Thursday, May 28, 2009
Edward F. Reilly, Jr.
In recent years a strange series of maneuverings have quietly encircled the little-known U.S. Parole Commission, which has managed to remain operative despite the fact that the government did away with parole for federal prisoners 25 years ago. The bizarre turn of events has centered on Veronza Bowers Jr., a former Black Panther who was convicted in the early 1970s of killing a park ranger in Marin County, California, north of San Francisco.
After serving 31 years in prison, Bowers became eligible for parole in 2005 (because he was one of the many federal prisoners already in the system when Congress voted in 1984 to eliminate parole). But Bowers was not let out of jail, thanks to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ intervention at the behest of Deborah Spagnoli, a former Bush White House aide and then-member of the parole commission, who wanted to keep Bowers in jail because he was an “unrepentant murderer.”
Spagnoli’s name resurfaced later, after someone entered the office of the parole commission’s chairman, Edward F. Reilly Jr., on a weekend and copied dozens of pages from his files in June 2006. What those documents amounted to is unknown. However, in 2008 an anonymous letter and a package of documents arrived at the Justice Department’s inspector general (IG), which oversees the parole commission. The documents alleged that Reilly had used his position and official stationery to promote improvements for a Missouri highway that could benefit his family holdings back home. Reilly denied the allegation, and refused to discuss the break-in of his office with the media.
Spagnoli’s husband, William Woodruff, now an assistant U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia, admitted to the Washington Post that he sent the package to the inspector general. Woodruff claimed he had obtained the documents through a Freedom of Information Act request in an attempt to gather evidence of what he thought were unethical practices. Meanwhile, Spagnoli clamed she had nothing to do with her husband’s action against Reilly, whom she accused of turning the parole commission into his “personal little fiefdom” while not looking after the concerns of crime victims. An investigation by the IG, which is still ongoing, has revealed that Spagnoli was one of four employees who entered the commission’s office on the Sunday morning that Reilly’s documents were copied. She resigned from her post on the parole commission in 2007, claiming the stress of the job had been too much for her.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Allegations of Impropriety Surround Parole Commission (by Joe Stephens, Washington Post)
U.S. Parole Commission (AllGov)
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