The Sunday Story: American parole and one man's case for freedom
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Hey, it's A. Martinez, and before we get started, just a quick heads up. This episode contains descriptions of violence and discusses a violent crime. On an August night in 1986, 16-year-old Jacob Weidman brutally stabbed his summer camp roommate. Eric Kane, who was also 16, died from his wounds. Weidman eventually confessed to the crime. He was sentenced as an adult and received a life sentence with the possibility of parole after 25 years.

The case left people stunned and divided. There was no motive, just murder. What amount of prison time is enough for this terrible senseless murder? I don't think you throw people away. I just don't think you do that. Jacob Weidman's case has long drawn attention, in part because Jacob's father is John Edgar Weidman, the acclaimed author of many books on race, violence, and criminal justice, including a memoir about his own brother's life sentence.

I'm E. Martinez, and this is the Sunday Story from Up First. Today, I'm joined by Beth Schwartz-Apfel. She hosts the new podcast, Violation, from WBUR Public Radio in Boston and The Marshall Project. Violation examines the Jacob Weidman case and what it says about violence, forgiveness, and the parole system in America. Welcome, Beth. Thanks for having me.

Beth, you cover criminal justice, so you probably come across a lot of cases of people who say they do not belong in prison or that there was some injustice in their case. But what was it about this particular case that made you want to focus on it? So one of the things that has always drawn me to criminal justice reporting is that these are messy stories. They're complicated stories and they don't have easy answers. So

A story like a wrongful conviction story, for instance, has a certain moral clarity. You know, if somebody's in prison who didn't commit the crime, then of course we need to figure out how to get them out of prison.

But when somebody did commit the crime, it's harder. And truthfully, it's more representative of the average person serving time in prison. There are all these big questions that Jake's case brings to the fore that he has in common with so many other people in prison. Like, how much time in prison is enough? How do we know when someone is ready to get out? Are

Are there certain crimes that you just cannot come back from? Jake's story is very representative of the kinds of messy, complicated stories that our prisons are full of. The other thing about Jake's story is just how different it is from your average story. As you mentioned, his father is this award-winning, acclaimed writer who...

who made his name with a memoir about how his own brother, Jake's uncle, was convicted of murder and was serving a life sentence. Jake...

was married twice while he was in prison, both times to psychologists. So there are just all these wild details that make his story incredibly unique and lots of twists and turns along the way. All right, let's dig into this story. Start us with the case in terms of the crime and how it all started. So Jake was on this road trip with his summer camp. Every year, the camp sent the oldest kids on these epic road trips across the West.

He was a, you know, your average kid. He did well in school. He was an excellent basketball player. He came from the stable middle-class family, very bookish family. And then suddenly out of the clear blue, he just up and stabbed this sleeping kid in the middle of the night in a motel room in Flagstaff, Arizona. The boy's name was Eric Kane and he was also 16. And this just shocked everyone. Nobody saw this coming. Nobody in Eric's life, of course, but nobody in Jake's life either.

And did Jacob Weidman confess right away? He didn't confess immediately. He says it took him a while to even admit to himself what he had done. And then once he did, he didn't feel ready to talk about it. His lawyers told him not to speak to the police. And when Jake did confess a few weeks after he turned himself in, it came as a surprise to everyone. And Jake said he was deeply sorry for what he'd done. Now tell us about Jacob's original sentence. What did the judge hand out?

So when he was 18, Jake Weidman was sentenced to life. In Arizona in 1988, life meant the possibility of parole in 25 years. Back then, life without parole was not an option. But at the time of sentencing, the Kane family, the parents of Jake's victim, Eric, asked the judge to make a formal finding that whatever parole board review Weidman in the future, not give him parole. And the judge did that.

But what Jake and his family hoped was that years later, 25 years from that point, a parole board would consider who Jake had become, not who he was when he was 16, but who he was when he grew up. Okay, so we know who did the murder. What's the mystery here then? I mean, why is this particular story worth a seven-episode podcast? Well, there are a lot of mysteries in this story, but you're right. Whodunit is not one of them.

To me, the mysteries are, can we understand what drives people to make these terrible choices, these, in some cases, devastating choices? Can we use that understanding to make better choices ourselves as a society? You know, how do we balance things like retribution against redemption, especially when we're dealing with kids? So does the calculus change when we're talking about young people?

