Leigh Gwathney, Chair of the Board of Pardons and Paroles speaks during a hearing in Montgomery, Ala., on Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2023. Gwathney's term as chair of the parole board end on Monday but she may continue to serve until she is replaced. (Stew Milne for Alabama Reflector)
Leigh Gwathney’s term as chair of the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles will end on Monday. Whether she will be gone from the board on Tuesday is unclear.
As of Friday, the Speaker of the House, Senate President Pro Tempore and the Lieutenant Governor, had not publicly indicated whether they plan to nominate Gwathney once more and extend her term or submit a different to the Governor’s Office to succeed her once her term officially expires.
Multiple messages were left with all three individuals seeking comment.
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“We are currently awaiting the required list of nominations from the speaker, pro tem and lieutenant governor for this appointment,” a spokesperson from the Governor’s Office said.
Gwathney declined comment on Tuesday. She will continue serving as a member of the parole board until the governor’s office submits another candidate to replace her.
The former prosecutor’s six-year term overseeing the board has been controversial. Parole grants plummeted into the single digits during her term, though they have grown in recent years. Critics have laid much of the blame for declining parole rates at Gwathney’s feet. The board’s delays in updating parole guidelines drew sharp criticism from Democratic and Republican lawmakers, who made the board’s funding for 2026 contingent on the board drafting them.
“I don’t think there is a word that adequately describes how badly the last six years have been in terms of what the law was, what the goals were, and how, I am pretty sure, under her leadership, the parole board missed almost every one of those goals,” said Rep. Chris England, D-Tuscaloosa, a longtime critic of both Gwathney and the current parole process.
“If there is a checklist out there for what is necessary to lose your job, I believe Leigh Gwathney hit every one of them,” he added.
New laws, declining numbers
Gwathney assumed office in 2019 after the Legislature approved an overhaul of the board. The move came after Jimmy O’Neal Spencer, was mistakenly released from prison in 2017. The following year, he murdered three people in Guntersville, including a seven-year-old child, during a series of robberies. A jury convicted Spencer of capital murder and sentenced him to death in 2022.
The 2019 law created a director of the Alabama Bureau of Pardons and Paroles and provided stricter rules for granting applicants parole, especially if they committed a violent crime. The legislation also established guidelines that would recommend if applicants should be granted parole or be denied.
The law required the parole board to update the guidelines every three years based on data to grant parole to applicants who are the least likely to be a threat to public safety.
The parole rate has declined dramatically since Gwathney was appointed to lead the parole board. According to data obtained from the Alabama Bureau of Pardons and Paroles, the parole rate was 55% for 2017 before steadily declining for the next several years.
It was 53% in 2018, one year after Spencer murdered three individuals after earning release. It declined again in 2019 to 31%, to 20% in 2020, 15% in 2021, 10% in 2022 before reaching its lowest point to 8% in 2023. For 2025, the rate increased to 26%.
Matthew Mangino, a former district attorney of Lawrence County, Pennsylvania who served for six years on the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole, said in an interview that parole helps people transition from prison back into their community.
“It helps those individuals with re-entry skills, whether it is dealing with their criminal conduct in the past, finding a skill, or continuing rehabilitation or treatment,” he said. “And it is also an opportunity to monitor these people while they are on the streets to ensure they are not violating the technical aspects of their release or involved in other criminal activity.”
Criminal justice reform advocates said Alabama’s parole board made decisions that did not comply with established guidelines.
According to a September 2024 monthly statistical report, the guidelines recommended that 83% of applicants be granted parole for that fiscal year but the grant rate was 20%. That results in a conformance rate, the frequency with which the parole board follows its own guidelines, of 25% for that fiscal year.
For 2023, the guidelines recommended that 81% of applicants be granted parole while the board only granted parole in 10% of the cases, a conformance rate of 12%.
Carla Crowder, executive director of Alabama Appleseed, a criminal justice reform organization, said the “unfortunate result” of the decline in paroles was that “more people are leaving prison at the end of their sentences with little or no parole supervision, which generally does not correlate with increased public safety.”
“The supervision and programming that comes from someone being granted parole generally means more services and more accountability for people leaving Alabama’s prisons,” she said. “A strong parole program with reasonable grant rates can contribute to public safety. Thousands of people exiting prisons, often after decades of living in violent, chaotic surroundings, with no supervision or programming generally does not.”
Some lawmakers also expressed concerns regarding the parole board’s decisions and the impact it has on the criminal justice system writ large, but especially on the violence and overcrowding within Alabama’s prisons.
“I am a second-chance person,” said Senate Minority Leader Bobby Singleton, D-Greensboro. “I believe that people deserve a second chance. And, at the end of the day, these people are going to get out at some point, whether they are going to EOS out, end of sentence, or they are going to die there. They are going to be released at some point in time. And so, I think when you continue to just deny people, deny people, when they have done everything that you have asked of them to do, it sends a bad message.”
Frustrations over guidelines
Some lawmakers have been increasingly frustrated with Gwathney and the parole board. Their frustrations culminated at a Joint Prison Oversight Committee meeting in October, when Gwathney gave what legislators considered evasive answers to direct questions.
Singleton said during an interview last week that he understood the difficulties of the job but that Gwathney and the parole board had not met his expectations.
“In the past, we have tried to get information, and we have not gotten the information,” Singleton said on Wednesday. “And when we have gotten information, it was misleading information.”
England was even more critical, accusing Gwathney of violating the law after the board went two years without updating parole guidelinesThe parole board in May proposed guidelines that will be submitted to public review, but England expressed doubts about their quality.
“It has been six years now, and what we have essentially done is waste time, a lot of money, and resources,” England said in an interview Wednesday. “Which includes changing guidelines and score sheets, depending on who was in front of her, so all that data is corrupted.”
Pennsylvania relied on guidelines to make parole decisions, Mangino said.
“We had the same numerical score that came from this guidelines process that would say whether someone was likely successful on parole or not,” he said. “You look at the crime, whether the defendant has taken responsibility for that criminal responsibility, you look at the actuarial tools as an aid to tell you what sort of risk, what sort of level of treatment someone might need, what medical health issues they have to deal with on the street.”
He also said that the state’s department of corrections would issue a recommendation for the parole board to consider.
“If you were going to go against the guidelines, you had to provide a written reason why you deviated from the guidelines,” Mangino said.
England has proposed legislation aimed at reforming the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles that would incorporate some of the factors Mangino used to guide his decisions.
The proposals included a validated risk assessment to guide parole decisions and to weigh whether a parole applicant is eligible for work release according to the Alabama Department of Corrections as factors for deciding parole. England also proposed legislation that requires members of the parole board to justify their decisions when they deviate from parole guidelines and allow applicants who have been denied parole to appeal their decisions to the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals.
Thus far, the bills have failed to pass the Legislature.
‘I don’t want to weigh in on that’
State senators who would approve the candidate for the board, whether Gwathney or someone else, declined to comment on her potential candidacy.
“I don’t want to weigh in on that,” said Sen. Will Barfoot, R-Pike Road, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, last week.
Sen. Greg Albritton, R-Atmore, said that he would consider her if Gwathney is the nominee.
“I think she has done a pretty good job, pretty adequate,” he said. “I know she is criticized for not granting more paroles, but then again, not many of us are looking at the records either.”
Sen. Clyde Chambliss, R-Prattville, who publicly criticized Gwathney during the October meeting, said last week he was not willing to comment.
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Author: Ralph Chapoco