Leigh Gwathney took the podium in Montgomery on Wednesday, facing a group of Alabama lawmakers both Republican and Democrat who wanted to know why the state parole board had all but stopped granting paroles last year.
At one point, a lawmaker asked why the board doesn’t let inmates attend their own hearings.
Gwathney, the chair of the parole board and the most reliable “no” vote on the board, said parole officers talk to inmates beforehand and that it wouldn’t benefit the board if they did hear from or get to question inmates directly.
Family members of people in Alabama prisons began to laugh and whisper in the audience, many shaking their heads while Gwathney spoke.
One man, who said his son died in prison after being denied parole, sat in the front row. “I’ve never seen anything that said why he was denied,” Tim Mathis said after the meeting. “I think it’s to do with these stupid guidelines they got.”
His son was 31 when he was killed in prison this summer. Mathis said his son would still be alive if he had been paroled.
“It’s just hard for me to comprehend… She can’t even answer the questions. She has no business with the job she’s got.”
Sen. Clyde Chambliss, R-Prattville, who serves as the chair of the Joint Prison Oversight Committee, asked a lot of the questions on Wednesday. He said the committee met with Gwathney in January with questions about the board’s decision making and is still waiting on answers.
“To date we have not received a response,” said Chambliss.
Frustrations continued to mount from both sides of the aisle as the hearing went on.
At one point, Rep. Chris England, D-Tuscaloosa, told Gwathney that her testimony was not persuasive.
“You inadvertently made the case that the board needs oversight,” said England.
All three parole board members — Gwathney, Darryl Littleton and Gabrelle Simmons — attended the committee meeting on Wednesday in Montgomery. In July, the committee met and criticized the board for not showing up.
But this time, Gwathney spoke with lawmakers about half an hour into the meeting, following Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner John Hamm’s updates on prison construction.
“It can be looked at that we are only looking for one side of things,” Gwathney said as she explained how files are compiled for each inmate applicant. “That could not be further from the truth.”
Gwathney told lawmakers that the board “believes in transparency.”
During her testimony, she detailed the criteria for deciding who to parole. But according to the board’s data, they only follow their own guidelines about 20% of the time.
When asked about those guidelines, data and methodology, Gwathney said she didn’t know the definitions for what’s listed in board data as active versus inactive offenders.
“Madam chair, that is problematic,” said Chambliss.
The board, and the bottleneck blocking people from leaving an overcrowded and dangerous prison system, became the subject of AL.com’s series ‘Denied: Alabama’s Broken Parole System’ throughout 2024.
Gwathney talked about the board’s existing guidelines, but said they were set in 2018, prior to her appointment. She said that she didn’t know who set them or their reasoning. While it’s required that they are considered before a parole decision is made, the board members do not have to follow them. She talked about a scoresheet that records how someone fits within the guidelines, yet admitted she sometimes changed the scores.
England pointed out that Alabama law requires the board to review the guidelines every three years, seek public comment and share them on the parole board website. “You’re about two years overdue,” said England.
“Fair enough,” Gwathney replied.
Those comments led to a contentious back-and-forth, with Gwathney saying the guideline revision “is an ongoing conversation.”
Chambliss interrupted. “Madam chair… When I ask a question like that, you should tell me what you’re doing, and why, and how, and where. That just gives me an air of, you’re just not going to be forthright with me.”
Chambliss added that the board should be adhering to its own criteria. “If we develop the guidelines, and say what the guidelines are, it seems like we should be hitting them more than 20, 25% of the time,” said Chambliss.
Gwathney fumbled, saying she was trying to answer the committee’s questions and apologized.
“Part of me gets nervous when I come up here and try to answer y’all’s questions,” she said. “It’s not that I’m evading your question. I don’t want you to feel that I am evading your question.”
She started naming people who previously worked at the board, seemingly pointing to them for creating the guidelines. “I don’t know that it’s right for me to throw out people’s names when everybody’s unhappy with something.”
Chambliss, frustrated, told Gwathney that wasn’t what he asked for.
“One of the two needs to be adjusted to reality,” Chambliss said about the difference in the guideline parole rate and the actual parole rate.
“You set the rules. The board sets the rules. They’re called parole guidelines. And I’m just having a hard time understanding conformance to your own rules is in the 20 percentile. I guess that’s my question… Why is that? If you actually write the rules yourself?”
As Gwathney pivoted back to saying the board didn’t write the rules, England hung his head.
England brought up a 2019 meeting, saying that the committee’s questions still haven’t been answered five years later. He also questioned Gwathney about her changing inmates’ scoresheets — despite her claiming that her changes are always to the inmates’ favor.
“Somebody else needs to be involved in this process,” England said. “Either (the guidelines are) broken, or the process itself is broken.”
“The fact that we’re here now and we’ve got these basic fundamental questions about process… there’s a problem here.”
He also said the board isn’t transparent with why they deny the majority of people who come up for a hearing. “These folks can’t go back and fix what’s wrong if they don’t know what’s wrong.”
Gwathney faced more grilling by Chambliss, and when she sputtered while answering, he didn’t hold back his frustration.
“Madam chair, it’s been since January. If you didn’t understand my question, you certainly didn’t have to wait until now.”
She told a story, without identifying details, about a case that the board has considered recently. But she didn’t stop for interruptions from Chambliss, until he firmly stopped her. “Madam chair,” he loudly stated.
“At our meeting in January, we asked six to seven questions. Your counsel wrote those questions down. I want the answer to those questions by the end of November,” Chambliss said.
“You know the questions. That’s why we are frustrated… we asked specific questions, we want specific answers.”
Chambliss gave each board member time to ask one final question or make one final point, before adjourning the meeting. Gwathney had been grilled for over an hour.
England finished by stating that a parole board which only releases 20% of eligible inmates is “wasting money and wasting time.”
“In 2019, we asked questions. In 2024, we asked questions, because we were trying to get to the heart of this problem we are discussing right now. And we’re still having it.”
“To the point that we had to be browbeaten, embarrassed and ashamed by the fact that the process is not working in order to get to the point here today of celebrating a 20% release rate…”
“We can’t afford it. The process itself has to work one way or another,” he said. “If it’s the guidelines, we fix it. And if it’s a personnel problem, we need to fix that too.”
Following the meeting, England told reporters: “Either the process is broken or her decision-making process is terrible. I’ll let y’all make that assessment.”
