Second Chances Resource Library

A guide to filing Administrative Appeals and CPLR Article 78 petitions challenging parole denials in New York State.

In 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Montgomery v. Louisiana, making Miller v. Alabama’s requirement that judges consider the mitigating attributes of youth retroactive and offering new hope to thousands of people who had been sentenced to life without parole as children. For many, that hope has led to shorter prison sentences, and for hundreds of others, it’s meant freedom. At the time of the decision, 2,800 individuals in the U.S. were serving life without parole for crimes committed as children. In the six years since, 835 individuals formerly serving this sentence have been released from prison.

Today, 25 states and the District of Columbia ban life-without-parole sentences for children, and in six additional states, no one is serving life without parole for a crime committed as a child. While we celebrate this inspiring progress, we recognize that far too many others have not yet received the relief they rightfully deserve. Thus, we are pressing forward in the fight for these individuals across all areas of our work, with a particular focus on state legislatures and advocacy in outlier states. You can read more about how far we have come and the challenges we still face in this report.

This fact sheet supports Second Look legislation in Texas to create parole eligibility after 20 years for juvenile offenders.

Although other countries have largely rejected the felony murder doctrine, 48 states, the District of Columbia, and the federal government still use these laws. Felony murder laws compel harsh decades-long – or even life – sentences even when the individual charged did not directly cause or intend the loss of life. This report evaluates the legal and empirical foundation, and failings, of the felony murder rule, profiles impacted individuals, and highlights recent reform efforts in 10 jurisdictions.

Key findings include:

1. Felony murder laws widen the net of extreme sentencing and are counterproductive to public safety.
2. Felony murder laws have particularly adverse impacts on people of color, young people, and women.
3. Existing reforms must be expanded to achieve justice.

This article is a retrospective analysis of the significant Maryland decision, Unger v. State, which resulted in one of the most interesting and important unplanned criminal justice experiments in Maryland and national history. On May 24, 2012, Maryland’s highest court released a decision that shocked the Maryland legal world and gave older life-sentenced Maryland prisoners their first real hope of release in decades. In Unger v. State, the Maryland Court of Appeals made retroactive a 1980 decision that had invalidated a historic instruction that Maryland judges had given juries in criminal cases for over 150 years. In that instruction, judges told the lay jurors that they, not the judge, were the ultimate judges of the law, and what the judge said was advisory only. A fair reading of the Unger decision was that all prisoners convicted before 1981 were entitled to new trials. Subsequent decisions confirmed this reading. Over six years, 200 of these older prisoners impacted by the Unger decision were released on probation. This article examines the jury-determines-the-law instruction, the Unger decision, and the implementation of Unger, largely through the releases of older prisoners convicted of violent crimes. In this article, we identify what we believe is important about the Unger story, not just in Maryland but also nationally, including the impact of race in criminal justice, the ability to release older prisoners with appropriate support, and how the lessons learned from the Unger decision can provide a model for reentry programs.

This document is a letter written to Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf, Lt. Governor John Fetterman, and the Board of Pardons Secretary K. Celeste Trusty. The letter asks for an expansion of clemency in Pennsylvania and provides FAMM’s recommendations on how to do so.

This infographic explains the commutation process in Pennsylvania.

For those concerned about mass incarceration, serious attention should be paid to the prison-release frameworks at the back ends of American sentencing systems. These are varied and are often highly complex. In each state, it is important to consider the institutional structure for release decisions, how and by whom time-served discretion is currently being exercised, and the range of possibilities for future changes in existing decision patterns (in both desirable and unwanted directions). Not all, but a large portion of the nation’s prison policy is implicated. In recent years, much of the mass incarceration debate has been focused on “front-end” decision-makers such as judges and prosecutors. For a comprehensive slate of possible reforms, equal attention must be directed to the back end.

This project offers new conceptual tools to better understand and compare the wide range of prison-release systems across America. We hope this will allow state officials to see their own systems in new perspective, and may shine a spotlight on policy options that would otherwise go unseen. It grows out of an ambitious project to examine the prison-release frameworks of 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the federal system.

This opinion piece calls on Congress and state legislatures to adopt broad “second look” sentencing laws.