Attacks on Spanberger are blind partisanship at its worst
By Jason Pye | Due Process Institute | Vice President
Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) is facing criticism from the “tough on crime” crowd over the Virginia Parole Board’s decisions to grant parole to people convicted of serious crimes. The criticism has mostly been confined to Virginia-based opinion editorials and social media, but it’s getting some attention from far-right publications, such as Townhall.com.
Former Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares (R-VA) has been a leading voice in the attacks. His message leaves little room for anything beyond outrage. In an October 1 post, Miyares described the board’s members as “leftwing social justice warriors” and called their actions a “monstrous insult to these victims.” The intended conclusion is obvious. Spanberger appointed the members, the members granted parole, and Virginians should see her administration as a threat to their safety.
I’ve never made my home in the “Beltway bubble.” This has always helped keep me grounded to the concerns of neighbors, friends, and family. If they bring up something political or policy-related, I pay attention because it helps me speak to those concerns in my work.[1]. The attacks on Spanberger, at least to some extent, have been noticed by Virginians. For example, on Monday while I was getting a haircut near Richmond, my barber’s husband brought up the Virginia Parole Board’s actions and expressed concern.
That speaks to the obvious political incentive. Miyares appears to be positioning himself for a 2029 run for governor. In an April Cardinal News column examining Miyares’s political activity and likely gubernatorial ambitions, Dwayne Yancey described Miyares as maintaining a presence with Republican crowds and maintaining a steady stream of criticism of the Spanberger administration. A potential candidate benefits from staying in the news and portraying the opposing party as dangerous. That’s my assessment of the incentive, not proof that every concern he raises is insincere. Still, Virginians should recognize the politics involved before accepting his attacks as a disinterested assessment of public safety.
Due Process Institute strongly supports parole, including meaningful parole consideration for people convicted of violent offenses. Restricting second chances to people whose crimes don’t make us uncomfortable would exclude many, regardless of what they’ve done to change. Someone can commit a terrible crime, serve decades in prison, accept responsibility, and become a person who can safely live in the community. We have plenty of examples. The crime remains terrible, and the victim’s loss remains real, but neither fact requires us to pretend that the person who committed it is incapable of rehabilitation or presents the same danger for the rest of his or her life.
Parole gives the justice system a way to recognize that change. It allows a board to examine the individual after years of incarceration and decide whether continued confinement remains appropriate or whether the remainder of the sentence can be served under supervision. That decision should carry weight precisely because it follows punishment and an assessment of suitability for release. A system that promises consideration but treats the original conviction as an answer to every application offers very little meaningful opportunity. If nothing a person does in prison can ever overcome the description of the offense, we should be honest that rehabilitation has been made irrelevant to release.
The board also can’t avoid difficult cases simply because the convictions make for disturbing headlines. Statutory law requires the board to review people when they become eligible for parole and generally reconsider them annually, although certain cases can be deferred for up to three years. A murder or rape conviction doesn’t allow members to refuse consideration when the person is legally eligible and due for review. They can weigh the seriousness of the offense and deny parole, but they still have to evaluate the case. Hearing these applications is a legal responsibility, and granting one after considering all the evidence doesn’t mean the board went looking for violent offenders to release. These difficult judgments are precisely the work its members were appointed to perform.
Virginia has assigned these judgments to a board, with legal duties that go well beyond reading the conviction. Under the current statute governing investigations before parole, the board must investigate the person’s history, physical and mental condition, character, and conduct, employment, and attitude in prison. The statute governing the board’s powers also requires consideration of rehabilitation and relevant information from after sentencing. The board’s own description of its review includes public safety, the circumstances of the offense, institutional conduct, release plans, and victim input. A parole grant is a judgment that an eligible person is suitable for release after that substantial review.
