On a recent Tuesday morning, Gregory Mingo put on a cap and black jacket and traveled by bus from his home in Westchester to the state capitol in Albany.
Nine months earlier, the 69-year-old was serving out a sentence of 50 years to life and worried he would not live to see the outside of Great Meadows Correctional Facility in Comstock. But he was now a free man, and on this day, stood before an audience of lawmakers and criminal justice reform advocates.
“Last September, I had a friend of mine – came in when he was 16 years old,” Mingo told the crowd. “He spent 45 years in prison, and he died a week before I came home. But you know what he died from? He died from hopelessness, and he died from not having the support that some of us are fortunate to have.”
Then Mingo urged his fellow New Yorkers to pass two bills that would loosen the state’s parole laws, including the Elder Parole bill, aimed at assisting older inmates who have served long stretches.
“This is a moral issue,” he insisted.
Mingo is a member of an exclusive group: incarcerated New Yorkers who have suddenly found freedom through, in his own words, “the miracle of clemency” – in his case a commutation granted by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
Such intervention is rare.
Over the course of 10 years, Cuomo exercised that absolute power a total of 41 times, when thousands were eligible for such grace. During his first term, Cuomo received an average of 670 requests for clemency each year, according to the state Department of Corrections, and granted none. His successor, fellow Democrat Kathy Hochul, has so far signaled she will be every bit as stingy in granting relief.
Mingo is advocating a different course.
Gregory Mingo during a visit to Albany where he has been promoting prison reform legislation.
Since his September release, Mingo has used his perch to champion criminal justice reform. In 2020, it was the multi-racial coalition that emerged in the wake of George Floyd’s murder that helped secure his release. Now, Mingo has joined another coalition, the People’s Campaign for Parole Justice, and said he hopes it can help shorten prison sentences for others.
But the campaign faces challenges in Albany, in the form of rising crime amid the pandemic and concerns that progressive reforms are fraught with political risks.
“One-quarter of voters say that crime will be the single-most important issue in determining which candidate gets their support for governor in November,” said Siena College pollster Steven Greenberg.
A double murder
When he was 28 years old, Mingo and two others were charged with a double-robbery murder that took place in Queens in 1980. James Parker died after being shot multiple times, while his girlfriend Karen Sheets was strangled with a metal hanger. They were among the then-record 1,800 homicides in New York City that year. The annual total would top 2,200 a decade later.
Inside, there's so little to do, and there's so much time to do it. And out here, there's so much to do and there's so little time to do it.
Mingo maintained his innocence from the beginning, saying he was in Massachusetts at the time of the killings, staying with his sister, a first-year student at Smith College.
But it was to no avail. A co-defendant, Susan King, testified against Mingo and a third defendant, Willie Holmes. All three were convicted. No physical evidence tied Mingo to the crimes, and his court-appointed lawyer refused to call alibi witnesses, Mingo’s supporters have long asserted.
The punishment: Mingo received a double-life sentence, for a term ending no sooner than 2031. Mingo said he remembers the day when he last walked as a free man and began what would become the start of nearly four decades of incarceration: July 31st, 1981.
This was just a few months into the Reagan era, with the new president having campaigned successfully on a slogan of “Let’s Make America Great Again,” coupled with a “tough on crime” approach to policing.
During Reagan’s eight years in office, the prison population at state and federal facilities nearly doubled, with communities of color hit especially hard by new mandatory minimum sentences.
Prison reform advocates on a recent trip to Albany where they advocates for parole reform.
“Among men, blacks (28.5%) are about twice as likely as Hispanics (16.0%) and 6 times more likely than whites (4.4%) to be admitted to prison during their life,” said the authors of a 1991 study for the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
The hardest part of imprisonment, Mingo recalled, was “the emotional and mental roller coaster that you go through, the hope that the truth will come out, that somehow you'll wake up and realize that this was all a bad dream.”
In prison, he did his best to stay in shape and became an inmate peer counselor. He also spent years advising others on their legal cases, and developed friendships with the many visiting college and law students, some of whom would later vouch for his character.
Then in 2020, protests erupted nationwide after the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. The resulting social justice movement took aim at the use of deadly force by police as well as the disproportionate rate at which Black and brown men were incarcerated. Mingo’s case was championed by his niece Ava Nemes.
Noting the lack of physical evidence tying Mingo to the murders and the failure to present any alibi witnesses at trial, Nemes wrote in a Change.org petition urging Cuomo to grant clemency, “Only a Black man in New York in the 1980s could have been convicted on such thin allegations and sent away for so long.” More than 100,000 signed on.
Nemes also noted that the judge who’d sentenced Mingo was later censured after using the N-word openly in court.
Gregory Mingo, No. 21, poses with teammates on the prison football team at Sing Sing in Ossining.
Mingo got additional support from a team headed by CUNY Law professor Steve Zeidman, director of the school’s Criminal Defense Clinic, who said Mingo was the “poster child” for someone deserving of clemency.
The pandemic lent additional urgency to Mingo’s request, as aging inmates in overcrowded conditions were especially vulnerable to the coronavirus.
During one 2020 interview that WNYC conducted with Mingo over the phone from a prison wing, a corrections officer could be heard saying he had to end the call. A prison counselor had apparently contracted COVID-19, so the entire wing was being cleared.
“Have to go,” said Mingo, abruptly hanging up.
Weeks later, Mingo discovered his clemency appeal had not been approved.
Clemency miracle
Mingo’s clemency “miracle” took place the following year, in August 2021. It was a prison official, a lieutenant, who delivered the news.
