Governor unfairly rejects clemency for Maine’s foremost justice advocate
It’s time for us to free Leo Hylton, the restorative justice advocate and scholar caged in Maine State Prison.
I wish it didn’t have to be us, the everyday Mainers who certainly have enough injustice on our plates to choke down these days. I wish Gov. Janet Mills would simply follow the clemency application guidelines her clemency board administers and grant Leo an in-person hearing to make his case for release, which should be a proverbial slam dunk.
But Mills has flatly refused to follow her board’s own rules, effectively turning Leo into a political prisoner and necessitating what is now a human rights campaign for his freedom. As Leo explains in the letter that follows, he applied for clemency last spring under the so-called exceptional circumstances provision that allows prisoners to petition for probationary release prior to having served half their sentence, which is otherwise the benchmark for consideration.
As a self-taught expert on Maine’s criminal legal system who’s helped lead efforts in our Legislature to reinstate parole (Maine ended parole back in the benighted days of disco, but Mills helped kill the most recent bipartisan bill to bring it back), Leo certainly knows the clemency law, his lone path to freedom. So it’s especially insulting and (speaking personally) infuriating to read the reply of Mills’ board last July telling Leo he hadn’t yet served 25 of his 50-year sentence, as if the exceptional circumstances provision doesn’t even exist, and then advising he spend nine more years in his cage before attempting to win an audience with whomever happens to sit on that board in the mid-2030s.
In 25 years as a journalist in Maine, I’ve never publicly called for a prisoner’s release, but I’d stake my life for Leo’s freedom, because I wholly believe in this man’s goodness. I urge all our readers to join me in demanding Mills grant Leo a clemency hearing ASAP.
When I’ve brought up his case informally at the bar (the drinkin’ kind, not the lawyers’ club), the most common concerns I’ve heard are the typical, What if he’s faking it?, or the classic, Everyone finds religion once they’re locked up. The first of three voices I’d like to add to Leo’s letter is that of a fellow inmate at MSP in Warren who wrote a letter to prison authorities dated New Year’s Eve, 2019 — about six months before Leo began writing his monthly column, Shining Light on Humanity, as well as cover stories on justice topics for this magazine — included in Leo’s clemency petition.
While working as a prison barber, Leo had given this headstrong inmate an offhand piece of advice that, this resident wrote, “resonated with me since then: ‘Don’t worry about what people say, do what you have to do and be the best at it.’
“This man had no idea who I was, yet without anything to gain, he wanted to do what he could to help me make my way through life,” the inmate wrote. “I didn’t know at the time that this man was younger than me. He walked, talked, and carried himself in a manner that spoke volumes of discipline, respect and inner knowledge. As I asked around the prison about him people told me different stories, but at the core of all stories was the theme of him not being the same person he was when he first walked through the prison gates to serve his time. Staff and prisoners respected him for all the work that he has done and continues to do.
“Here is a man who wakes up and works to help others for no gain,” the letter continues. “Every time I see him, he is either working on NAACP business [Leo has been a leader of the prison chapter of that civil rights organization, and also has rehabilitated stray or adandoned dogs behind bars], or headed towards the medical wing to serve in the Hospice Volunteer program, staying with and taking care of sick men that this prison and its residents have seen come and pass away. I don’t know how he does it, how he [takes] that kind of heartache, that many men cannot see, let alone stay with in tender moments of life. … Leo has a compassionate and strong heart that is rare not only in prison, but in society as well. He never wavers, never is outwardly seen as an angry or spiteful man. Always looking for what else he can do…”
The next voice is that of Natasha Irving, the District Attorney for four Maine counties (Knox, Waldo, Lincoln and Sagadahoc) whose letter of support, dated this past July 1, is included among the 130 others Leo submitted to the clemency board.
“I understand why Leo was sentenced to Prison,” DA Irving wrote. But later she explains that this “sentencing did not take into account the fact that he was a teenager, having just turned 18 when he committed this crime. It did not take into account that Leo would take accountability for his actions in a manner exponentially more meaningful than pleading guilty. It did not take into account that severely traumatized people, teenagers, can make terrible mistakes and grow up to be safe and kind young men. It did not take into account that Leo would grow up to be safe and kind, to become a man of peace and earn his PhD.
