The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's controversial Mattis decision earlier this year opened up the possibility of parole for as many as 216 inmates currently serving life sentences in the commonwealth. And in the process, it dropped a heavy workload on the Parole Board that some elected officials believe requires legislative intervention.
The high court ruled in January that it was a cruel or unusual punishment to impose a life sentence on certain emerging adults -- those who were 18 to 20 years old when they committed their offense.
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Applied retroactively, 160 incarcerated people became immediately eligible for parole with that ruling, a spokesperson for the Parole Board said in response to a News Service inquiry. A total of 216 "may be or become eligible" pursuant to Mattis, the spokesperson said.
The Committee for Public Counsel Services, the state's public defender agency, responded by training and certifying around 40 lawyers to handle Mattis cases before the Parole Board, it said, while 35 to 40 other attorneys already handling so-called lifer hearings took on some cases.
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"We are now at the point where everyone who fits into that category has access to a specialized counsel," CPCS Parole Advocacy Unit Director Mara Voukydis said. "So everyone is up and running and working on their cases within that cohort."
Voukydis said there were no hearings scheduled for some months because of a "technical issue" in the courts related to modifying original sentences to reflect the new parole eligibility, something she said is now generally resolved. That leaves both attorneys and the board to work with "a really large number of people, who, because of the amount of time they were incarcerated, became immediately eligible."
Parole hearings can run for hours, and feature testimony from victims' families in addition to the incarcerated person's presentation and questions from the board. The board has only heard a handful of Mattis cases thus far, according to Governor's Councilor Eileen Duff, who tracks the board's work and often speaks about it during council hearings.
"It's huge. I think they've only been able to hear five cases," Duff said, out of the potentially hundreds of cases that could come before the panel.
"I think the Parole Board is working in good faith to schedule hearings, but scheduling is challenging because they also have all of the other hearings that happen in due course," Voukydis said, adding that she hoped the board could "perhaps receive additional resources to be able to make this happen for each person that has a right to a hearing now."
Both Duff and Governor's Councilor Paul DePalo said they believe the Legislature should step in to improve that workflow.
Currently, Duff said, state law requires every member of the board to be present at a lifer hearing or Mattis hearing.
"That's not really necessary. If there could be panels of three to five members, it would really speed things up tremendously. You could split them up and it would naturally help things move faster because they'd be able to schedule more hearings. But the Legislature would have to do this," Duff said, adding that "there's only so many hours in the day."
DePalo wants to see lawmakers act to expand the size of the Parole Board's membership, which is currently capped at seven. The Governor's Council has final approval power over the board's members, who are nominated to fill vacancies by the governor.
"And in the absence of that, or in the meantime, [I hope] that the Executive Branch would consider bringing in retired judges or retired Parole Board members -- as they're statutorily permitted to do -- in order to handle this backlog," DePalo said. He added that "in order to do the job that the SJC has mandated, it's not really sustainable with the size of the current Parole Board."
The groundbreaking Mattis decision came down from a split court, 4-3, in January. Chief Justice Kimberly Budd and Justices Scott Kafker, Dalila Argaez Wendlandt, and Frank Gaziano were in the majority, with Justices David Lowy, Elspeth Cypher, and Serge Georges Jr. dissenting.
In his dissenting opinion, Lowy wrote that the judiciary "must proceed with extreme restraint" when second-guessing whether sentences prescribed by the Legislature violate Article 26 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, which protects the people from cruel or unusual punishments.
Justice Elspeth Cypher agreed, writing in her own opinion that the court had been asked to "commandeer the job of the Legislature."
Councilor DePalo, who often raises the science of brain development during judicial nominee hearings, said he sees the Mattis decision as opening the door to further incorporation of neuroscience in jurisprudence -- possibly for lower-level crimes, or expanding the 20-year age cutoff in Mattis.
"Twenty years is not the cutoff for the brain development issues that the court was addressing. ... It expands up to 25 years old, and based on my expertise and work in this area, there are other factors to take into account. For example, children who are victims of severe or complex childhood trauma see exacerbated timelines in that development. So that's been documented scientifically," the Worcester Democrat said.
And while Cypher skewered "arbitrary reliance on developmental neuroscience" in her Mattis opinion, she also foreshadowed additional action down the road.
Cypher cited Elizabeth Scott and Laurence Steinberg's "Rethinking Juvenile Justice," published in 2008, which said the brain continues maturing until at least around the age of 25. Cypher said focusing on the 18-20 age range in Mattis while leaving out 21-25 year olds is an example of the "inherent capriciousness of judicial line drawing."
To Voukydis, the work slowly getting underway at the Parole Board represents the hope of a potential second chance after decades in prison.
"This work is somewhat unique, in that we are seeing people who are decades into their incarceration, and so many years beyond what happened that caused them to be incarcerated," she said. "And it's not work that anyone takes lightly, so we're very glad to be able to provide the opportunity for people to show the board that they're ready for release."