Years later, after Jake was sentenced, the Supreme Court found that kids should be treated differently because their brains have not fully formed yet. So like in 2004, they said you can't execute people who committed their crimes as juveniles. In 2012, they said you can't sentence them to mandatory life without parole. And many states have interpreted that to mean that even parole boards should give extra consideration to paroling people who are kids when they committed their crimes. So when did Jacob come up for parole for the first time?

He came up for parole for the first time in 2011 when he was 41 years old. He'd served 25 years, 23 of those in prison and two of them in the county jail. Okay, so 23 years in prison. How did he do there? Well, the first few years in prison were rough.

Remember, when he went in, he was only 18. And he'd been told that the only way to keep yourself safe in prison was to act tough. And so he, you know, racked up some disciplinary infractions in those early years for things like using obscene language, disobeying orders. He got into a fight. But as he got older, on into his 20s, he told me that he kind of decided that he didn't want to be that person anymore. And he said, you know, I'm not going to be that person anymore.

He couldn't live with himself like that anymore. And since then, since about the early 90s, he's been essentially a model prisoner. It's really easy to get tickets in prison, these disciplinary infractions. You can get tickets for, you know, being in the wrong place at the wrong time. You can get tickets for not having your shirt tucked in. But Jake Weidman, for decades, has received almost no tickets.

And he says over the years, he's committed himself to figuring out what

what the hell was going on with him when he committed this crime, to navigating his mental health struggles. He got a college degree. He's even done charity work in prison. This is something that Arizona allows is prisoners to organize walks to raise money. They can actually bring in pizza and sell slices of pizza to other prisoners and to correction officers to raise money for things like the American Cancer Society or the Wounded Warrior Project. So Jake's been involved in all that stuff, Toastmasters, things like that.

that. From what you're telling me, Beth, I mean, it sounds like he'd be a candidate for parole. And, you know, the question is, what does a viable candidate for parole look like? And that sort of gets to the heart of some of the questions that we're grappling with in this podcast. Because, you know, if you ask the parents of Eric Cain, Jake can never be trusted to be free again. He will always be a danger. And they go before the parole board and they tell them that. Every time Jake has a parole hearing, they tell them that.

Other people believe that there have to be ways of making amends. There have to be ways of earning second chances.

The thing about Arizona that's really interesting is that Arizona abolished parole in 1993. So anybody who committed their crime after parole was abolished can't go before the parole board and ask for a second chance. So in a way, the state has sort of forsworn parole. They sort of don't believe in parole. But at the same time, they have to honor it for the people who were convicted before parole was abolished. They have to hold these hearings for the hundreds of people who are eligible for it. And Jake is one of them.

We're talking to journalist Beth Schwartzapfel. We'll be right back.

I'm Amy Martinez. You're listening to the Sunday Story from Up First. And today, we're talking to journalist Beth Schwartz-Apfel about the case of Jacob Weidman. Weidman murdered his summer camp roommate, Eric Kane, when both boys were 16. He became eligible for parole after serving 25 years of a life sentence but was denied six times. Now, it didn't go well for Jake in a lot of parole hearings. Take us back, Beth, to some of those early ones. What happened? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I think first, before we even do that, we should probably talk about how parole hearings work and how they don't work. You know, every state's parole board is different. They all go by different rules and they're all made up of different people, of course. But one thing that most boards have in common is that the board members are appointed by governors. And so they're supposed to make decisions independently, but they're subject to political pressure to make decisions a certain way that's kind of in keeping with what the governor would want.

And because they're largely political appointments, the degree to which board members have any relevant experience at all varies widely. So in Arizona, almost every board member is either a former cop or a former prosecutor. These are people who have spent their entire careers trying to put people in prison. So they tend not to be people who are inclined to let people out again. That's pretty common. But what's also common is for board members to have no experience in criminal justice at all. In my reporting, I encountered people...

who served on parole boards who were farmers or pastors or entertainment and event managers.

The next thing to understand is this huge divide we were talking about between people who believe in parole, who believe in second chances, and people who don't. And there's just no reconciling those two sides. You know, Eric's family not only thought that Jake shouldn't ever get out on parole, but they also said that he shouldn't even have these hearings, that if he was truly sorry for what he had done, he shouldn't even get out on parole.

