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.
They locked this child up when he was 14. Now he’s 55, and they’re saying “yeah, he’s completed all the rehabilitative programs we have, but he still needs more because if we let him out now, it (Direct quote:) “would unduly depreciate the seriousness of the crime or promote disrespect for the law.””
That sounds like a whole lot of nonsense, so they can maintain access to some great slave labor via the 13th amendment. Who seriously believes that prison rehabilitates?
Prison reform. It’s critical.
