by Chuck Sharman

A settlement reached on September 15, 2025, moved the North Carolina Post-Release Supervision and Parole Commission a step closer to finally realizing changes that it was ordered to make almost a decade ago in its parole review procedures for prisoners whose crime was committed when they were juveniles. The new agreement resolved a case filed by prisoner Brett Allen Abrams, who accused the Commission of failing to abide by a court order issued in the earlier case.

That was filed in 2010 by prisoner Shaun Antonio Hayden. He was 15 when he committed a burglary and sex offenses to which he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in 1983. His suit accused the Commission of failing to provide a “meaningful opportunity to obtain release based on demonstrated maturity and rehabilitation,” which the Supreme Court of the U.S. (SCOTUS) had just made a requirement for any prisoner convicted of a crime committed as a juvenile in Graham v. Florida, 560 U.S. 48 (2010).

At the time, the Commission provided no difference in parole procedures for these prisoners. Ruling on Hayden’s case in 2015, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina blasted the Commission for having “wholly failed” to provide that “meaningful opportunity” which SCOTUS had mandated. Defendants were found guilty of violating Hayden’s Eighth Amendment guarantee of freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, and their motion for summary judgment was denied.

In Graham, however, SCOTUS also held that “[i]t is for the State, in the first instance, to explore the means and mechanisms for compliance” with its ruling. Therefore, the district court refused to grant Hayden’s request for injunctive relief on his parole application, ordering the parties to come up with a plan to address the deficiency found. The Commission turned to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, but it refused to hear the case because the district court’s order was not final. The Commission then agreed to negotiate a plan with Hayden, which the district court formalized in an injunction granted on November 2, 2017.

Under the injunction’s terms, the Commission was required to provide advance notice of parole hearings to prisoners whose crimes were committed as juveniles, and to let them present witness testimony and other evidence of their rehabilitation. If denied parole, they were also owed a written explanation of the Commission’s reasoning, along with specific recommendations “for steps the offender may take to improve his/her future chances for parole release.”

It wasn’t a guarantee of parole—far from it, in fact—but the ruling represented “a significant departure from the current parole process,” the district court said, “which provide[ed] no advance notice of parole review to the eligible offender, no opportunity to be heard during the parole review process, and no in-person hearing.” Hayden, who had filed his suit pro se, was represented by appointed counsel from attorneys with N.C. Prisoner Legal Services. See: Hayden v. Keller, 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 222207 (E.D.N.C.).

Abrams Brings His Case

Three years later, in 2020, Abrams was denied parole from a life term he had been serving since pleading guilty in 1984 to peeping at his neighbor while she sunbathed on her deck and then fatally stabbing her when she caught him. He was just 14 at the time. During his decades of incarceration, he had developed an “impressive” prison record, as his complaint recalled. He had only minor disciplinary infractions, the last over 15 years earlier. Since 2008, he had been held in minimum-custody on work-release, employed full-time at a meat-packing plant, where prison guards drove him every morning and picked him up every evening. He also got his GED and took advantage of numerous other educational and therapeutic opportunities.

Psychological evaluations reported the same thing that his pastor did: Abrams was “not the boy that he was many years ago when his crime was committed but that he is a very respectful and responsible man now.” So when he was again denied parole, Abrams filed a pro se suit accusing the Commission of keeping parole “perpetually out of realistic reach” by failing to give sufficient consideration to his “continued demonstrated maturity and rehabilitation.” He moved to hold the Commission in contempt of its Hayden order.

North Carolina had eliminated most discretionary parole in 1994, leaving Abrams in a dwindling group of prisoners still in custody for crimes committed before that date. Commission records revealed that about 200 were reviewed between 2010 and 2015, but just seven were granted parole. Following the Hayden ruling, the Commission added a 30-minute in-person interview to its procedures for any prisoner serving time for a crime committed as a juvenile. But when Abrams was appointed counsel from the Southern Coalition for Social Justice (SCSJ), attorneys found that Commissioners had never been trained for the interviews.

“[W]orryingly,” the district court added, “incorrect information was included” in the parole reviews conducted for Abrams. A harried Commission staffer, Joy Smith, repeatedly noted in his file that he was a suspect in an unsolved fire that killed his brother in 1983—even though the Iredell County Sheriff’s Office determined that the cause was accidental and closed the case the next year. She also wrote that he planned to live with his mother on the same block where his victim’s family lived, which was false.

A Broken Process

Smith wrote to Abrams that his parole was denied in 2020 because the Commission “wants you to have more programming to increase your self-awareness and learn how to handle deep emotions that played a role in the commission of your crime.” But a state prison psychologist said that he “has been infraction free for 13 years … so just how improving his ‘emotional regulation’ would be measured is not clear.”

Of course, the Commission’s then-Chair, Willis Fowler, would later admit that there was “strong opposition” from the victim’s family because of Abrams’ “horrible crime.” And Smith confessed to the district court that neither Fowler nor anyone else on the Commission ever reviewed the records of the counseling that they had ordered Abrams to undergo. Such “relevant information was excluded” from the process, the district court noted, even though “commissioners testified [it] would have been relevant to their decision regarding parole.”

Worse, Fowler said that Abrams had already made so much progress that he wasn’t a good candidate for parole. Retired by the time he sat for a deposition in Abrams’ case, the former Commission chair said that he couldn’t support putting Abrams on a path to release unless he had “fallen back, so to speak, had violated a rule, or had not been as successful as he previously had been.” As an exasperated SCSJ attorney Jake Sussman told WFAE in Charlotte, the Commission was “moving the goalposts, kind of arbitrarily, about what success looks like.”

As with Hayden’s case, the district court could not force the state to grant parole to Abrams. But the settlement of his case addressed lingering deficiencies in the Commission’s process. For one, Commissioners didn’t have access to all of a prisoner’s medical and mental health files. Prisoners didn’t know that, though, so they couldn’t provide the information themselves. Now, they must receive the following advisory in advance of their hearings:

“The Parole Commission does not have access to all your records. If there is something that you want the Parole Commission to consider, including, but not limited to, medical or mental health records, it is your responsibility to provide copies of those records to the Parole Commission within 30 days from the date of this letter.”

To prevent more errors like those that Smith included in Abrams’ file, the agreement further requires staffers to advise the Commission that summaries included in a prisoner’s file come from one of the following sources: “Official Crime Version/Prison/Court Record”; “Information Provided by Offender/Supporters”; “Information Provided by Community”; “Victim Information”; “Psychological Information”; and “Other Information.” See: Abrams v. Fowler, USDC (E.D.N.C.), Case No. 5:20-ct-03231.

Abrams, 57, was denied parole again in 2022 and 2024, during pendency of his case. He is currently held at Carteret Correctional Center in Newport, according to the state Division of Adult Correction (DAC). Hayden, 59, is currently held at DAC’s Central Prison in Raleigh.  

Additional source: WFAE

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