Late to her own deadline, Hochul says clemency changes are coming

Governor Kathy Hochul said last week that a number of clemency reforms she committed to in December are on their way. Photo by Kevin P. Coughlin / Office of Governor Kathy Hochul

By Jacob Kaye

Half a year after Governor Kathy Hochul committed to reforming the state’s clemency process, New York’s top executive said changes should be coming soon.

Earlier this month, the Eagle reported that the governor – the only person with the power to grant clemency – had missed a self-imposed deadline to institute one of the promised reforms. Of all the reforms she had promised in December 2021 when she granted 10 people clemency, only one appears to have been implemented.

Appearing in Queens last week for an unrelated press event, Hochul said that reforming clemency in New York has proven to be a challenge.

“It’s not an overnight process, but it’s one that’s going to be thoughtful, and one that will be long-term enduring,” Hochul said.

Undergoing her first round of clemencies last year, Hochul said that she saw a number of issues with the process.

“When I went through this process last December for the first time, I said, ‘There's got to be a better way,’” she said. “So, we are overhauling the system from the ground up.”

An estimated several hundred New Yorkers currently have clemency applications pending with the governor’s office. In 2022 alone, at least 39 currently incarcerated or previously convicted New Yorkers have applied for clemency, a spokesperson for the governor told the Eagle in March.

Seen as an act of mercy, clemencies, which come in the form of either a pardon or a sentence commutation, are typically granted around the holidays. There are, however, occasional exceptions – former Governor Andrew Cuomo granted several sentence communications days before he left office last year, including to Greg Mingo, a Queens man who was 40 years into a 50 year prison sentence.

In December 2021, Hochul granted pardons to nine people who had previously been convicted, mostly on drug charges, and all of whom needed clear records to remain in the United States. She also commuted the prison sentence of Roger Cole, who had served 30 years of an 85 to 100 year sentence for a drug conviction.

Announcing the clemencies, Hochul committed to making four reforms to the clemency process.

At the top of the list was the creation of an advisory panel made up of criminal justice professionals, including law enforcement officials, public defenders, judges, clergy and formerly incarcerated people. The panel would be tasked with reviewing clemency applications and making recommendations to the governor – that work is currently done by a dedicated group of staffers in the governor’s office.

In March, a spokesperson from the governor’s office told the Eagle that the panel would be formed and announced in the spring of 2022, a deadline that has long since passed.

Last week, Hochul said that news about the panel would be coming soon.

“We’ll be announcing the members of the commission,” Hochul said.

“The next step in this process is to name the individuals who will be on the advisory board for us,” she added. “People from different walks of life, and that's what we're trying to find is the right balance to give us perspectives from communities on what the right decision is.”

However, advocates say that an advisory board is unnecessary, and does little more than give a governor political cover when public outcry follows a granted clemency.

“It's just about providing political cover,” Steve Zeidman, a CUNY School of Law professor, told the Eagle earlier this month.

“[Current staffers reviewing applications] know which are the meritorious ones, so the need for an advisory panel, when you have a whole bunch of people who've invested hundreds of hours reviewing these applications, seems superfluous to me,” added Zeidman, who also leads the school’s Criminal Defense Clinic, which accounts for the majority of clemency applications submitted in New York State.

In addition to the advisory panel, Hochul said the governor’s office would work with the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, the state agency that runs New York’s prisons, to devise standards and guidelines for clemency applications.

“There has to be some uniformity so that people seeking clemency are held to the same metrics,” Hochul said. “

The governor also committed to informing those with pending applications the status of their request for clemency. That reform appears to have begun.

Earlier this year, the governor’s office began sending communications to those with pending applications about the status of their request.

Prior to the reform, applicants were not told whether or not their application had even been received, let alone its status.

“People who applied for clemency went into this vast wasteland of never knowing their status,” Hochul said. “That was cruel and unfair. They didn’t know whether it’s going to be heard this year, whether it’s in a pile again for the next year or just forgotten about.”

“I already have a process where we’re now keeping engaged with petitioners and letting them know their status,” she added.

Potentially the most meaningful clemency reform the governor promised last year, was granting clemencies on a rolling basis – and providing the number of pending applications and the number of denied applications with each round of granted pardons and commutations.

Hochul did not say whether any clemencies were going to be granted before the holiday season this year. The governor has yet to grant an application for clemency this year.

“It's a challenging responsibility of the governor when you think about the power that's conferred to make a decision,” she said.

Arnie Raimondo, a Vietnam veteran who suffered from undiagnosed PTSD, was recently granted clemency by Cuomo in February 2021. First incarcerated in 1981 at the age of 30, he was released from prison 40 years later.

In a statement to the Eagle, Raimondo said that the most important reform to clemency would be increasing the frequency with which they’re granted.

“Being reunited with my family after over 40 years has been really emotional,” Raimondo said. “I worked hard to get here and it feels great, but so many of my closest friends, the people who inspired me, are still behind bars.”

“The clemency process needs to be speeded up and happen more often than just during the holidays so that other people can come home,” he added. “I know I’m not the same guy who was locked up in 1981, and they’re not the same people, either.”