Pennsylvania inmates serving LWOP for 2nd degree murder face uphill battle to gain release

While 19 states, including New York and California, allow the governor unilateral clemency power, Pennsylvania is among 10 states that require the approval of its pardon board. Without the board’s recommendation, the governor is barred from commuting a person’s sentence, reported The Appeal. Three members—a victim advocate, a corrections expert, and a medical or mental health expert—are nominated by the governor and approved by the state senate. The lieutenant governor and attorney general comprise the other two members.

Acknowledgment of an application can take up to 18 months. Only then does an applicant undergo an institutional review, including a psychological review as well as an interview with the prison superintendent. Former DOC secretary John Wetzel instituted the policy of interviewing applicants. His successors have continued the practice.  

Then the process continues to a merit review. In 2026, the board scheduled three merit reviews for commutations. At each review, the board votes on hundreds of applications, reviewing the person’s institutional record, program participation, staff support, their personal statement, future plans, and letters supporting or opposing their release. For applicants serving life without parole, three of the five members must approve before they can proceed to a public hearing.

Before the public hearing, board members interview the applicant over Zoom. Each interview lasts no longer than 30 minutes. At the hearing, which is also virtual, family members of their victims as well as the applicant’s loved ones have the opportunity to testify.

Until the 1990s, an applicant needed a majority vote for commutation. Then, in 1994, however, Reginald McFadden, who had been granted commutation two years earlier, killed two people and raped a third. Recidivism among clemency recipients for any offense is extremely low. Nonetheless, his acts prompted widespread fears of second chances and a 1997 legislative change requiring a unanimous vote for all commutations. Between 1967 and 1994, over 360 life sentences had been commuted. 

Since 1995, the board has reviewed 190 applicants serving life without parole. Of those, 80 (or fewer than half) were recommended to the governor. Seventy-eight have been granted commutation. 

Celeste Trusty, now the state legislative affairs director for FAMM, served as secretary for the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons during previous governor Tom Wolf’s last year in office (December 2020 to January 2022). “It really does matter who’s in office, who’s on the board, what the public sentiment is about commutation [and] the political ambitions of the people involved in the process,” she told The Appeal. She noted that, because Wolf had no plans to run for higher office, “the political liability that people generally associate with second chances and clemency was removed, and he was able to boldly go forward.”

During Wolf’s two terms as governor, the board held 114 hearings for lifers and recommended 55. Wolf granted commutation to all of them.

As attorney general, Shapiro was a member of the pardon board. In 2019, he cast the fewest votes for commutation. Since becoming governor in 2023, the board has conducted 46 hearings for lifers and recommended 15 people. Shapiro granted commutation to all 15. (During his first term, Wolf granted commutation to 19 people, more than his past four predecessors combined.)

Bolden initially applied at his mother’s urging. The board denied his first two applications. 

Since then, he has developed multiple sclerosis, which has progressed to the point where he requires a wheelchair. It also greatly limits the use of his left hand and causes constant pain. 

This past March, Bolden learned that he received support from the Department of Corrections Secretary Laurel Harry. His merit review is scheduled for July 9. If approved, his public hearing will be on September 11. 

“Little by little, I’m starting to have more hope,” he said. Decades behind bars, including four years with execution hanging over his head, made it impossible to envision a life beyond the prison door. 

“The gravity and weight of prison is so hard to put into words,” he said. 

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SCOTUS grants new trial to condemned man who spent 20 years on death row

The question in the case was whether defendant's lawyer had a meaningful chance to challenge the prosecutor’s stated reasons for striking Black jurors

A divided Supreme Court sided with a Black death row inmate from Mississippi who accused the white prosecutor in his case of intentionally and illegally striking potential Black jurors from the panel that heard his case, reported The New York Times.

Terry Pitchford was convicted in 2006 for his role in the murder of a shopkeeper by a 12-member jury that included only one Black member. At the time, the county where his trial took place was 40 percent Black.

In its 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court said Mr. Pitchford’s lawyer should have had an opportunity to challenge the prosecutor’s reasons for striking all but one potential Black juror, consistent with a 40-year-old landmark precedent barring race discrimination in jury selection. The decision means that Mr. Pitchford, 40, who has served on death row for more than two decades, is entitled to a new trial, his attorney said.