“In my work I have met men and women who were sentenced to life without parole as juveniles, merely weeks younger than Leo was at the time he committed these crimes. Due to the Supreme Court ruling that juvenile life without parole was cruel and unusual punishment, these men and women have been released from prison. These are men and women who have committed serious act of violence and homicide, and now they work to break the cycle of violence so our young people avoid these tragic footsteps. They do good and important work across this country. I want Leo to be able to do this work, too.”
Lastly, in her opposition to parole, Mills has cited the supervised-early-release program available to inmates at the end of their sentences (this would be decades away for Leo) and the discretion judges have to suspend portions of sentences. Mills’ sister-in-law, Justice Nancy Mills, sentenced teenage Leo in 2010 to spend the rest of this century in prison (90 years for a first conviction on a non-fatal offense), then suspended 40 years. But that’s not mercy or the time needed to reform in a state like Maine without parole, where Justice Mills knew Leo wouldn’t get out until he was years past retirement age, a septuagenarian felon with no prospects for employment, housing, friends or family life to look forward to.
Gov. Mills’ third excuse is a desire not to further upset crime victims who must be notified and given an opportunity to weigh in when a prisoner is up for parole or clemency. That’s a dead end in any reasonable discussion about restoring parole, as that process must include victims, but what do Leo’s victims actually want?
William Guerrette, a former Republican state lawmaker and the father whom Leo gravely injured during the botched home invasion and robbery he and his foster brother, Daniel Fortune, attempted in 2008, had recovered sufficiently to run in a special election against Democratic state lawmaker Craig Hickman, Maine’s first Black and openly gay state senator, in 2020. Guerrette lost that election, but a few years later he wrote to his erstwhile legislative colleagues urging them not to reinstate parole so as to, in part, spare victims like himself and his daughter further fear and unease.
At the end of his testimony, Guerrette listed what he wanted:
“1. Restorative justice
2. Rehabilitation
3. College education and training
“Where are these benefits and programs for me and my daughter?” he rhetorically asked.
Funny, in the most tragic sense, that Guerrette should demand exactly what Leo is struggling to provide him and his daughter, who was also seriously injured that night. As Leo wrote in his column last May, “Fighting for Financial Reparation,” he’s has been struggling to convince Department of Corrections officials to allow him to establish a Reparative Trust Account for Guerrette’s daughter, money she could have used for education or rehab. Leo has been eager for years to engage in a restorative justice process that would comfort and support his victims by showing them the peaceful man he’s grown up to be and working to repay his deep moral debt to them any way he can.
Leo Hylton is more than a model prisoner; he’s like a supermodel prisoner whose inspiring reformation and accomplishments should be cause for celebration, a “badge of honor” for Maine’s embattled Department of Corrections, as one state lawmaker who supports his release wrote. Rather than take a win — a prisoner once deemed a “dangerous, violent predator” has been throughly reformed in state custody and has become a nationally recognized scholar and champion for public safety and justice — Gov. Mills prefers to prioritize punishment over rehabilitation.
Maine people know better and we believe and insist that all human beings, especially troubled teens, can genuinely and lastingly change their lives for the better. It’s time to insist our state’s leader, who has the sole power to free prisoners, recognize this and grant Leo the opportunity to make his case for clemency in person.
— Chris Busby
September 29, 2024
Dear Governor Mills and the Governor’s Board on Executive Clemency:
Governor Mills, in your Second Inaugural Address, delivered in January of last year, you declared Maine a state where “hope is very much alive.” You highlighted the colorful “Hopeful” signs that popped up during the pandemic and said, “These signs became a symbol not only of survival but of health, renewal, new life.”
You then quoted the sign’s creator, artist Charlie Hewitt: “To be hopeful is not a gift — it’s a challenge. To be hopeful requires action … commitment … opening your eyes, it requires making a decision … being part of something.”
“Maine people,” you added, Governor, “know and embrace this.”
Survival, renewal, new life, the challenge to commit to take action and join others to keep hope alive — I not only know and embrace all this, Governor; I embody and practice these values every day, as do many others inside Maine State Prison. However, your refusal to grant clemency to longterm residents who reform their lives is extinguishing hope inside and outside Maine’s prison walls, undermining the mission of your Department of Corrections, and making Maine more dangerous.
I implore you to take the humane actions necessary to keep our hope alive, to send the message that Maine believes people can genuinely change for the better. As it now stands, Maine’s position on clemency is devoid of mercy, trust or hope.
As you all know, there has been no parole in Maine since the 1970s, and recent efforts in the Legislature to reinstate it — which I helped organize and you opposed, Governor — have thus far failed to pass. For many, like me, serving long sentences, that leaves executive clemency as the only option for release prior to the supervised-early-release program offered during the last 30 months of incarceration (a date decades from now, in my case).
