In 2019, Joy Smith, a part-time case analyst with the North Carolina Parole Commission, passed along allegations to her colleagues that Brett Abrams had locked his brother in a camper and set it on fire in 1982, killing the young boy.
“It appears Abrams was jealous of him,” Smith wrote of the man eligible for parole for another crime.
Excluded from Smith’s case summary was that local law enforcement had deemed the boy’s death an accident in 1984.
Abrams was ultimately denied parole, as he has been since 1993.
That omission is included within court documents filed earlier this month in an ongoing federal lawsuit challenging the North Carolina Parole Commission’s review process for people who were sentenced to prison when they were still children.
Prison reform. It’s critical.