A bill to expand the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles from three members to five and make other changes to the board narrowly won approval in a House committee on Thursday, putting it one step from final passage.

The House Judiciary Committee, on an 8-7 vote, approved SB324 by Sen. Clyde Chambliss, R-Prattville.

The vote came after the committee heard opposition to the bill from the Alabama attorney general’s office, the victims’ advocacy group VOCAL, and Walker County District Attorney Bill Adair, who spoke about his father’s murder more than 40 years ago.

Former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Sue Bell Cobb urged the committee to pass the bill.

Cobb and former Jefferson County Circuit Teresa Pulliam are leaders of Redemption Earned, an organization they say helps people who have spent decades behind bars and shown that they have reformed their lives and are good candidates for release.

Much of the commentary was about Alabama’s percentage rate of paroles granted, which dropped to single digits a couple of years ago and has since gone up, and hardships placed on victims to attend parole hearings.

Chambliss stressed that his bill was not intended to change parole rates but to create a more effective board and improve the Legislature’s oversight.

Chambliss, who chairs the Legislature’s prison oversight committee, said the parole board took more than a year to respond to specific questions from the prison oversight committee and did so only after the attorney general’s office intervened.

Under current law, the three members of the board are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Senate.

SB324, in addition to expanding the board to five, would specify that board members cannot begin their term until Senate confirmation. It would change the date of terms to align with legislative sessions to ensure that the Senate can evaluate the appointees.

It would also provide that the board would pick its own chairman. Under current law, the governor picks which of the three board members is chair.

Chambliss said he believes a five-member board would be better suited to making parole decisions. He said the current system, with the governor appointing the chair of a three-member board, vests too much of the board’s authority and influence in one person.

AL.com spent last year delving into Alabama’s parole system, which all but stopped releasing eligible prisoners in 2023.

Read more: Denied: Alabama’s broken parole system

The parole rate in 2023 was 8% – despite the parole board’s own criteria showing about 80% of the eligible inmates should be let out.

Chambliss said that was one of the main problems with the current board – that it follows its own guidelines in parole decisions only 20% of the time.

The senator also said the board has not followed the law that requires it to update those guidelines, which are intended to be a tool to help evaluate suitability for parole.

Chambliss said the board should follow the guidelines or change them, as they are mandated to do by law.

Katherine Robertson, chief counsel for Attorney General Steve Marshall, noted that the Legislature changed the law a few years ago to say that the board’s paramount duty is to promote public safety.

“Right now our in-custody prison population is about 85% violent,” Robertson said. “So the candidates coming up for parole don’t make it easy for them to find a lot of people to parole.”

Robertson urged the committee to reject Chambliss’ bill.

“No board, commission, no judge is going to be perfect,” Robertson said. “They’re not going to satisfy all stakeholders all the time.

“But when we told them that their paramount duty is public safety, I don’t think anybody can argue that they have failed in that. And so for that reason, we think they deserve our support.”

Cobb, founder of Redemption Earned, said the organization supports keeping dangerous violent offenders behind bars but wants fair assessments for those who have done what they should to earn consideration for parole.

“Judges sentence based on parole,” Cobb said. “That’s the law. They basically tell folks, ‘You do everything you can, get your GED, go to SAP (drug treatment), and stay away from drugs and get your education and get a skill and put a record together, and you’re going to get parole.”

Cobb said Redemption Earned tries to help incarcerated people who are old or not in good health, generally those who have been in prison 25 years or more or are age 65 and older.

“Unlike what other folks say – that we just want to get people out of jail – nothing could be further from the truth,” Cobb said.

“We want the state to stop wasting money holding individuals who have proven that they are no longer the same person when they were convicted and that either their health or prison record demonstrates that it would be almost impossible to reoffend.”

Adair said the man who murdered his father in 1981 received a life sentence.

But Adair said he learned that after two years of that sentence, the perpetrator was not spending his days in prison but was working on the prison system’s cattle farm in west Alabama.

Adair said he tried to get an appointment with Gov. George Wallace, who was in his last term, but only received a letter from the governor that said an inmate convicted of murder tended to be a good trusty.

“Our state luckily has come far enough today that that kind of thinking is not out there,” Adair said.

Adair talked about the hardships on victims attending parole hearings can be overlooked.

“My family had to come down here time after time after time and put through hell because we weren’t part of the system,” Adair said.

“I saw my granddaddy, I saw my aunts and uncles, their lives deteriorate because they had to come down here and relive this after we had just gone through a trial.”

Chambliss said a section of his bill was intended to spare victims and their families from repeated parole hearings in cases of violent crimes when parole is all but certain to be denied.

It says inmates serving a sentence for a violent, Class A felony could have to wait up to 10 years between parole hearings. Under current law, the maximum wait is five years.

Chambliss told the Judiciary Committee that it is important for the Legislature to let state agencies know they cannot ignore the oversight role of lawmakers and requirements in the law, such as the parole guidelines.

“A lot of state agencies are watching right now,” Chambliss said. “And if this committee allows this agency to not follow they law, they’re going to do the same thing.”

Wednesday’s approval by the Judiciary Committee puts SB324 in position for a vote in the House as early as next Tuesday. It has already passed the Senate.