Your Clemency Board’s rules require applicants to have served half their sentence before applying for an in-person hearing, after which the Board makes its recommendation to you, Governor. But your rules also allow applications made under what are termed “Exceptional Circumstances” to be considered before that half-sentence benchmark is reached.
I did exactly that earlier this year, submitting an over 600-page petition for executive clemency under exceptional circumstances. My application included over 130 letters of support by people who took time out of their lives to tell you how much I am needed beyond the walls of Maine State Prison. Even if you don’t believe I deserve a chance to be heard, they do. But I believe that, at the very least, my 16-year journey of transformation deserves a hearing.
In a brief letter dated July 22 of this year, the pardon clerk wrote to me: “After careful review of your petition and supporting documentation, the Board has denied your request for a commutation hearing for the following reason.
“The Board found that you have not served the minimum amount of your sentence required for a commutation.”
Nowhere in the letter is my exceptional circumstances claim acknowledged; it is completely ignored. “While the Board’s denial of a hearing is final with no appeal process, you may reapply for a hearing in the future,” the clerk informed me. “Based on the reason for your denial,” the clerk added, “it is advised that you wait until you have served at least the minimum amount of time for a commutation before submitting a new petition.”
That will be nine years from now.
Governor Mills, in that same speech you made it clear you weren’t speaking of a wishful, fanciful hope, but rather a “disruptive” hope that “challenges and changes the way we do things.” A hope that “calls on us to advance and adapt, while preserving who we are as a people and all the values we hold dear.”
You quoted Matthew: “For I was hungry and you fed me … naked and you clothed me…,” but you stopped in the middle of verse 36. You stopped before Jesus says, “I was sick and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to Me.”
At our core, I believe all human beings believe in hope, transformation and redemption, but we often fail to extend that belief into actions that foster and exhibit care and grace for others. Governor Mills and honored Board members, I must believe you are decent people who genuinely want to exercise your power over our freedom for good ends. In spite of this dehumanizing system that compels me to demonize you, I see you. I see your humanity, and I honor it.
Holding you in this regard, I am really struggling to understand how you can refuse to seriously consider cases like mine and others’ who committed terrible acts in our youth and now stand as interrupters of violence and healers of harm? Why not exercise your authority for the healing and liberatory benefit of Maine’s communities?
The more than 130 letter-writers explained how my presence outside prison will enhance public safety, not lessen it and certainly not threaten it. Twenty of them offered me work, ensuring I will be able to immediately contribute to my family, the tax base, and my community. With the help of friends, family, and my partner, I put together a comprehensive reentry plan that addresses the core drivers of the crime that brought me to prison (trauma, financial desperation, and no relational boundaries). That plan includes housing, transportation, employment and counseling.
Over my 16 years of incarceration, I have transformed from a traumatized and emotionally illiterate emerging adult into a wounded healer dedicated to nonviolence and peace-building. After reviewing my application, I beg you to answer this question, as it also applies to hundreds of others in your custody: If mine is not an exceptional circumstance fit for further review, whose is?
Governor, to flatly deny clemency applications such as mine is to kill the very hope you say we all must believe in and act upon. Please see the person I am today and direct your Executive Clemency Board to grant me a hearing at its next practicable meeting.
I pray this finds you well and that my words find a home in your heart.
A sample of Leo’s application materials
The governor’s clemency board’s application requests the following of those seeking consideration under exceptional circumstances: “Please describe the ‘EXCEPTIONAL circumstances’ that you think would justify the Board’s consideration of your petition for executive clemency. Although there is no single definition or standard for what constitutes ‘exceptional circumstances,’ at a minimum, you must demonstrate the compelling circumstances and appropriate need that support your petition for clemency.”
Rather than improving public safety, my continued incarceration degrades it, draining state Corrections Department resources while preventing me from fully engaging in reparative action for the harm I caused. About a month after my 18th birthday, I committed a horrible act of interpersonal violence. Over the 16 years that have passed between then and now, I have come to learn and understand the ways unprocessed childhood trauma, spiritual confusion, and terrible decision-making combined to manifest in such uncharacteristic violence (never before, and never since, have I used a weapon against another human being).
In addition to transforming from a deeply wounded and confused (and thus dangerous) adolescent into an actively healing, fully grown man, I have also transformed from a high school dropout into a PhD student, researcher, professor, and highly sought-after expert in restorative and reparative justice practices.
