Virginia’s parole board applauded a killer. Show us the file

In 1998, Troy Demar stabbed Christine Allen to death in the Fairfax County home they shared. Her daughter was 3 months old. A judge sent him away for 40 years. This month, 7News reported that Virginia’s Parole Board let him out. One board member said this on the record: “You have done so much; you’ve actually done more programming than most inmates.”Allen’s sister had testified. “He killed my sister. My life will never be the same.”Here’s where I part company with the outrage. The scandal isn’t that Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s (D-VA) board grants parole more often than Glenn Youngkin’s did. It’s that no Virginian outside that room can audit the reasoning in either direction, and the commonwealth has spent six years proving it won’t let them. Virginia abolished discretionary parole for felonies committed on or after Jan. 1, 1995. Everyone still eligible was convicted three decades ago or longer. That population doesn’t churn; it ages. Watch the grant rate move anyway. Before abolition, Virginia paroled about 46% of eligible candidates. Under Terry McAuliffe it ran near 6%. Under Youngkin’s board it fell to 1.3% in early 2024, eight grants against 628 applications. Spanberger replaced all five members in March, and 7News now puts the rate near 10%.Same statute. Same aging men. Same files. The variable that changed was the governor.I’ve spent 30 years around fiduciaries and a decade as an expert witness watching judgment get picked apart under oath. The first question is never “what did you decide.” It’s “show me the file.” A decision you can’t reconstruct from a contemporaneous record isn’t a judgment. It’s a preference wearing a judgment’s suit. Virginia’s Parole Board is a fiduciary. It manages other people’s risk on behalf of the citizens who live next door to the outcome.Conservatives should resist making this a Spanberger problem, because the record won’t cooperate. In 2020, the state inspector general found that Ralph Northam’s board broke state law and its own policies in freeing Vincent Martin, who murdered Richmond police officer Michael Connors. The board never notified the Richmond commonwealth’s attorney, canceled a scheduled call with Connors’s family, and kept no minutes for six months. The General Assembly responded in 2023 with SB 1361, stripping the board’s FOIA exemption and requiring monthly publication of decisions with individualized reasons and recorded votes. By late 2024, the American Civil Liberties Union was accusing the Youngkin board of complying selectively, opening the books on cases it planned to approve and telling prisoners they could inspect the rest in person. Prisoners aren’t free to show up anywhere.Two administrations, opposite politics, identical instinct: decide first, disclose never.Here’s the part almost nobody is reporting: the General Assembly already fixed this. HB 1030, carried by Republican state Rep. Tony Wilt and passed with bipartisan support, builds a 10-factor objective scoring system covering education, work programs, disciplinary history, and reentry readiness. It doesn’t expand eligibility. It disciplines discretion. Implementation was pushed to July 1, 2027. So Virginia gets 16 months of maximum discretion and minimum documentation. That’s the window we’re in. Wilt built the measuring stick, then agreed to leave it in the box.To be fair, a 1.3% grant rate isn’t caution either. It’s repeal by attrition, and conservatives who believe in the rule of law should be uneasy when a statute survives on paper but dies in practice. Virginia also runs the lowest recidivism rate in the country at 17.6%. And the caricature doesn’t fit. Board Chairwoman Shannon Dion directed the Virginia Victims Fund and spent 25 years as a prosecutor. Which is exactly why she should want the receipts public.IGNORANCE WAS A CHOICE: HOW TIM WALZ HANDED SCAMMERS $250 MILLIONAdopt HB 1030’s framework now, by board policy, without waiting for 2027. Publish every decision with the individualized reasons and recorded votes the law already requires. Certify in each file that the commonwealth’s attorney was notified and the board diligently attempted to reach registered victims, because Virginia has shown what happens when nobody checks that box.Louis Brandeis wrote that sunlight is the best of disinfectants. Christine Allen’s family stood in front of that board and asked it to make him serve the 40 years. They got a decision. They are owed the file and reasoning behind it.Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a Bachelor of Science in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.