Gov yet to utilize clemency powers as illegal prison guard strike continues
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Governor Kathy Hochul has yet to utilize her clemency powers as prison guards across New York continue to illegally strike. File photo via Mike Groll/Office of Governor Kathy Hochul
By Jacob Kaye
As the illegal strike by New York State prison guards entered its ninth day on Tuesday, Governor Kathy Hochul said enough was enough. The officers who had illegally walked off of their jobs in New York’s prisons over a week ago had yet to negotiate their return in good faith and were putting “the entire state at risk” by going AWOL, Hochul said.
The wildcat strike that began several days before nearly a dozen officers were charged with murdering Robert Brooks at Marcy Correctional Facility in December has thrown the state’s prison system into crisis. Incarcerated people at a number of facilities throughout the state have had limited to no access to programming, family visits and other services. At least one man, 51-year-old Jonathan Grant, has died during the strike.
In response, Hochul has sent 6,500 members of the National Guard into a number of prison facilities to fill in for the striking officers. Hochul also said Tuesday that the state had initiated legal proceedings against officers who had walked off the job, and that she was working to transfer incarcerated people out of the most chaotic facilities and into calmer ones.
But while Hochul’s administration has “worked tirelessly over the last nine days to resolve” the strike, the governor has yet to utilize a power granted only to her that could lead to the release of dozens, if not hundreds, of people locked for decades in New York’s prisons.
Though Hochul has over 1,140 clemency applications from incarcerated New Yorkers asking for their sentences to be commuted sitting on her desk, the governor has yet to grant a single request in 2025.
The inaction falls in line with Hochul’s approach toward clemency last year, when she commuted the sentences of only three people. The governor, who vowed to reform the clemency process during her first year in office, granted three times as many clemencies in 2023, the first full year her reforms went into effect.
The governor’s office did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday.
As of December 2024, there were 1,616 applications for clemency pending with the governor’s office. Of those, 1,147 applications were from currently incarcerated New Yorkers asking for their sentence to be commuted or reduced. The remaining 469 applications were from people who previously spent time in prison asking for their record to be cleared through a pardon.
The governor’s office did not provide the Eagle with updated numbers on Wednesday.
Advocates told the Eagle this week that they were disappointed that Hochul had not yet used her clemency power to ease the crisis in the prisons.
“I think she’s being hypocritical and she’s failing our communities in doing so,” Jose Saldana, the director of the Release Aging People in Prison Campaign, told the Eagle on Wednesday.
“She has the opportunity to really make a statement, not only for the communities that are impacted, but for the illegal strikers, that she's going to resort to humane solutions to this crisis,” Saldana added. “That's an opportunity but she's not doing it.”
Only the governor of New York has the power to grant clemency to those convicted in the state’s courts. Though constitutionally given to the governor, the power went mostly unused by New York’s executives for decades until former Governor Andrew Cuomo committed to using the power more frequently in 2015. Once a year around Christmas time, Cuomo would grant clemency to around a dozen people. Though the former governor’s reforms ultimately failed to materialize in full, clemency became a possible avenue for release for a small handful of incarcerated men and women serving long sentences who were able to show that they had changed their lives for the better while behind bars.
As Cuomo began granting clemency, more and more New Yorkers began to request it, and a backlog of applications began to build up on the governor’s desk. A vast majority of the over 1,140 sentence commutation applications pending with the governor’s office were submitted prior to Hochul taking office in 2021.
Since taking office, Hochul has granted 17 sentence commutations, accounting for around 1.4 percent of the pending commutation applications. She has also granted 77 pardons.
When granting her first round of clemencies in 2021, Hochul announced that she planned to make a series of changes to the way her office handled the applications.
To start, Hochul’s office began to update New Yorkers who had applied for clemency about the status of their request. The state also published instructions online for applying for clemency.
She also created a clemency advisory panel designed to review and recommend applicants to the governor.
At the heart of the reforms, however, was the governor’s commitment to grant clemency on a rolling basis, rather than all at once around the holidays.
Though it was the final reform to be enacted, Hochul followed through and granted clemency outside of December for the first time in 2023. That year, she granted clemency on three different occasions.
However, Hochul appeared to backtrack on the key reform in 2024, granting clemency twice and greatly reducing the number of sentence commutations included in those clemency rounds.
Advocates say that if there has ever been a time for Hochul to recommit to granting clemency on a rolling basis, it’s now.
“I know that there are countless men and women that are incarcerated that meet that criteria [for clemency] and can be safely released back to their community and family,” said Stanley Jamel Bellamy, the New York City organizer for the Release Aging People in Prison Campaign who himself was granted clemency by Hochul in 2022.
“She can give them a date and allow these individuals to walk right out the door in a matter of minutes or days, and she's not using that executive power,” Bellamy added. “It begs the question, why not? What is she afraid of?”
