The Maryland General Assembly is taking up legislation (Senate Bill 111 and House Bill 303) to eliminate the requirement that the governor approve parole for any inmate serving a life sentence. Let's take the politics out of parole, it is suggested, and let the Maryland Parole Commission alone decide on release for anyone not confined by a sentence of "life without parole."
Before we take the governor out of the loop, we should take a look at what the parole commission has actually been doing with repeat violent offenders.
Michael McGraw (aka Michael Thornton) arrived in state prison in 1987 at age 17 for two rapes and a handgun, all Baltimore City convictions. Constantly on disciplinary segregation, he was mandatory released — that is, by operation of credits earned, not by parole — in 2009, having done 23 years of a 25-year sentence. Five months later, Mr. McGraw got into a knife fight over a woman, and in October 2011 got seven years in the city for manslaughter.
With this history, in August 2012 two parole commissioners recommended Mr. McGraw for parole a year later, and he was duly paroled on Aug. 13, 2013.
Five days later, he was charged with smuggling drugs into one of the Hagerstown prisons. He was sent back to prison as a parole violator and sentenced to a year and a day in prison on the Washington County conviction. The unwise parole was also revoked, and Mr. McGraw isnow scheduled for release in 2018.
Tyrone Wheatley, born in 1954, had served six prior sentences in the Division of Correction when an adult woman accused him of sexually assaulting her over many years as she grew up. He pleaded guilty to rape in January 2009 and got probation: credit for nine months served before trial in Baltimore City, with the balance of 20 years suspended.
Wheatley was found guilty of violating his probation in 2010 and was sentenced to the full 19 years and 3 months remaining. Still, he made parole on Aug. 16, 2013, on medical grounds; the parole commission was assured he was dying.
Two weeks after his parole, Wheatley got into an altercation with an elderly Pakistani immigrant, whom he assaulted. Wheatley was returned to the Division of Correction on the parole violation in February 2014 (He died in custody on May 19, 2014).
Mr. McGraw and Wheatley are only two of many violent offenders the parole commission has mistakenly deemed ready for release in recent years. Even when paroled convicts have been returned to prison after committing new crimes for which they were later convicted, the commission has been only too eager to restore them to their freedom.
The parole commission talks the talk of public safety and victims' rights, but it walks the walk of accelerated release. Maryland does not build prisons, and it is crucial for governors and prison officials to keep convicts moving out as fast as they are coming in. In this new climate of budget cuts, this policy is unlikely to change.
I am acquainted with many men who are serving life sentences. Some of them should never go home. However, I agree that a "simple" life sentence should imply the possibility of parole — after many years of incarceration, good adjustment to prison and true contrition.
If the governor is quietly excused from having to approve parole for lifers, the parole commission will speed the release of men and women who have committed the most odious crimes. We will be assured that they are too old, too sick or too changed to constitute any further danger. Michael McGraw and Tyrone Wheatley give the lie to this.
The death penalty is gone. Soon we will be told of the heartlessness of life without parole. (Jody Lee Miles, whose death sentence was commuted shortly before Gov. Martin O'Malley left office, is already challenging the "without parole" restriction on his new life sentence.) Maryland is moving, perhaps inexorably, toward the sense that no one, regardless of the horror of his crimes or the social devastation they have wrought, should have to die in prison.
Hal Riedl retired from the Maryland Division of Correction in 2010, and from the Office of the State's Attorney for Baltimore City in December 2014. His email is halriedl@msn.com.