We contacted the Kansas Prisoner Review Board with a set of regulatory proposals that would correct the constitutional errors with the Board's practices for juvenile applicants seeking parole release.
Juvenile offenders have a right to have meaningful opportunities for release and courts have clarified that to satisfy the Eight Amendment, parole boards must undertake a detailed “youth and its attendant circumstances” analysis before denying parole release to a juvenile applicant and that parole hearings for juvenile applicants must use different procedures and consider additional factors other than the standard evaluation criteria used in adult proceedings in order to properly protect juveniles from being treated the same way as adults. Kansas' generally discretionary parole system currently fails to systematically provide all juveniles with a different parole process that considers youth and mitigating life circumstances and has as its starting point the presumption that juvenile applicants must be released at their minimum sentence.
Additionally, the PRB must ensure due process protection for juvenile applicants in parole hearings. The PRB must: (1) disclose all evidence to be considered prior to the hearing; (2) provide an opportunity to be heard and to present evidence in support of release; (3) provide the right to hear and confront adverse witnesses as necessary; and (4) prepare a written decision that is comprehensible and sufficiently detailed for a reviewing court to evaluate. This would mean that the PRB actually shares all parole files with juvenile applicants or their counsel in advance of a hearing, allows applicants to submit written evidence of mitigation in response, and forbids prison staff from giving off-the-record feedback on the credibility of parole applicants or their suitability for release. It would also require the PRB to submit a written decision denying parole that communicates far more reasoning than the extremely brief, boilerplate denials the PRB currently uses. Furthermore, due process requires that there is a recording of each parole interview for the purposes of administrative and judicial review. However, the PRB in practice currently makes no such records.