two years later. Lawmakers strong-armed the governor into finally letting ESC take effect. In July 2024, the first 800 eligible prisoners were released. But less than six months later, Youngkin was back with his latest budget, which included another amendment eviscerating ESC—this time reducing the credit a prisoner could earn from 15 days to just 4.5 days for every 30 days served. Delegates to the state House and Senate adopted their own versions of the budget on February 8, 2025, without the governor’s changes to ESC. The two versions will now be reconciled and sent to Youngkin for signature.

About That Stingy Parole Board…

After Virginia abolished parole in 1995, the only state prisoners eligible were those sentenced before that or those seeking geriatric release. A 2000 state Supreme Court ruling, Fishback v. Commonwealth, 260 Va. 104 (2000), also made another 549 prisoners are eligible because their jurors were not informed that parole had been abolished.

But this harsh system got worse after Youngkin took office in 2022. The Parole Board’s approval rate has plummeted with his appointees, including Chairwoman Patricia West—“the architect of parole abolition in Virginia,” according to Shawn Weneta, a former prisoner who is now a policy strategist for the state ACLU chapter. Under West, who worked for then-Gov. George Allen (R) when the state ended parole and now teaches at televangelist Pat Robertson’s Regent University in Virginia Beach, the Board has approved just 1.3% of eligible applicants.

To help prisoners navigate their parole applications, the General Assembly passed SB 1361 in 2023, removing an exemption to the state Freedom of Information Act that the Board had enjoyed. Signed into law by the governor on May 12, 2023, the bill requires the Board to publish its decisions every month, including “individualized reasons” for granting or denying parole and each member’s vote (which can be cast only in a public meeting). State lawmakers followed up with HB 913, which provided that the Board could vote with just three members present instead of four whenever meetings are lightly attended. Youngkin signed the law on April 4, 2024.

Dennis “Vega” Moore is one Virginia prisoner fighting for parole. He has been incarcerated since fatally shooting Vance Michael Horne, Jr., during a 1996 robbery, when Moore was 17. While serving almost three decades of a 53-year sentence, he has earned a GED and taught himself multiple languages. He has also studied real estate and gotten married. Parole-eligible thanks to Fishback, he says that he is rehabilitated and remorseful, worthy of a chance to reenter society, where his goal is to help at-risk youth avoid incarceration. “I’ve grown up in prison,” he said, “but I will not make prison my life.”

Yet Moore was denied release in March 2024 on a fourth appearance before the Board, which fretted that freeing him “would diminish the seriousness of his crime.” He had abundant company; that month, the Board approved only two of 117 petitions it considered. So hopes were high when the new transparency provisions took effect in July 2024. In fact, the ACLU called them “the biggest reform of Virginia’s parole system since 1994.”

Yet by October 21, 2024, the ACLU accused the Board of meeting mainly with prisoners whose applications it was already inclined to grant. Of course, it had no problem complying with transparency requirements about those sessions. For others, the Board said it felt “uncomfortable” divulging unredacted documents but offered to make them available at an in-person appointment.

“That’s not what the legislature had in mind,” declared ACLU senior supervising attorney Vishal Agraharkar. As the organization’s letter emphasized, “Requiring prisoners to make and attend an in-person appointment when they are not free to do so does not satisfy the board’s legal obligation to ‘make available’ such records.”

Most prisoners aren’t present or even represented when the Board considers their applications, noted Washington & Lee University Law Professor Allison Weiss, whose students provide representation to some applicants. “Transparency, I think, is a really good thing, which is why these, you know, the laws were amended in the first place,” she said. “It seems unusual to have a hearing about whether somebody should be released and not to hear from the person.”  

Sources: Bolts Magazine, Virginia Mercury, WRIC

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