The dispute in Mr. Pitchford’s case involved the same prosecutor whose jury-selection practices were condemned by the Supreme Court in a separate decision in 2019 that drew considerable public attention.

In that case, the prosecutor Doug Evans spent decades trying to convict Curtis Flowers, a Black man, of the 1996 murders of four people inside a furniture store. During six trials, Mr. Evans repeatedly ensured Black people were excluded from juries. The case was featured on a season-long podcast, as well as in episodes of a documentary series. Mr. Flowers spent 23 years in prison until he was released in 2019 following the court’s decision. Charges against him were dropped the following year.

The question in Mr. Pitchford’s case was whether his lawyer had a meaningful chance to challenge the prosecutor’s stated reasons for striking Black jurors.

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In general, prosecutors have leeway to remove a certain number of potential jurors, by issuing challenges that are discretionary and cannot be second-guessed. Forty years ago, the Supreme Court carved out an exception in the case Batson v. Kentucky. Under that ruling, when lawyers are accused of discriminating based on race in jury selection, they must provide a different, race-neutral explanation for their actions.

In recent years, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has turned away most appeals from death row inmates. But writing for the majority, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh said the state judge had failed to provide Mr. Pitchford’s lawyer “sufficient opportunity” to dispute the prosecutor’s race-neutral reasons for striking four of five potential Black jurors, and had failed to explore if the prosecutor’s reasons were “pretextual.”

Justice Kavanaugh, who wrote the court’s 2019 decision in Mr. Flowers’s case as well, has had a longstanding interest in race and jury selection. He was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the court’s three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Joseph Perkovich, one of Mr. Pitchford’s lawyers, praised the court for recognizing the “extreme failure of the state courts to enforce essential protections under the Constitution.”

In a statement, Megan Byrne, a lawyer at the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, said the decision “properly recognizes that potential racial discrimination in jury selection deserves meaningful scrutiny and careful review.”

Mr. Evans, the prosecutor, has retired from the Montgomery County district attorney’s office. The Mississippi attorney general’s office, which defended the conviction, did not respond to a request for comment.

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15 years of pretrial hearings for Guantanamo detainees

Prosecutors portrayed the prisoners as unrepentant jihadists who bragged about their roles in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to federal agents during their first months in military detention at Guantánamo Bay, reported The New York Times.

Defense lawyers cast the men as so broken by violence and solitary confinement in their years in C.I.A. prisons overseas that they were groomed to involuntarily confess to U.S. agents.

Over eight days this month, the two sides offered these stark, clashing views to a military judge who is now confronted with the overarching question in the long-running capital case: Did Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is accused of hatching and organizing the Sept. 11 attacks, and two co-defendants voluntarily incriminate themselves to F.B.I. agents years ago, and can their statements be used against them?

The case is in its 15th year of these pretrial proceedings, and no date has been set for the trial to begin. But the judge’s decision could be a turning point almost 25 years after the attacks killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon.

Stephan Gerhardt, whose brother Ralph was killed in the attack on the World Trade Center, said the judge’s decision would provide “a major step forward as it answers probably the biggest legal question that needs resolution before a trial date being set.”

He watched some of the arguments in the court at Guantánamo this month.

The legal question before the judge is not about the crime itself, the largest terrorist attack ever in the United States. That will be left for a trial.

It is whether the prisoners were so thoroughly conditioned after more than three years of incommunicado detention, which started off with brutality and continued with years of questioning by U.S. government agents, that they involuntarily told their captors what they wanted to hear.

A crux of the question confronting the judge is the legal principle of attenuation, how to get an untainted confession after a coerced one. Prosecutors say the “clean” interrogations at Guantánamo in 2007 met the legal standard of a change in time, change in place and change in identity of questioners.

Transfer to Guantánamo

To make his decision, the judge is reviewing years of testimony and reams of classified evidence managed by four previous judges in the case against Mr. Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi to decide whether there was a clear moment of attenuation.