He shouldn't even try to get parole because every time he goes before the board, it's incredibly painful for them. And they have to relive this traumatic event. And, you know, you can understand why they feel that way. It is traumatic. On the other hand, you can also understand how a human being wants to be free. Jake wants the opportunity to go out in the world and try again to be a contributing member of society.

Jake spent decades trying to understand and explain what he had done.

Along the way in prison, he saw several therapists, medical doctors who tried to help him, and he received a lot of diagnoses. We describe all of that in the podcast, but truthfully, there are no easy answers for how any of that contributed to him committing the crime. So Jake was denied, not once, but six times. Beth, did the parole board explain why they were denying him parole?

So in Jake's hearings, there were often these sort of vague answers about why they denied him. For instance, talking about, you know, the severity of the crime or the fact that there was loss of human life. Both things, of course, that the judge knew when he handed down Jake's sentence. Or they'd say things like they were not convinced he had adequately addressed the problems related to his criminal behavior. Right.

I spoke to a lot of parole board members for the podcast, and no one could explain clearly exactly how they'd come to a decision. There was a lot of, you know, going by your gut or following your instincts. Here's Brian Shea, a deputy county attorney in the office that prosecuted Jake at a parole board hearing.

What will it take for Weidman to have paid his debt to Eric and Eric's family and to society as a whole? What amount of prison time is enough for this terrible, senseless murder? So if parole board members are going by their gut, I'd imagine their gut instincts must be influenced by the gravity of the original crime. It's extremely common for parole boards to discuss the original crime.

And some of this is to make sure the person can explain what they've done, has enough insight and remorse to sort of reassure the board that this will never happen again. But for a lot of people who go before parole boards, they say it feels like they're being retried, that they're, you know, forced to rehash things that the judge already knew when they gave them a sentence that made them eligible for parole.

Because they can't change the details of their crime. Those details will never change. So people try as best they can to talk about the things that they can change, like their educational record or the programs and the classes that they've participated in or job training or other activities. And when parole was first created, that was the whole idea, you know, to give people an incentive to do their best while they're locked up.

to give them a reason to make the best of their time. But when it feels arbitrary who gets parole, then people notice that and they figure, you know, why bother trying? Because I'm not going to get parole anyway. Beth, tell us about the Kane family and what their role was during this case. You can understand why a family who sent their 16-year-old off to summer camp and then he never came back again, you know, would...

How do you ever recover from that? So they have always maintained that Jake Weidman is a danger to society and should never be free. They're very vocal about this. They come to all of his hearings. They've been to every single hearing he's ever had.

They also say he's a liar and he's trying to manipulate the board. And that message resonates with the pro board who they're dubious that the incarcerated people before them are telling them the truth. They're sort of alert for a performance or any kind of indication that the person is not being sincere. This idea that people will say anything to get out.

Now to that extra layer over this case, the fact that Jacob Weidman is a son of author John Edgar Weidman. How much has that made a difference in the way he's been viewed by the parole board or the public in general?

Well, I think it cuts both ways. You know, I think it's made it easier in the sense that unlike the vast majority of people in prison, Jake comes from a family of means. He has an attorney who's at almost all of his parole board hearings. That's very, very unusual. He has family members who fly out to almost every single one of his parole board hearings. That's also very unusual. But

The Keynes also view John Edgar Wideman, let's just say Eric Keynes' father, Sandy Keynes, once said he has nothing but contempt for the man. They blame John Wideman for creating a monster is the language that they used.

So Jake winds up getting paroled on his seventh time before the board. He was 46 years old. What were the parole board's reasons for granting him his freedom this time? He was granted freedom for two reasons. The first reason is that enough members of the board finally became convinced that he was no longer a danger, you know, that he had gotten control of his mental health struggles, um,

One board member said, you know, prison is an incredibly dangerous and violent place. And the fact that he had not engaged in any violence over the decades he was there was a pretty good indication that he was not a violent person anymore. But even more importantly, the makeup of the board changed. And it just so happened that there were three people sitting on the board that day who were sympathetic to his cause. And you need three votes to get parole.

