Editorial by Jill Porter
The Philadelphia Daily News
PHILADELPHIA — WHY WAS he out on the street?That’s the question we furiously ask whenever a horrendous crime is committed by a felon paroled before his full sentence was served.
That’s the question that still rankles police after Officer Patrick McDonald was murdered last month by a parolee with two years left on his sentence.
Daniel Giddings was a felon with a violent history who was released in August, after serving 10 years of a six-to-12-year sentence for armed robbery and aggravated assault.
What was he doing on the street?
It’s a legitimate question, not just a rhetorical rant against the system.
But the fact is, you can’t get much of an answer.
What you get is the “green paper” from the state parole board listing criteria an inmate met before being approved for release.
In Giddings’ case, he “accepted responsiblity” for his crime, showed “remorse,” completed “institutional programs,” got a positive recommendation from the department of corrections and so on.
But if you want to ask for more specific information from the board members who abbreviated his sentence, you can’t.
Their identities are secret.
The names of the nine members of the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole are public. But they don’t all make the decision.
According to Sherry Tate, spokeswoman for the parole board, a felon is interviewed at the prison where he’s incarcerated by two to five board members. They make the decision, Tate said, and there’s no review by the whole board.
And their identities are confidential.
So you can’t ask questions about reasons and rationales; you can’t get answers, and you can’t hold anyone accountable.
In other words, public officials who earn taxpayer dollars make decisions that sometimes have dramatic repercussions.
And the state says we have no right to know who they are.
It makes no sense to me.
This isn’t about facilitating a witch hunt.
This isn’t about identifying “villains” on the parole board who we can demonize and scapegoat.
We do enough of that already, in a nonproductive spree of hostility and finger-pointing - at, for instance, the judiciary - in the aftermath of a terrible crime.
And God knows there’s no perfect system, no way to guarantee that a felon who’s released won’t strike again.
But it seems inconsistent and irrational to conceal the identities of the parole board members who make such potentially crucial decisions.
Every other aspect of the criminal-justice system is, as it should be, a public proceeding, with the players identified by name.
They may not be accountable to anyone - certainly judges aren’t - but they know the public is watching.
Why is it different with the parole board?
Why can’t we know exactly who interviewed Daniel Giddings, or who in the prison system recommended he be released, and why?
Tate cited me chapter and verse of statutes that mandate confidentiality.
She couldn’t explain the rationale behind the statutes.
And the explanation provided by Gov. Rendell’s spokesman, Chuck Ardo, didn’t make sense to me, either.
Rendell suspended all paroles in the aftermath of McDonald’s murder, and appointed an academic expert to study how the state releases violent offenders.
Would Rendell support making the process more transparent, I asked Ardo, so the public can know the identity of the decision-makers in each case?
“The reason some of it is closely held is that we have to balance the public’s right to know with the safety concerns of those making decisions,” Ardo said.
“You can count on bad people having bad friends who might seek to do harm if a negative decision was made.”
But the “bad person” who may be rejected for parole already knows who made the decision and can seek retribution if he’s so inclined - because he’s been interviewed by them.
And why aren’t we afraid of what those “bad people” will do to the judges who send them away in the first place?
Or, for that matter, the cops who lock them up?
Call me a radical, but I don’t think any process benefits by secrecy.
I think the privacy laws that protect medical and other records that pertain to individual prisoners can be met, and the identity of the parole board decision-makers still can be revealed.
And then when the agonizingly recurring question comes up - what was he doing on the street? - we’ll know just whom to ask.
Copyright 2008 Philadelphia Newspapers, LLC