When I crossed the threshold of 30 years of age, I saw what others who reflect at that stage of life see: as “grown up” as I thought I was at 25, I was still a kid. I still had immature and impulsive ways about me that I progressively shed during the following five years.
The fields of neuroscience, developmental psychology, and sociology — as well as the criminal legal system itself — all support the existence of “emerging adulthood” as a stage of development distinct from full adulthood. The end of emerging adulthood may be 24, 26, or 29 for different people, but I had barely entered it when I committed my crime, still three years shy of Maine’s legal drinking age.
The Sentencing Project, Vera Institute of Justice, researchers at Harvard Kennedy School and many others have joined the nationwide call for emerging adults to be viewed — and sentenced — differently than fully mature adults. In fact, acting on recent Supreme Court rulings that acknowledge the heightened capacity for change of those under 21, the Sentencing Project recommends individuals sentenced as youth or emerging adults be afforded a review within the first 10 years of their sentence, and have their sentences capped at 15 years.
Nothing magical happens on the night of a person’s 18th birthday. Maturation of brain, body and character takes time. In studies supported by Maine’s Department of Corrections, researchers have cited the unique challenges of emerging adulthood and urged sentencing reforms and other changes in response to the science — in other words, they’re “calling on us to advance and adapt” Maine’s carceral policies based on these modern understandings.
In a November 2022 study for the Place Matters project of USM’s Muskie School of Public Service, Jillian Foley and Erica King linked emerging adults’ biological and behavioral challenges to “higher rates of criminal activity,” but added, “brain development is just one of many factors contributing to the disproportionate representation of young adults in the justice system. For many young people, having a background of poverty, systemic racism or discrimination, school disconnection, behavioral and mental health problems, substance use, family instability, housing insecurity, parental incarceration, and other childhood traumas can set them down the path to justice system involvement both as a juvenile and a young adult.”
That list reads like my life story and that of most others I’ve met in here.
Writing for the Maine Law Review in 2022, authors Christopher Northrup, Jill Ward, Jonathan Ruterbories and Jess Mizzi added legal and local angles on this subject:
“[E]ighteen to twenty-five-year-old offenders, termed ’emerging adults’ by researchers, experience much of the same developmental and physiological challenges as their younger, system involved counterparts, yet they are treated as if they are fully developed in the eyes of the law. Thus, emerging adults — without any sound scientific or legal justification — are exempt from many of the systemic protections offered to system-involved youth under the age of eighteen. This is the case in Maine, resulting in poor outcomes for the state’s emerging adults who come in contact with law enforcement. Overrepresentation of minority groups, and prolonged system involvement are just some of the deficits of Maine’s current model. To produce better outcomes, there must be a holistic, individualized, and supportive systemic response that considers the needs of emerging adults on an individual basis and refers them to appropriate rehabilitative services.”
In less than two years from today, I will have lived my entire life over again as an incarcerated person: a life sentence in the midst of a de facto life sentence (the federal Department of Justice considers anything over 40 years a de facto life sentence; I am serving 50 for a first offense).
A great educational irony of my life is that I received my GED diploma the same day I was handed my half-century prison sentence in one of the few states in the U.S., or the world, without parole. Of the approximately 21 months I spent in county jail during legal proceedings, I was allowed to live outside segregation for less than six. It was during those few months that I prepared for, and attained, my GED.
After struggling for another three years as a large, hurt and angry young Black man nearly universally hated in a predominantly white prison that still tolerated anti-Black racism (e.g., several officers referred to me using racial epithets among other staff and incarcerated people), I restarted my educational journey in the fall of 2013. I’ve since earned an associate’s and bachelor’s degree in Liberal Studies, followed by a master’s degree in Conflict Analysis and Resolution. I am now a PhD student at George Mason University’s Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution maintaining a 4.0 GPA, but as a faculty advisor pointed out in one of my support letters, it will be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to conduct the field work necessary for my doctorate behind bars.
Concurrent with my formal higher education, I learned to be a peer facilitator and mentor in prison, a Personal Support Specialist-certified hospice volunteer, and a restorative justice scholar-practitioner inside and across prison walls. I co-taught a course on Carcerality and Abolition at Colby College (via Zoom and in person) and helped develop a curriculum for the statewide public humanities initiative Freedom & Captivity.