Mingo was sitting in the prison library when the official found him and told him to step out into the hall – an ominous sign, he thought – and to take his mask off.
“So now my mind is racing and I'm wondering, what is this about? And then he pulls out the paper and he reads off that I was granted clemency.”
Mingo had already received intimation of his clemency from his sister, but hearing it in all its officialness, his body suddenly grew hot. His knees buckled, he said, and he felt faint. The official said he didn’t look well and told him to lean against a wall, so Mingo did, then asked him to read the letter once more.
“I asked him if it was for real. He said it was. Then he took me and put water on my face.”
Mingo returned to his cell and told no one his news. That whole night, he stayed up, wondering if it was all a “cruel joke of some sorts.”
Gregory Mingo meets with parole reform advocates and others.
In the morning, however, someone woke him up and told him to turn on the TV: Mingo was on the news. The grant of clemency was one of the last acts of Cuomo’s service as governor before resigning amid allegations of serial sexual harassment.
Within the prison, Mingo said, word of his clemency made him an “instant celebrity.” The commutation trimmed his sentence; it did not wipe away his convictions.
“I remember the day I left, one of the guys upstairs hollered down to me and he said, I want you to listen to this song.”
It was “Happy,” by Pharrell Williams.
As he left the walls of the prison, Mingo noticed that the air smelled different. He hesitated to take that first step, he said, “just to make sure I'm actually free.”
A new life
Since September, Mingo’s lived in Ossining, in a home that commands a dramatic view of the Hudson. The property is owned by his sister and her husband, who decided to move to Ossining in 1985 to be closer to Mingo while he was incarcerated at Sing Sing prison, but Mingo was relocated to Attica soon thereafter.
Sometimes, he said, he goes out on the porch at night and just listens.
“It almost sounds as if the trees are talking to each other, the leaves are talking to each other, the birds are talking to each other,” he said. “I wonder what they’re saying.”
He’s hoping to get a paying job, but for the time being, is working as a volunteer on a construction team that builds prefabricated homes for formerly incarcerated people coming home.
“Greg is a really good guy, really personable,” said one of his fellow volunteers, John Porco.
Reform advocates said Mingo's easygoing personality, combined with his personal story and a reputation as a model prisoner, have helped him land speaking opportunities at conferences and in front of lawmakers.
“That really moves our work forward,” said Jose Saldana, the executive director of Release Aging People in Prison, “because it helps the public to understand that people behind bars are people, and in many cases they are mentors and leaders who inspire real and positive change in others.”
RAPP is part of a coalition backing a parole reform campaign, specifically an “Elder Parole” bill that would make parole easier for anyone over 55 who’s served at least 15 years of time, as well as a “Fair & Timely” bill aimed at those who have demonstrated a record of improvement. The legislation attempts to address the fact that while the state’s overall prison population has come down, the number of aging inmates has risen.
There are currently 4,704 people in New York state prisons over the age of 55 who are incarcerated, of whom 47% are serving life sentences, according to RAPP. Half of this aging population is Black.
The campaign has backing from unusual quarters: advocates for survivors of crime and violence, including a number of organizations that wrote to Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, asking them to support parole reform.
“More than 60% of survivors indicated that they favor shorter prison sentences and more spending on prevention and rehabilitation programs, including education, mental health treatment, and drug treatment,” the authors wrote, drawing upon the 2016 National Survey of Victims’ Views.
What we're doing here is something that is really new, bringing together the parole justice movement, as well as the survivor justice movement in ways that it's never really been done before in New York state.
“What we're doing here is something that is really new,” said Chel Miller, a spokesperson for the New York State Coalition Against Sexual Assault, “bringing together the parole justice movement, as well as the survivor justice movement in ways that it's never really been done before in New York state.”
The Queens district attorney’s office had no immediate comment on Mingo’s newfound role in the criminal justice reform movement. Relatives of Sheets and Parker, the victims of the 1980 murders, could not be located decades later.
Looking for impact
Earlier this month, Mingo was among more than 100 men and women who traveled on buses from Rochester, Buffalo, Westchester and the five boroughs to Albany in order to lobby state lawmakers.
Advocates for parole reform said they have support from a majority of state lawmakers. With just days remaining before the end of the legislative session, however, they’ve received no assurances from either Stewart-Cousins or Heastie, so it’s unclear if the bills will receive a vote.
A spokesperson for Stewart-Cousins did not respond to a request for comment, and Michael Whyland, a spokesman for Heastie, simply wrote, "The Speaker has led the way on criminal justice reforms and we discuss all issues with our members.”
It also remains to be seen whether Hochul will respond to pressure to approve more requests for clemency. Last year, she announced the formation of a Clemency Advisory Panel, but in a disappointment to many progressives, commuted just one sentence.
"Gov. Hochul is committed to improving safety, justice and fairness in the criminal justice system,” wrote Hochul spokesperson Avi Small, “and will continue working on much-needed improvements to the clemency process."
For advocates of reform, there’s a sense of frustration. Democrats, who have backed such reforms in the past, hold a supermajority in the Legislature but it’s unclear if that will actually translate into meaningful action – or more “miracles” like the one Mingo received.
In many ways, Mingo recognizes that he beat the odds, and although he is at an age when most people are winding down, he’s doing the opposite, trying to make up for opportunities lost.
“Inside, there's so little to do, and there's so much time to do it,” said Mingo. “And out here, there's so much to do and there's so little time to do it.”
