New York's approval rate for parole applications has been sliced in half since 2005, falling from 52 percent to 24 percent between 2005 and 2013, City Limits' Bill Hughes wrote earlier this month.
Jim Murphy, a former county legislator in Schenectady County and a longtime volunteer with the New York chapter of CURE, Citizens United for Rehabilitation of Errants, said he has been plugging parole board statistics into spreadsheets and "he believes he will soon be able to show a pattern emerging that can predict which parole board commissioners are more or less likely to grant or deny parole. 'A good number of these people—not all of them—but a good number seem to be making their decisions based on the politics of the case,'" Murphy told City Limits.
Criminal justice advoces said that "crimes that receive a disproportionate amount of media attention are judged more harshly by parole boards than similar offenses that are off the public radar."
Lawyer and Legal Journalist