In 2022, I co-facilitated a victim-offender dialogue process in a sexual assault legal case in the Midwest. I now lead training workshops on restorative and transformative justice, conflict transformation, peace practices, and forgiveness and reconciliation. While I continue to learn and grow in my own life, I teach others inside and outside prison how to develop reflexive-accountability and reparative practices (as demonstrated by dozens of the academic/professional support letters).
I have not been perfect in my journey. Yet even an article in the conservative news outlet The Maine Wire, slanted to undermine me and the bipartisan effort to reestablish parole in Maine, could not help but admit: “By all accounts, Hylton appears to have used his time in prison to educate himself and radically reorient his relationships with other people and with God.”
I caused grievous bodily harm to two innocent people who had done absolutely nothing against me, people against whom I held no ill thought. I traumatized them, their family, and our community. I cannot undo that harm. I cannot take back what I did. What I can do is strive to prevent that harm from happening elsewhere, prepare others to do the same, and engage in reparative action whenever possible. This is exactly what I do every day, a fact attested to and affirmed throughout the enclosed support letters.
In my Aug. 4, 2009, sentencing memorandum, Kennebec County Deputy District Attorney Alan Kelley wrote that my violent actions during those panicked minutes that terrible night had “proven [me] to be among those most ‘dangerous individuals’ whose incarceration is, ‘required in the interest of public safety,’” and thus my “actions must speak more loudly than [my] words could ever hope to do.”
I ask now, 16 years later, that these same words used to condemn me hold true in my pursuit of redemption: please let my actions during the past 14 years inside Maine State Prison speak to my true character.
“The State has very little information regarding the defendant and his history,” Kelley conceded in his memorandum, yet he also concluded, “the State has little faith in the defendant’s prospects for rehabilitation.” Kennebec County Superior Court Justice Nancy Mills (our Governor’s sister-in-law), who sentenced me based on Kelley’s memo, called me a “dangerous, violent predator,” despite having no reason to believe I’d ever preyed on anyone before.
Although living in a carceral environment that demanded violence of me, I managed to extricate myself from its ongoing pull. With the mentorship of other incarcerated people, the assistance of prison staff and administrators, and support from outside volunteers, as well my grounding in the healing-centered ministry and relationship of Jesus Christ, I became one of the foremost interrupters of violence and a preventer, mitigator, and resolver of all manner of conflict at Maine State Prison.
As shown by the nearly two dozen job offers and professional partnership invitations I cannot accept right now, my incarceration is preventing me from reaching some of the people who could most benefit from my unique skill set and healing-focused approach. At-risk emerging adults and young people all over Maine — especially those acting out so publicly nearby this prison, in Rockland — are those I most desperately want to help.
As a former foster child who left an abusive home at 10 and never felt connected to any community as I was moved through the system, I can meet these young people where they are. I can be for them what I never had: someone who can look them in the eye from a place of love, understanding, lived experience, and non-judgmental support and say, “I have been there, I am ready to walk with you through the pain and struggle, and I genuinely want to walk with you in this way.” These youths are not criminals, delinquents, or problem children. They are young people who are hurting and have not yet learned how to articulate their pain in constructive or healthy ways, so it comes out as disruptive and harmful actions.
•••
I am needed outside the walls of Maine State Prison to do this work and to engage in substantive reparative action for the harm I caused long ago. But far beyond my situation, Maine’s people, especially those behind bars, need to know executive clemency is a legitimate process that recognizes genuine rehabilitation — the correction of wrongful behavior that Maine’s entire criminal legal system is intended to foster. The clemency board’s blanket refusal to even acknowledge its own process for consideration of exceptional circumstances tells Maine people their government has no mercy to offer and is willfully blind to any real progress attained inside its penal institutions. My release will very publicly change that bleak picture to one of promise and hope.
I am thus humbly imploring our Governor and her Clemency Board to afford me the opportunity to continue to mend the social fabric I so badly damaged years ago. I have done all I can do on this side of the barbed wire, collaborating with Department of Corrections staff and fellow residents for over a decade on numerous initiatives and programs, some never before accomplished here. I have dedicated myself every day to support others in their healing, learning, growth, and reparative efforts. The only right next step is through the front doors of this prison and into direct contribution to the community awaiting me with open arms and open hearts outside.
You can reach Leo Hylton by mail at Leo Hylton #70199, Maine State Prison, 807 Cushing Rd., Warren, ME 04864, or e-mail leoshininglightonhumanity@gmail.com.
