Virginia’s parole board, reshaped by Gov. Abigail Spanberger earlier this year, granted release to seven of eight felons it reviewed on a single day this week, according to reporting by WJLA’s Nick Minock. The cases included people convicted of murder, rape, child abuse and bank robbery, with several inmates having decades remaining on their original sentences.
Minock reported that victims had submitted pleas to the board asking that the inmates not be released. In one hearing, an inmate told the board that he and other prisoners were thankful for the releases and wished the panel a “safe day.”
Spanberger took office this year and replaced the entire membership of the state parole board, the body responsible for deciding which incarcerated people are released before completing their sentences. Under the new board, parole has been granted to about 10 percent of inmates who have had hearings over the past seven months. That compares with a 0.7 percent grant rate under the board appointed by former Gov. Glenn Youngkin two years earlier.
New parole eligibility rules
Virginia Democrats passed legislation this year expanding parole eligibility to certain inmates whose juries were never informed, at the time of sentencing, that the commonwealth had abolished parole. That law requires those newly eligible prisoners to receive new parole interviews, a factor in the volume of hearings now before the board.
Voting rights restoration
Separately, the Spanberger administration has been restoring voting rights to convicted felons, a process the governor has described as reversing a legacy of disenfranchisement tied to Virginia’s Jim Crow-era laws. RedState reported in July that tens of thousands of such restorations had occurred.
That restoration process has also produced at least one documented error: the administration restored voting rights in August 2026 to a man, identified as Mr. Breton, who had died in January 2016.