Or, as the judge called it, the pivot.

Military judges have so far thrown out the confessions of two other capital defendants, Ammar al-Baluchi and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, because of what the C.I.A. did to them. Prosecutors are appealing to reinstate Mr. Baluchi’s statements.

“Mr. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed could not shut up about his role as the emir of the 9/11 attacks,” the lead prosecutor, Clayton G. Trivett Jr., said on the first day of the hearing. Mr. Trivett said Mr. Mohammed boasted about the attacks to C.I.A. interrogators after he was captured in Pakistan in March 2003 and then to F.B.I. agents at Guantánamo in January 2007.

It was in March 2003 when Mr. Mohammed was in C.I.A. custody that he was waterboarded 183 times. His lawyer, Gary D. Sowards, said that after his client was tortured, he was questioned hundreds of times, sometimes three times a day, by C.I.A. investigators.

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CREATORS: President Settles Extraordinary Lawsuit With Himself

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
May 26, 2026

Never has there been a more egregious abuse of power in American history than the settlement of President Donald Trump v. the Internal Revenue Service. The President sued the IRS — essentially suing himself — while the lawyers defending the government against the lawsuit also work for him. Trump was well aware of the incongruous nature of his lawsuit, telling reporters, "I'm supposed to work out a settlement with myself."

Let's put that in perspective. The president oversees the Department of the Treasury. The IRS is an agency of the Department of the Treasury. The Secretary of the Treasury serves at the pleasure of the President. The Department of Justice is also an agency of the executive branch of government — headed by the president's former attorney — whose attorneys must adhere to the president's opinion on matters of law.

The Justice Department announced that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has established a $1.776 billion fund to settle Trump v. IRS. According to Lawfare, the name "Trump chose for this instrument of partisan self-dealing — conjured by a president suing his own government and settling with himself, a product of the politicized use of the legal system he claims to deplore — is 'The Anti-Weaponization Fund.'"

As the fund is currently configured, Trump will not be entitled to compensation directly from the fund. According to Lawfare, "the money will be doled out by a five-member board he effectively controls, operating under procedures that need not be disclosed, with the identities of recipients potentially kept secret."

Before you cheer for the president's magnanimous decision to not accept monies for himself, consider that the settlement directs that the government would be "forever barred and precluded from prosecuting or pursuing" pending tax claims against Trump, his family members and businesses.

According to The New York Times, the addendum to the settlement agreement was posted, without fanfare, on the department's website. According to The Times, the addendum "revealed the determination of Mr. Trump and his appointees to ram through maximalist measures with minimum outside scrutiny at a moment when they still have uncontested control of government."

The immunity from IRS auditing ignores that the IRS is required by regulation to audit the president's tax returns every year. It is also worth noting that The New York Times reported in 2024 that an audit of Trump by the IRS could cost the president more than $100 million.

His $10 billion lawsuit and the resulting $1.8 billion settlement do not pass constitutional muster. In 1937, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles Evan Hughes reasoned that justiciable cases and controversies not only require that disputes be of the types specified in Article III of the U.S. Constitution, but the controversy must be definite and concrete, "touching the legal relations of parties having adverse legal interests."

There are no adverse interests in this settlement. The president's IRS made a deal with the President's DOJ to use taxpayer money to compensate supporters of the president. This lawsuit and settlement should have been laughed out of court.

The judge overseeing Trump's suit, Kathleen Williams of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, raised the case and controversy concern. To avoid briefing and arguing the matter, Trump withdrew the suit in exchange for the "slush fund" and IRS immunity.

If Congress does not act — both houses having been emasculated by the President's influence with the extreme wing of the GOP — the Courts will need to step into the void. The slush fund is being challenged by police officers who helped defend the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. This money grab must be thwarted.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book, "The Executioner's Toll," 2010, was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

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Federal prison in Pennsylvania under scrutiny for restraints and healthcare failures

The Department of Justice found several “serious issues” with treatment of inmates, contraband and employee practices at USP Canaan in Waymart during an inspection of the federal prison last June, reported WVIA.

