HARRISBURG — Just five people are empowered to make critical recommendations to Pennsylvania’s governor about which incarcerated people deserve a second chance — and which don’t.
Despite this critical function, the state’s Board of Pardons operates with limited transparency. That’s why Spotlight PA is giving the public easy access to 25 years’ worth of information about how the panel votes on commutation requests.
The news organization recently examined the case of Gail Stallworth, whose application for commutation of her life sentence initially received the board’s full support before an unprecedented revote doomed her chance at freedom.
Experts told Spotlight PA that Stallworth’s situation is unique in the board’s history. Still, obfuscation, opacity, and confusion around the board’s actions and considerations are commonplace.
Clemency applicants and their supporters — whether legal counsel, other state officials, or citizen watchdogs — regularly report frustration with a lack of transparency concerning the standards and methods the board uses to make its decisions in both pardons and commutation applications.
Board votes are taken at public meetings, which are broadcast as they occur, but the videos are not saved and posted. If a member of the public misses the meeting, they can’t watch it at a later date.
The breakdown of each vote is public under the state constitution, but the board does not post meeting minutes on its website. The board posts some information regarding votes taken on applications for life sentence commutations, but does not publish roll calls or information on other kinds of commutations.
To improve transparency and accountability, Spotlight PA filed requests under the Right-to-Know Law for data showing every commutation recommendation vote taken by the Board of Pardons in the past 25 years.
The newsroom received hundreds of rows of data showing votes taken at the public hearing stages of clemency, which we are making available to the public.
At the public hearing stage, the board votes on whether to recommend an application to the governor for final approval. Commutations of life and death sentences require unanimous support. All other types of clemency require simple majority support.
In addition to the board vote data, Spotlight PA has added a field showing the governor in office at the time of each commutation vote.
While publishing this data represents a major move toward transparency, there are limitations.
The Board of Pardons did not record the full breakdown of each vote in the databases officials provided to Spotlight PA. Instead, the identities of board members were only included when they voted against the majority. For example, if the board voted 4-1 on a particular application, only the identity of the one person in opposition was included.
The board provided a list of past and current board members to Spotlight PA, but it did not include dates of service for every member, making it difficult to determine the exact breakdown of each vote.
The collected data is embedded below and is also available on GitHub. For more information about the data and its limitations, visit the GitHub page.
In response to a request under the Right-to-Know Law, the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons provided Spotlight PA with four .xlsx files recording votes taken during public hearings between 2000 and 2025.
Each file contained the date, type of clemency sought, applicant name, applicant county, vote result, and initials of the board member who voted in the minority.
Spotlight PA joined these four files into one database, cleared the original formatting, and created individual columns for each category of information to enable easier analysis. The news organization also added columns: one for the governor in office at the time of the vote, determined by year, and one for the outcome of the vote.
Outcomes were determined using a conditional formula based on board rules for different types of clemency.
The board must vote unanimously to recommend commutation of a life or death sentence. For all “life” or “death” applications, if there was one or more votes in dissent, the formula returned “denied.” If there were no votes in dissent, the formula returned “approved.”
People can also apply for commutation of their minimum or maximum sentence imposed by a judge when they are serving an indeterminate amount of time. For example, someone 12 years into a 10-15 year sentence might apply to commute their maximum. Similarly, someone nine years into the same sentence might apply to commute their minimum.
In applications seeking commutation of a minimum or maximum sentence, a majority of members must approve. For all “minimum” or “maximum” applications, if the number of “yes” votes exceeded the number of “no” votes, the formula returned “approved.” If yes votes did not exceed no votes, the formula returned “denied.”
Since 1997, board membership has included the lieutenant governor, the attorney general, a psychologist or psychiatrist, a victim advocate, and a corrections expert. In the original data from the state, the identity of board members who voted in the minority were only identified by first and last initials.
To determine the identity of board members who voted in the minority, Spotlight PA consulted Pennsylvania Senate confirmation records and other public sources. The Board of Pardons later provided a list of current and past members, some with dates of service, that helped validate the identities.
Once a board member was identified, Spotlight PA replaced the initials.
The original data Spotlight PA received from the Board of Pardons recorded votes for applications for pardons.
Unlike commutation applicants, pardon applicants are not regularly identifiable through other means. Though the data is public and available to anyone who files a Right-to-Know request, the names of applicants are not otherwise available online.
People who apply for pardons are seeking to scrub the record of their criminal convictions to improve their economic and social stability and remove the stigma associated with a criminal record. By publishing the names of these applicants, Spotlight PA would once again be identifying these people and connecting them with a criminal background.
Because of this, Spotlight PA is not publishing pardons data at this time. The newsroom is considering ways to publish this data without compromising the anonymity of the applicants.
Do you have a question or thought about the data and Board of Pardons? Contact Spotlight PA investigative reporter Danielle Ohl at dohl@spotlightpa.org.