But Jacob Weidman wasn't out for very long. What happened? Yeah, a little less than nine months after he was granted parole, Weidman was yanked back into prison for what's known as a technical violation. He'd failed to make an appointment with a particular psychologist on a particular day. So that's the short version of what happened. The long answer is that

The victim's family was incredibly involved in many aspects of his supervision in a way that was extremely unusual.

They were keeping a very close eye on his whereabouts. They typed up pages and pages of things that he was supposedly doing wrong. His parole officer didn't actually find that any of that was true or that he had violated any of his parole conditions, but no doubt there was a pressure campaign by the victim's family during the time that Jake was out. Now, again, the victim's family was only doing what they thought was right to honor what had happened to their son, and they did have a right to do that, even if it was extremely unusual.

But Jake argues that while it's the state's obligation to listen to the Canes, the state should make decisions on the basis of a wide range of considerations, not just what the victims want. And what he and his lawyers say is that that's not what happened. Okay, so other than going back to prison, where does this leave Jake? Well, first of all, many people who are accused of a parole violation don't get sent right back to prison. The board does have an option to...

find somebody guilty of a parole violation, but then send them back into the community. In Jake's case, they revoked his parole and sent him back to prison. So now he's back to square one, serving a life sentence in prison. He is eligible to go before the parole board every year and ask for parole. And instead, he's fighting the original parole revocation in court. And this has been going on almost six years now. And how has the Weidman family responded to what's happened?

Well, Jake's father, John Edgar Weidman, talked to me for this podcast. And for years, he wouldn't discuss Jake's case. Jake asked him not to, wanting to sort of keep a low profile and not feel like he was trying to make himself into some kind of victim or some kind of cause.

But after everything that happened, Jake felt like it was important to speak out because he did not feel like he was treated fairly by the system. And so he gave his family members his blessing for them to speak to me about it. And when I asked John Weidman what would make the criminal justice system more effective and more humane, this is what he told me. The only possibility is for individuals to feel about others the way they feel about themselves.

to really make the jump out of one's skin and see another person both as you and not you. If you do that, then that obliges you to see things from the victim's family's point of view too, who are saying he should never get out, right? He shouldn't even try to get out because these parole board hearings are so painful for us. I can understand that.

I can understand and maybe if I was looking at a young man, even on a television screen because he couldn't come to the hearing but he was on a screen, if I was looking at him on the screen and I knew that he stabbed my son to death, I might hate that person forever. I might want to see him burn in hell. I might want to get a knife in my hand and kill him. All right? Fair enough.

But is that all I would feel? Is that all I would feel? All I can say is I hope not. We'll be right back. I'm Amy Martinez. You're listening to the Sunday Story from Up First. And today we're talking to journalist Beth Schwartz-Appel about the case of Jacob Weidman. Okay, so parole boards have few guidelines, and it seems like the incentives aren't necessarily great for them to grant parole. I mean, it just seems, Beth, like the stakes are so high. That's true. Um...

Most of the incentives, as far as parole boards are concerned, are to keep people in, right? All the risk is in letting people out. There's very little risk to the board to keep people in. And that's what makes it so easy to politicize the process. I'm sure people remember the name Willie Horton. In the late 1980s, George H.W. Bush, who was a presidential candidate at the time,

used the case of Willie Horton. And so I am not going to furlough men like Willie Horton. He was a prisoner in Massachusetts who escaped while out on furlough. It's not exactly parole, but the idea is the same. And while he was out, committed a terrible crime. Mike Dukakis and Willie Horton changed our lives forever. He was serving a life term without the possibility for parole when Governor Dukakis gave him a few days off.

Hortonbrook into our home. For 12 hours, I was beaten, slashed, and terrorized. My wife, Angie, was brutally raped. When his liberal experiment failed, Dukakis simply looked away. And Bush used this case as a sledgehammer against his political opponent in that race, Michael Dukakis, to great effect. And this happens every few years. One out of the thousands of people out on parole does something terrible.

And then when that happens, politicians look for someone to blame and they often point the finger at the parole board as if they should have known this would happen. And then for years afterwards, parole boards take this as a sort of object lesson and they parole way fewer people than they used to.

