The Rhode Island Senate passed legislation March 12 that requires individuals convicted of first- or second-degree murder to serve at least half of their sentence — increased from the current one-third minimum — before qualifying for a parole hearing. The bill — sponsored by Sen. Leonidas Raptakis, D-Coventry, East Greenwich, West Greenwich — passed the Senate unanimously and is now under consideration by the House of Representatives.
“A lot of senators know this is a serious issue,” Raptakis said, noting that the bill passed 8-0 in committee and 38-0 on the Senate floor. The law only applies to individuals convicted of first- or second-degree murder who have “not been sentenced to life in prison,” according to the bill.
The legislation “sends a strong message” to criminals that they are “going to pay the consequences (for murder),” Raptakis said. The bill also supports families of victims, who often find themselves battling parole boards to keep individuals accused of some of the “most brutal murders in the state” incarcerated, he said.
“It is unfathomable to me that this would have any measurable impact on crime,” said Brad Brockmann ’76, executive director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights, of the legislation. Increasing the percentage of a sentence that prisoners must serve before they are eligible for parole is “simply too nuanced,” Brockmann said, adding “there is a strong need for us to move beyond a sense of justice predicated principally on retribution.”
“We want to protect the families,” Raptakis said. “We put more burdens on the victims of the crime than on the criminals who committed the crime.” By requiring convicted felons to serve at least 50 percent of their sentences before being eligible for parole, Raptakis said he hopes to eliminate — or at least reduce — the burden on families, who fear that individuals convicted of murdering their loved ones may be prematurely released.
In an email to The Herald, Raptakis cited two cases when individuals who had been convicted of murder were released on parole before serving half of their sentence and killed again.
Andrew Jett was released on parole in 2010 after serving only 18 years of a 40-year sentence for killing his girlfriend in 1992. Jett was arraigned on murder charges again Feb. 12.
“If he would have served at least half his sentence, he may not have had the opportunity (to murder again),” Raptakis wrote.
Raptakis said he also opposes the release of Bradley Kryla, who killed a prostitute in 1993 and is scheduled to be released on parole in May. “He hopes to pursue a career as a youth counselor,” Raptakis wrote.
Simply adjusting the amount of time that prisoners must remain incarcerated before being eligible for parole is unlikely to give the law any real deterrent effect, Brockmann said. The legislation seems to be founded on a desire for retribution, which Brockmann said he understands but finds “counterproductive.”
It is important to be open to the possibility that “someone could be totally rehabilitated after 15 years,” Brockmann said.
“For us to be building criminal justice laws based on emotion is not prudent,” Brockmann said. In many murder cases, “people don’t think before they shoot” — they will not weigh the prospect of serving half or one-third of their sentence before receiving parole “in the heat of the moment,” Brockmann said.
He added that treating first- and second-degree murders equally under the law “doesn’t make sense” and is “poor criminal justice,” because important distinctions exist between the two categories of crime.
The correlation between increased incarceration and reduced violence is “at best a complex relationship,” Brockmann said. As a country, the United States has seen its crime rates decline since 1990, with only a small portion of that trend attributable to incarceration rates, Brockmann said.
Rhode Island had 2,939 adults on probation per 100,000 residents — one of the highest rates in the country, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2011 Probation and Parole Report. This high rate of individuals on probation creates “a lot more of a chance to trigger a problem,” Brockmann said.
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