Julie McConnell is director of the Children’s Defense Clinic at the University of Richmond’s School of Law. For more than a decade she’s represented prisoners who did terrible things when they were teens and have spent decades in state prisons. McConnell argues they are no longer the same person who committed those crimes.
"Their brains were far from being fully developed," she explains. "The part of the brain that was more developed at that point was the risk-taking, impulsive part of the brain that doesn’t understand that there are long-term consequences to your choices and your behavior."
Among her clients Shabaz Abdullah, formerly known as Reginald Evans -- a Norfolk man who began selling drugs when he was 13. His parents were divorced, and his mother became an addict. She lost the family business and the house where she lived with the kids – leaving them homeless, but Abdullah was afraid to report their situation.
"We were keeping our mouths shut from my father’s side of the family, because the embarrassment and the shame that came with it," he recalls. "We didn’t share anything with the counselors at the school, because we didn’t want my mother to get in trouble. We didn’t want to be taken or anything like that, so I had turned to the streets for survival."
He carried a gun for protection and used it once to try and rob a cabbie. When the man resisted, Abdullah says he fired the weapon to try and scare him, but the bullet ricocheted off the dashboard and killed the driver.
"Something like that should have never happened to him. Here I am, 15 years old, my co-defendant 17 years old. We’re out here trying to rob somebody, and we end up killing this man. He was a husband. He was a father. He was somebody’s son."
Now – at the age of 45 – he expresses remorse, but he can’t bring his victim back, and the law doesn’t allow him to communicate with the man’s family. Instead, Abdullah has started a charity and along with other inmates is buying school supplies for low-income kids in Norfolk. He’d like to expand the mission – to help at-risk teens, people who are homeless or abused. He’s been a model prisoner, gotten his GED and learned a number of trades, and his lawyer -- Julie McConnell – argues he and most older inmates are a safe bet for release.
"They’ve calmed down, matured, developed empathy. They have a reason to care about their futures, and that’s just not something they had when they were teenagers living in very difficult circumstances," she says.
One thing working against them – the notion that victims of crime will feel better if perpetrators are locked up for life. McConnell disputes that point too.
"It’s a false promise. I saw it when I was a prosecutor. We tell them that the system is going to seek revenge for you. That, sadly, does not usually bring closure and comfort to victims’ family members. I’ve even seen cases where victims’ family members were advocating for the release of someone who had served a lengthy sentence they received when they were a child, and the board still didn’t want to release them."
Prisoners need three votes from the parole board or four if they committed a capital crime. By law, that panel is supposed to have five members, but for years Governor Glenn Youngkin refused to fill the fifth seat, putting prisoners like 47-year-old Marcus Ganzie at a disadvantage.
“I need a full panel review. I need five members, because if one decides to say no, I do have a 5th vote," he explains.
So Ganzie went to court, demanding the governor make that appointment. The case has yet to be heard, but last week Youngkin named former Commonwealth’s Attorney Phillips Ferguson to be number five on the board. That should help to ease a workload that McConnell says has overwhelmed current members.
"They’re deciding between 2,500 and 3,000 cases a year. There isn’t enough time to meet these individuals in most cases, to have any kind of direct conversation with them or have a careful look at their record. It's as though they aren't really taking the cases seriously. If the met Marcus or Shabaz, I think they would realize they don't need to keep them incarcerated."
One factor in prisoners’ favor -- the man who used to chair the parole board and now heads the Department of Corrections had called for personal meetings with those who want parole. Chadwick Doston has been pressing for more educational opportunities behind bars and with his agency costing the state more than a billion dollars each year, he could also be urging the board to free more people.
