Alabama veteran parolee's arrest temporarily delayed in last-minute order

In the eyes of the state of Alabama, parolee Jerry Lett did everything right. 

Yet Lett was due to turn himself in to law enforcement on Friday, his 53rd birthday, after the state parole board voided his 2020 early parole grant. 

An eleventh hour reprieve out of a local Montgomery court granted Lett more time as his lawyers fight what they say is an unconstitutional parole revocation based on the state’s own error. 

State officials agree Lett, a combat veteran sentenced in 2018 on a cocaine trafficking charge, had fully complied with parole conditions since his release from prison last fall. But the parole bureau said it erred in allowing Lett an early parole hearing in September 2020. 

More:Released on parole, he was a model citizen. Now the state says he should go back to prison.

Lett's incarceration overlapped a massive legislative shift in 2019, which altered the board's autonomy and increased mandatory minimum sentence requirements. When he was sentenced in 2018, Lett was eligible and scheduled for an early parole consideration date in 2020. But by the time the date rolled around, he was no longer eligible, lawyers for the Alabama Bureau of Pardons and Paroles and the Alabama Attorney General’s office said this week.

Alison Ganem, Lett’s attorney, filed a motion for a temporary injunction in the case early Friday morning, after the parole board voided Lett’s parole and issued an arrest warrant for his reincarceration on Thursday. Lett's legal team argues he now has a compelling legal interest to remain on parole, whatever the state's error.

“Since leaving prison, he has complied with all parole conditions, timely reported to his parole officer, and reunited with his family,” Ganem, a staff attorney at the Southern Center for Human Rights, said in the motion. “His parole performance has vindicated earlier predictions of him being a negative public safety risk. There is no reason to believe that Sergeant Lett, a valued community member in declining health with a demonstrated record of service, will create any problems at all while on continued parole. For those reasons, the balance of harms supports an injunction in Sergeant Lett's favor."

Judge Johnny Hardwick ruled in Lett's favor, writing an injunction would not harm the parole board or the Alabama Department of Corrections. Hardwick ordered the Alabama Department of Corrections to withdraw its warrant pending further court order.

"We are grateful and relieved that Sergeant Lett will be home with his family tonight," the Southern Center for Human Rights said in a statement. "We will continue to fight for his freedom."

Cam Ward, the director of the Bureau of Pardons and Paroles, acknowledged this week it was the bureau's error, not Lett's, that led to the revocation hearing. Ward, an Alabama legislator known for his outspoken support of prison reform prior to taking the bureau position, said he supported the temporary injunction. 

Ward believes the board, which operates independent of his position, voted in line with the law but said he is “committed” to finding a potential solution to keep Lett from returning to a state prison.

"The law is the law. You can’t disregard it when you don’t like it," Ward said. "But if there is a way we can work within it to get a better outcome, I’m for it. And I think this guy deserves that."

‘I took responsibility’

Lett was pulled over in Houston County in October 2012, arrested and charged with trafficking after police found cocaine in his car. 

The case languished for several years, but Lett pleaded guilty and was sentenced in 2018.

"I took responsibility for my crime," Lett said.

Lett was struggling with addiction at the time, his attorneys said, after a voluntary combat deployment during Operation Desert Storm and a second career as a Dothan firefighter left him with significant health issues. Lett also said he suffered from post-traumatic stress. 

"Sir I am dealing with this PTSD etc. the best way I know how," Lett wrote in a letter to his sentencing judge.

In 2018, Lett qualified for an early parole hearing, putting his case on the board's docket. When a sweeping bill to reform the board and parole requirements passed the Legislature in 2019, Lett was still qualified, his attorneys said in a statement, when his hearing came up in 2020.

Lett served a mandatory minimum term of three years and had a clean prison record, with ADOC officers testifying on his behalf at the parole hearing. He had multiple commendations from his military service and was adamant about completing any class possible inside prison. 

“I knew I had met and exceeded every criteria that they asked me to do,” Lett said. “No getting disciplinaries, take rehabilitative programming. Everything that was offered, I volunteered to take it, and to teach it to others. I went to church. I was constantly volunteering my testimony to let guys know that you have to keep your nose clean in there. The prisons are violent, the prisons are overcrowded. It’s tough. I witnessed several guys get killed, one actually died on my bed. To keep your nose clean and to keep yourself protected was quite tedious.”