Good behavior and demonstrated rehabilitation deserve substantial weight in those decisions. Following rules over an extended period, participating in education and treatment, maintaining prison employment, and accepting responsibility can provide meaningful evidence that someone has changed. Nobody should claim that every person granted parole has completed every available program or has a spotless institutional record. But we also shouldn’t erase the work that supports a parole grant. When a board cites years without disciplinary infractions, successful programming, improved decision-making, and a stable release plan, those are substantive reasons. Describing the person solely through the worst thing he or she did leaves the public without the evidence the board considered.
One of the cases Miyares attacked illustrates the problem. Townhall reproduced his criticism of parole for Troy Demar, who was convicted of murdering Christine Allen. The coverage centered on the family’s grief and opposition. However, the official September decision report also records that Demar was 53 and had been incarcerated for approximately 28 years.[2]. The board cited rehabilitation, acceptance of responsibility, educational advancement, positive staff reports, successful correctional and vocational programming, a low risk assessment score, and a stable release plan. It also recorded that he had been infraction-free since incarceration. The family’s grief and opposition belong in the discussion. No question. However, the rehabilitative details deserve a place there, too. As does the fact that, except for very limited exceptions, we do not incarcerate people for the entirety of their lives.
A board’s assessment can be mistaken, of course, but a thoughtful assessment supported by substantial evidence shouldn’t be dismissed as ideological indulgence. There’s a considerable difference between someone being released without regard for his conduct and someone receiving parole after nearly three decades in prison with documented reasons supporting the decision. The second description does not erase the harm done to Allen or her family. Nothing can do that. But it explains what the board was asked to decide. Miyares’s criticism asks the public to reach a conclusion about the grant while giving the original offense nearly all the weight. That’s not a sound way to judge parole.
Age is another part of the record these attacks tend to obscure. People often become less likely to offend as they grow older, and decades of incarceration can leave someone far removed from who they were when they committed the crime. The U.S. Sentencing Commission’s study of aging and recidivism followed federal offenders released from prison or placed on probation in 2005. Over eight years, only 13.4 percent of those aged 65 or older at release were rearrested, compared with 67.6 percent of those younger than 21. Rearrest, reconviction, and reincarceration all declined with increasing age.[3].
Aging out of crime doesn’t mean that an older person is incapable of causing harm. It means that the likelihood of offending generally declines with age, making age relevant alongside behavior, treatment, health, and the proposed living arrangement. Individualized parole review allows those factors to be considered together. That is particularly useful when a person has spent decades demonstrating improved conduct. Age alone doesn’t settle whether someone should receive parole, and the original conviction alone doesn’t tell us whether that person remains a danger after decades in prison, either.”
Youngkin’s board understood that serious convictions didn’t necessarily foreclose the possibility of parole. Virginia Parole Board records show 145 parole grants involving 144 distinct people between April 2022 and January 15, 2026.[3]. Twenty-four of those included life sentences. Sixty-two listed murder or homicide convictions, 59 involved robbery, and 19 were kidnappings or abductions. The categories overlap, and these are counts of grant records, not separate people in each category. And the compilation isn’t a complete accounting of every grant during Youngkin’s term. What this does establish, however, is that a Republican administration’s parole board approved parole for people whose crimes would produce the same alarming descriptions of criminal conduct now being used against Spanberger.
For example, consider Donald Eugene Jones. The official December 2025 decision report lists a life sentence for rape, along with convictions including sodomy, abduction, and burglary.[5] Youngkin’s board granted him parole on December 17, after approximately 44 years in prison. Its stated reasons included rehabilitation, good institutional adjustment, a low risk assessment score, a stable release plan, and no victim opposition. That record reflects a board weighing a serious conviction against decades of subsequent conduct and the evidence supporting release. It’s important to have a process like this through which decisions can be made, whether a Republican or Democrat appointed the members who made it.
The ages and time served in the broader spreadsheet provide further context. Across its grant records, the median age was 59 and the median estimated time served was approximately 26 years. Seventy-two records involved people aged 60 or older. These figures describe the grants compiled for the prior administration, rather than Spanberger’s current board, but they show the kinds of decisions parole entails. The person being considered may have spent a quarter-century in prison and reached an age associated with a substantially lower risk of offending. Miyares’s attacks leave little room for that reality. The conviction becomes the entire identity, and everything that followed is pushed aside.