This, of course, leaves people who are eligible for parole and their families in a state of confusion and frustration. Here's Jake's brother, Daniel, at a parole hearing in 2013. I confess to being frustrated and confused by the outcome of each previous parole hearing. The board hasn't offered a clear, concise, and consistent rationale for denying parole that aligns with a statutory mandate.

Further and perhaps most frustrating, the board hasn't provided a blueprint for Jake to put into action. It's not that the goalposts keep moving. It's that from my perspective, the goalposts don't seem to even be on the field. Beth, we've heard the term mass incarceration, but you mentioned a different term in the podcast, mass supervision. What do you mean by that? Well, there are 2 million people in prisons and jails in the U.S., but there's almost 4 million people on probation and parole.

There are so many people under supervision and so many rules to be broken that these programs, which initially were meant as an alternative to incarceration, you know, people are often hoping they'll get probation or hoping they'll be released on parole, right? Because it's better than prison. It's an alternative to prison.

But it actually has become a pipeline for prison rather than an alternative because the rules are so easy to break and because there are so many people subject to these kinds of rules.

There have been some efforts to address this. Some states, for instance, have used what are known as graduated sanctions policies. So if someone on probation or parole breaks a minor rule, they'll get a minor sanction. If they continue to break minor rules, the sanctions get, you know, slowly tougher, incrementally tougher. But the idea is that the punishment should fit the crime. And there's also some recognition that sometimes rules get broken because they're impossible not to break. Like, most...

Most states have a rule against associating with known felons. But depending on what community you live in and how policed that community has been for how many years, sometimes it's impossible to not break that rule. Where I grew up, Beth, if you threw a party in my neighborhood, you'd have a lot of felons at that party because they just lived in the neighborhood. So that's an approach to possibly fixing some of the issues that people on parole face. But what about the system itself, the parole system? Are there efforts to make it uniform and fair?

There was a big push in the 90s to eliminate parole boards altogether. And as we talked about, Arizona is actually one of the states that eliminated parole. But in the states that do still have parole, you really don't see a lot of push to reform how they operate. Legal scholars and experts have proposed various ways to make it more fair. There's this idea called a second look provision, where instead of going before a parole board, people serving long sentences could go before a judge.

and ask the judge to take a second look at their sentence. And that has a number of benefits. You know, a judge is a scholar of the law, for instance, and you can appeal a judge's ruling. You can say, look, the judge didn't follow this rule and that wasn't fair. Parole boards have almost no oversight and it's nearly impossible to appeal a parole board decision in most states. Beth, you've been reporting on this for a long time, years. What final thoughts do you want to leave us with?

Well, for one thing, I want to just say that the Keynes have never felt comfortable speaking with me, but I've tried really hard to represent their family's point of view. I want to acknowledge that it's really, really hard to wrestle with what should happen to somebody who has committed violence. You know, that is...

That is not a wound that the Cains will ever, ever recover from. And I think that any decision we make as a society about what to do has to account for that. But I think that the story shows that parole boards fail everyone involved all too often. So not just Jake, who doesn't have a clear sense of what he needs to do to earn release, or didn't feel like he had a fair shake when he was accused of breaking the rules of his release...

but also the Kane family who were shocked when he was released and who didn't have a clear sense of what they could expect or how to navigate what was an incredibly painful time for them either. So I think that more clarity and more transparency about the process would serve everyone, both victims and the people who have committed crimes against them.

That is Beth Schwartz-Appel. Beth, thank you for telling us about your new podcast, Violation, all about the parole system. Beth, thanks. Thank you for having me. Violation is a production of WBUR and The Marshall Project. It is reported and hosted by Beth Schwartz-Appel. It is produced by Quincy Walters, mix and original music from Paul Vitkus. The podcast is edited by Ben Brock-Johnson at WBUR and Geraldine Seeley at The Marshall Project.

For more information about Jake's case, including additional documents, photos, and related stories, go to themarshallproject.org slash violation and wbur.org slash violation.

The Sunday Story is produced by NPR's Enterprise Storytelling Unit. This episode was produced by Justine Yan with help from Milton Guevara and edited by Jenny Schmidt. Kweisi Lee was our engineer. I'm Ian Martinez. Up first, we'll be back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great weekend.