Lett was “ecstatic” when he was granted parole last fall. Weeks later, he met his two daughters, who he raised as a single dad, outside the prison for the first time in years. Jonte Lett, his youngest daughter, flew in from Europe, where she is stationed with the U.S. Air Force. Growing up, Lett pushed his daughters to be ambitious, she said, and they relied on his encouragement through “low points.” She was overjoyed to be able to call him anytime she needed once he was released last fall. 

Lett maintained full compliance with his parole, checking in with his parole officer once a week and making progress on paying back a $60,000 fine. He was also able to begin lining medical procedure with Veteran’s Affairs, after his heart disease and diabetes deteriorated in prison. 

It was a few days before Christmas when Lett’s parole officer called and asked to come by his house. 

“He came and met me at my daughter’s house, where I live at,” Lett said. “He looked like he had been crying. He told me, ‘You didn’t do anything wrong.’” 

Jonte Lett said she doesn’t understand who is served by revoking her father’s parole. The prison system is overcrowded, and Lett requires extensive medical care he can receive through the VA. 

“It’s really wrong, and I would say cruel as well,” Jonte Lett said. “‘Here’s your freedom. Actually, you know what, I’m just going to take that back.’ [The board] made a good choice to allow him be free, and it’s just not right."

Lett granted parole during historic decline in parole grants

Ganem and Lett said this week the state first informed them that Lett’s possible parole revocation hinged on a notification issue. But the state this week said under a mandatory statute passed in 2019, Lett did not meet the minimum time served to be eligible for an early parole. 

Regardless of the administrative error, Ganem said in a March letter to the parole board, the board's "procedural error in no way undermined its substantive determination that Mr. Lett was fit for release."

"The question at this juncture is not Sergeant Lett’s eligibility for early parole. It is whether the Board can reincarcerate him, six months after his release, when he has not done anything wrong. Under clearly-established law, the answer is no," Ganem said. 

The 2019 legislation at play in Lett's case has substantially affected Alabama's parole landscape, advocates say. The changes came after public outcry over the release of an inmate in 2017, who was mistakenly classified as a nonviolent offender and was accused of killing three people, including a child, during two 2018 burglaries. 

Gov. Kay Ivey installed Charles Graddick, a former Alabama attorney general and judge, to lead the bureau, taking power away from the board itself. Graddick, who called for the abolition of the Board of Pardons and Paroles in the early 1980s, canceled hundreds of parole hearings through 2019 and 2020, citing first the board's failure to meet the new notification requirements and then COVID-19 restrictions, even as other state agencies continued to conduct business virtually.

Parole grants significantly declined in Alabama under Graddick's tenure. A data review by the ACLU of Alabama estimated the state’s parole grant rate in 2020 would be the lowest rate in seven years, even as the prison system faces a Justice Department lawsuit for overcrowding and other systemic issues.

Ward said when he replaced Graddick in December, Lett’s case was the very first to come to his attention. It was the “oddest” case he had seen. Ward does not have a vote on the parole board, but he said Friday he believes the three-person board made the right legal decision at Lett's revocation hearing.

But Lett’s sterling track record is not in dispute, Ward said.

“The question comes in: Do you say, ‘I’m going to ignore the law here?’” Ward said. “That’s a slippery slope. That being said, I do think there’s a lot of options out there to help him so we don’t have to send him back to DOC. I’ve been very committed to working with folks to see if we can get that done.”

Ward said he would support “any option to keep a person like this out of prison, who has done what he’s supposed to do. 

“We should all strive, within the law, to keep him from being incarcerated in prison,” Ward said.

Lett's legal team said they would continue to fight Lett’s parole revocation in the courts.

"I’ve been praying that it’s going to turn out for the greater good," Lett said on Monday. "Whatever [God's] will is, that’s what it’s going to be. I’m not going to try to hurt myself, I’m not going to try to take off. I’m still going to keep fighting. I’m still going to try to correct the injustice. I know that I deserve to be out; I know what it took to get out. I’m going to do what it takes to stay out."

Contact Montgomery Advertiser reporter Melissa Brown at 334-240-0132 or mabrown@gannett.com. Brian Lyman contributed to this report.