None of this is to suggest that Youngkin’s board should have denied those grants. Quite the opposite. Its willingness to approve parole in difficult cases shows why the process is worth defending. Miyares’s support of the prior board while condemning its replacement invites a consistent explanation of the distinction. If the problem is granting parole to someone convicted of murder or rape, the prior board did that too. If the problem is a particular person’s present risk, then he should address the evidence bearing on that risk. Switching between those arguments whenever the governor’s party changes is a political convenience, rather than a coherent position on parole.
Victims also deserve more than being pulled into that partisan contest. Their pain is real, and their testimony should receive serious consideration. Virginia’s investigation statute protects their opportunity to provide testimony, requires the board to consider it, and keeps submitted testimony in the parole file for future reviews. The same law preserves the board’s decision-making authority. That arrangement recognizes both the importance of the victim’s experience and the board’s obligation to evaluate the entire case. Respect for a victim doesn’t require making agreement with the victim’s preferred outcome the sole test of whether a board acted responsibly.
It’s important the public realize that a grant of parole comes with continuing obligations. People granted parole serve the remainder of their sentences under supervision in the community, subject to conditions enforced through probation and parole officers. The board can revoke parole and order reincarceration. That structure recognizes rehabilitation while maintaining accountability after release. The public discussion over parole should reflect the substantial conditions and supervision involved–all of which protect the public’s safety. Describing every grant as someone simply being “turned loose” encourages the impression that the state has abandoned all responsibility for the person’s conduct.
The supplied outcome review offers some encouraging evidence, although it has limits. Publicly available parole and revocation records show that only four of 351 people granted parole later had an identified law violation, an observed rate of approximately 1.14 percent. The court-record review identified no new murder, rape, assault, or sexual offense among those four cases. Another 18 people had parole revoked for supervision violations without a cited law violation, which shouldn’t be conflated with committing a new crime. These findings are encouraging, although the 1.14 percent figure isn’t a standardized recidivism rate.[6]
I’m willing to criticize a parole decision when there’s compelling evidence that the board disregarded a serious danger or failed in its duties, but not merely by granting parole for a person convicted of a disturbing offense. Parole exists because a conviction and sentence don’t tell us everything we need to know decades later. Its legitimacy depends on recognizing meaningful change, including in people whose crimes were grave. Requiring the board to consider rehabilitation and then attacking it for acting on evidence of rehabilitation would make the promise of review largely empty.
Miyares has every right to oppose Spanberger’s administration, but this borders on demagoguery. Likewise, Virginians have every right to question whether Miyares’ portrayal of parole serves their understanding or his political prospects. Regardless, we all should support a system that punishes serious wrongdoing, gives people a reason to change, and recognizes when supervised release is appropriate. Youngkin’s board sometimes reached that judgment, and Spanberger’s board should be able to reach it too. The burden should belong to someone claiming a particular grant endangered the public to explain why the evidence supporting release was inadequate. A terrible crime does deserve a serious response. But so does a parole decision made decades afterward by thoughtful people following statutory laws.
[1] This is why I cringe when politicians from either party speak about “what the American people want.” No, that’s what your political base wants. A plurality of Americans are independents. What they want and what your base wants are very different things.
[2] See p. 53.
[3] These aren’t specifically Virginia parole rates, but they provide substantial evidence for taking age seriously when assessing risk.
[4] One person is listed twice.
[5] See p. 49.
[6] Credit here to Cavalier Consulting for supplying these data. Some people had been out longer than others, and the records capture only violations that could be linked to a later published board decision. The figure therefore can’t tell us how many committed another crime within, say, three years of release. Even with those limits, the record provides evidence that people granted parole often return to the community without committing new crimes.