According to a reporty, the Office of the Inspector General found issues including concerning use of restraints on inmates, issues with the prison’s ability to provide healthcare to inmates and inappropriate imagery and demeaning language in employee spaces.

In a video released Thursday, Deputy Inspector Bill Blier said inspectors, while on-site from June 2-5, 2025, observed employees applying four-point restraints to inmates in a “manner that caused inmates severe discomfort and posed serious risk of lasting injury.”

The prison has capacity for 1,536 inmates, and had a population of 1,357 at the time of the inspectors' visit.

“Multiple USP Canaan employees told us they had seen four-point restraints applied too tightly, which caused the hands of restrained inmates to swell and become discolored,” Blier said. “While BOP (Federal Bureau of Prisons) policy allows for use of restraints in certain situations, it is impermissible to cause physical pain or extreme discomfort.”

In regard to inmate healthcare, the report states USP Canaan had been without an on-site, full-time physician since November 2022 at the time of the inspection. The inspection also found inconsistencies with medication administration practices, expired medical supplies and delays of healthcare and lab testing.

“We also observed unsafe practices in dental services, specifically sharp dental surgical tools and chloroform stored in unlocked cabinets near inmates,” a release from DOJ states.

Blier said the inspectors also observed prison employees using "inappropriate and demeaning language” toward inmates and other employees, as well as inappropriate imagery in employee areas.

“Our team observed several instances of imagery associated with designated criminal groups, white supremacy and anti-semitism in employee-only areas,” he said in the video statement.

The report makes nine recommendations for BOP to correct the issues found at USP Canaan. The BOP agreed with all of them, and in the appendices of the report, outlined the steps that have been taken over the past year to rectify each situation.

The Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General publishes the progress of its recommendations online as reports become available.

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Vindictive Prosecution: Criminal charges dismissed against Kilmar Abrego Garcia mistakenly deported to El Salvador in 2025

Federal Judge Waverly Crenshaw in Nashville dismissed criminal charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, ruling that the charges were punitive for challenging his deportation last year, reported Juristnews..

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is the man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador in March 2025, despite an October 2019 “withholding of removal” issued by the Board of Immigration Appeals. Abrego Garcia originally entered the United States irregularly after fleeing his home country, El Salvador, to escape the notorious Barrio 18 gang, which had threatened his family with death.

In March 2025, Abrego Garcia was stopped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers while driving home from work in Maryland and arrested despite the fact that the officers did not have a warrant. The officers simply told Abrego Garcia that his status had changed, and he was promptly put on a plane bound for El Salvador, where he was placed in the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT). His case received much media attention and was eventually brought to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled that Garcia had to be returned to the United States.

Court documents later released revealed that Garcia had been arrested under suspicion of involvement with the gang MS-13, allegations denied by Garcia and his wife. Despite the April 2025 decision by the Supreme Court, Garcia remained incarcerated in El Salvador until June, when the Trump administration indicted him on charges of human trafficking in connection with a November 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee.

In March 2026, Garcia moved to dismiss the criminal charges against him, alleging vindictive prosecution. Vindictive prosecution occurs when the government prosecutes a person in retaliation for exercising a legal right. This charge can be difficult to prove, but Garcia prevailed. In the judgment, Judge Crenshaw wrote:

The Court does not reach its conclusion lightly. The objective evidence here shows that, absent Abrego’s successful lawsuit challenging his removal to El Salvador, the Government would not have brought this prosecution. The Executive Branch closed its investigation on the November 2022 traffic stop. Only after Abrego succeeded in vindicating his rights did the Executive Branch reopen that investigation. What the Government labels as “new evidence” was not new as a matter of law. The prosecutor’s subjective good faith does not cure the retaliatory taint.

In a statement published by We Are Casa, a community organizing group that has supported Abrego Garcia, he said this about his case: “Thank you to God, my attorneys, We are CASA, and everyone who has continued to support the fight for justice. Justice is a big word and an even bigger promise to fulfill, and I am grateful that today, justice has taken a step forward.”

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Mangino discusses Dr. Ebony Parker trial on Court TV

 Watch my interview with Matt Johnson on Court TV discussing the trial of Dr. Ebony Parker.

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