Did parole board investigation bring answers?
1. This investigation was never going to tell us very much. Republicans wanted a wide-ranging inquiry into why the Virginia Parole Board has been releasing so many prisoners and whether law and policies have followed. Remember that this all started when the states Office of the State Inspector General found that the parole board violated state law and internal procedures last year when it released Vincent Martin, convicted of murder in connection with the death of a Richmond police officer in 1979. Instead, what they got was a much narrower inquiry into the policies, process and procedures that the inspector general employed. Thats a very different thing. Further, Republicans complained that a) the law firm doing the investigation was picked by a Democrat (Attorney General Mark Herring) and that the lead investigator previously worked for several Democratic attorneys general in New York. They called this a whitewash before it even got underway and repeated that charge after the report came in this week. Wed prefer to say that this was a narrowly crafted inquiry that doesnt pretend to address any of the big questions about the parole board, all of which are still on the table.