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HARRISBURG — In his first two years as governor, Josh Shapiro has signed about 50 percent of the clemency applications recommended to him by the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons.
During Gov. Tom Wolf’s second term, a reenergized Pennsylvania Board of Pardons received and recommended more applications for approval than it did under any prior governor since 1997.
Wolf granted more than 1,600 applications during this period, double the number he signed during his first term and nearly all of the applications recommended to him by the board.
While under Shapiro’s administration, the board has taken steps to improve the process for people seeking second chances. But he has thus far been slower to sign the applications reaching his desk.
In his first two years as governor, Shapiro approved about half of the nearly 900 applications for pardons and commutations that the board sent to his desk. But Shapiro has formally rejected only 26 applications, leaving the rest open for consideration.
Shapiro spokesperson Manuel Bonder said the governor evaluates every pardon and commutation case individually based on its circumstances, “which are often complex, and on its merits.
“The Governor stands proudly on his record of votes on the Board of Pardons as [attorney general] and as Governor, delivering meaningful criminal justice reform while making Pennsylvania communities safer,” Bonder said.
Despite increased applications, the board has sent fewer commutations to Shapiros desk for consideration.
But the change comes as a disappointment to advocates who were encouraged by the shift toward forgiveness in the second half of the Wolf administration.
“It was a great relief when people finally started getting commuted after 30 years,” said Etta Cetera, an advocate with the Commutation Now campaign, a recent effort to revamp the process and push for transparency at the board.
“It was amazing — and now I just feel exasperated and exhausted,” she said.
The five-person Board of Pardons comprises the Pennsylvania attorney general, the lieutenant governor and three political appointees in corrections, psychiatry and crime victim advocacy. It meets several times a year to review and vote on applications from people who hope to have their prison sentence shortened or their criminal record scrubbed.
Applications the board deems “meritorious” are given a public hearing, after which the body votes to either deny the application or approve it for the governor’s consideration.
While pardons are recommended by the board in a majority vote, life sentence commutations, which allow a person to get out of prison, require unanimous approval — a constitutional change made after the board voted by simple majority in 1994 to release Reginald McFadden, a convicted murderer who killed two more people after being released.
Both pardons and commutations require final sign-off from the governor after the board sends a recommendation. The bureaucratic process has profound consequences, particularly for people serving life in prison, but it typically chugs along with little public scrutiny.
That changed in the mid-2010s when the U.S. Supreme Court, in two landmark decisions, directed states to reexamine life sentences given to people who were minors at the time of their crime, said Sean Damon of Straight Ahead, an organization that advocates for the end of mass incarceration.
“That momentum turns into people getting organized and pressing for bigger change,” Damon said. “People start getting active and start trying to pass legislation, but they understand, the family members understand, that that takes time, so what can we do now?”
Relatives of people serving life in prison began to turn their attention to the Board of Pardons, Damon said, which at the time was seldom recommending commutations to the governor.
Republican Gov. Tom Corbett granted no commutations in his four years as governor. In his first term, Wolf granted only five.
But in his bid for a second term, the Democrat picked John Fetterman as a running mate, a choice that would ultimately change the direction of the Board of Pardons.
Fetterman, now a U.S. Senator, became a champion for reform in his role as lieutenant governor and chair after he met with families who pushed the board to prioritize mercy and endorse more life commutations, which had become rare.
By the end of Wolf’s second term, he approved 49 commutations for life sentences, more than the prior 20 years combined.
There was also an effort at the time to pressure Shapiro, who was attorney general and served on the board from 2017 through his run for governor in 2022. As one of the five unanimous votes required for a commutation of a life sentence to reach the governor, he faced criticism for no votes that doomed applications that the rest of the board supported.
After joining the board, Fetterman was among Shapiro’s most vocal critics and threatened to challenge him in the 2022 Democratic primary for governor if he didn’t support more applications.
Cetera, who has watched board proceedings for more than a decade, participated in rallies in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia to pressure Shapiro.
The campaign worked, she said. Shapiro added his affirmative vote to 73% of applications in 2022, during his gubernatorial run.
“We felt like he heard us,” she said.
As governor, Shapiro has the ultimate choice of whether someone deserves forgiveness for their crime or freedom from imprisonment. Under his administration, the board has grown its administrative staff and taken steps to streamline the process for applicants.
Following the surge in approvals under Wolf, the board received an onslaught of applications that has continued under Shapiro. During Wolf’s first term, the board received 1,822 applications across all four years. The board received more than 2,000 in 2020 alone.
Clemency applications of all types are still submitted on paper and processed by hand, said former board secretary Celeste Trusty, who served under Wolf. When the new applications started pouring in, a backlog formed, clogging an already slow process.
“There are thousands and thousands of applications and because everything is submitted on paper, all of those things that need to get input by the Board of Pardons staff into a database,” she said.
Staff also spend a lot of time answering phone calls and emails from applicants seeking a status update, Trusty said.
To handle the increased workload, the board created and filled seven new positions, said Kirstin Alvanitakis, a spokesperson for Lt. Gov. Austin Davis, who currently chairs the board. These additions doubled the staff. The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections also added two case specialists to its commutation unit, she said.
“The addition of new staff has allowed us to better serve our applicants,” Alvanitakis said. “Applications are reviewed sooner and with better accuracy. Staff reach out when applicants have outstanding issues, allowing them to address open warrants and outstanding financial obligations before they see the Board.”
The board also created an expedited review process for applicants with nonviolent offenses on their record, and plans to release a digital review questionnaire and a Spanish language application next year, she said.
As part of the expanded program, the board’s staff reviewed applications that were already filed and moved about 800 applications to the faster track, Alvanitakis said.
Shapiro and Davis also support a constitutional amendment that would change commutation recommendation back to a majority vote, as it was before the McFadden case. State House Speaker Joanna McClinton introduced such a bill last year, but it failed to pass.
Any similar amendment would need to pass both chambers of the General Assembly in two consecutive sessions before becoming a referendum that voters can approve or reject. The earliest the measure could possibly appear on a ballot would be in 2027, after Shapiro’s current term is over.
Despite efforts to speed up and streamline the process, commutation in particular can take years.
And though the board remains more likely to recommend commutations than in the years before Fetterman’s advocacy, under Shapiro it has supported significantly fewer lifers seeking a second chance.
In 2023 and 2024, the board recommended just eight applications to the governor. He has signed six as of December.
Advocates point to this change, as well as the reappointment of Harris Gubernick, as worrying signs of a return to the caution of the post-McFadden days, when the shadow of his crimes nearly ground to a halt second chances to people serving life in prison.
Gubernick is a corrections expert who has been on the board since 2011 and cast controversial votes against commutations, including those that have the support of the state Department of Corrections and the victim’s family.
“This moment of a potential opening and some promise for reform seems to be closing and we cannot let that happen,” Damon said.
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