Gothamist76%
Escape from 'death by incarceration?' Bill would revisit long sentences for NY prisoners.0%
By Ryan Kost81%
12/25/2025, 11:01:02 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 29 faulty reasoning types, including Optimism Bias, Self-Serving Bias, and Framing Effect, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 13.3% saturation with 279 hits. Analysis detected 2,970 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,135 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 0% and a BS Rank of 0% (0 of 16,813 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 100.00% of the article peer group.
Sixteen years ago, during the course of a six-month spree of fast-food robberies, Shawn Peace shot two people: a Popeyes employee in the hand and a cab driver multiple times, leaving the slumped-over man to bleed out in his car.
Then-Queens District Attorney Richard Brown called Peace "a menace to society."
Peace was convicted of second-degree attempted murder, first-degree assault, first-degree robbery, and second-degree criminal possession of a weapon, and was sentenced to 110 years in prison.
Peace remains incarcerated at Green Haven Correctional Facility in Dutchess County.
He told Gothamist he’s accepted responsibility for what he did, earned an associate degree, begun work toward a bachelor’s and leads an alternatives-to-violence workshop for other prisoners.
“Understanding the severity of my crimes and the harm that I caused, I knew that I would have to spend some time in prison,” he said.
“But I didn’t think I would have to spend the rest of my life.”
Peace, now 37, wants an opportunity to ask a court whether the sentence imposed on him for a crime he committed when he was 22 still makes sense today.
That question is at the center of a growing push in Albany to pass a so-called second look law, which would let people serving long prison sentences ask judges to review their punishments.
Supporters say the legislation would allow courts to consider how someone has changed.
It would also give the justice system a chance to revisit sentences handed down during New York's tough-on-crime era, when extreme terms were common and judges had little guidance on how youth, trauma or rehabilitation should factor into punishment.
While a growing number of states have judicial review mechanisms, there are few options once once a sentence is handed down and appeals are exhausted in New York.
The governor has the power to grant clemency, and more recently appellate attorneys have begun developing novel legal strategies that target lengthy prison sentences given to “emergent adults.”
These efforts, however, are time-intensive and uncertain to produce results.
Dozens of legislators in both the Assembly and the Senate have signed on as cosponsors to the second look legislation.
Rowan Wilson, the state’s chief judge, has spent the past year rallying support.
“The momentum for a second-look bill is as powerful and burgeoning in ways I've never seen before,” said Steven Zeidman, a professor of law at CUNY and the codirector of the Second Look Project.
The space that he was in, the only two alternatives would've been prison or death.
Charisse Peace, on why she turned in her brother, Sean, for a string of robberies and shootings
Under the proposed legislation, a prisoner sentenced to more than a decade could ask a judge to review their sentence after they’d served half that sentence or 10 years, whichever is less.
Judges could consider factors including the person’s age at the time of the crime, past trauma, evidence of rehabilitation — or statements from victims.
The Vera Institute of Justice estimates more than 6,000 people would be immediately eligible to seek review if the law passed, with another 500 to 600 becoming eligible each year thereafter.
“So many of those folks that we work with have been in [prison] 20, 30, 40 years,” Zeidman said.
“And the question is: Are they going to die in prison or is there some mechanism for someone to re-examine their sentence, see who they've become, see if they merit a second look?”
The legislation is currently pending in both chambers’ codes committees.
The chairs of both committees, both Democrats, said they planned to discuss the bill with colleagues when the legislature reconvenes in January.
Republicans, however, have signaled the bill would face opposition if brought to the floor for a vote.
Senate Minority Leader Robert Ortt referred to it the kind of “pro-criminal” legislation that makes the state more dangerous.
Assemblymember Phil Palmesano, a Republican from Western New York, takes particular issue with a part of the proposal that creates a presumption in favor of sentence reduction for people who were under 25 at the time of their offenses, or are now older than 55.
A leopard never changes their spots – they cannot change.
... Once you attempt to take a man’s life, you should be punished for it.
Trevor Bell, the cab driver Sean Peace shot multiple times
“I will 100% debate this bill on the floor if it comes up for a vote, as will, I fully expect, a number of my colleagues,” Palmesano said.
“This will not be a quick pass.
This would be a long, lengthy debate if the Democrats choose to bring this bill to the floor of the assembly.”
Trevor Bell, the driver Peace shot, told Gothamist he doesn’t believe a judge should reduce Peace’s sentence if given the chance.
“Let him rot in jail,” he said.
Bullets cut into Bell’s neck and legs.
He suffered two strokes during his time in the hospital.
He lost strength and dexterity and still struggles to walk, Bell said.
“A leopard never changes their spots – they cannot change,” Bell said.
“I’m a Jamaican.
I believe in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
I believe that once you attempt to take a man’s life, you should be punished for it.”
The wrong path
Charisse Peace understands her brother is in prison for a reason.
She was in the courtroom the day the judge announced her brother’s sentence, and though he didn’t know it at the time, she had been the one to turn him into authorities.
“I knew instinctively he was on the wrong path,” Charisse said.
“The space that he was in, the only two alternatives would've been prison or death.”
More than a century in prison though, she said, felt like “a life sentence just without saying life.”
As years passed and then a decade, Charisse watched as her brother came back “home” to himself.
“One of my stronger opinions is just that if correctional facilities are supposed to facilitate correction, then that requires our lawmakers to have a certain level of confidence in the system to work,” she said.
In the absence of any formal way for judges to revisit sentences, a small number of advocates have tried to create informal paths back to freedom, a patchwork approach that depends largely on luck and limited resources.
CUNY's Zeidman began his work on second look efforts about a decade ago, when he realized there was no organization advocating for “people serving death by incarceration.”
As he and a small group of students began taking up parole litigation cases and compiling clemency applications, word spread.
He said they’ve received thousands of requests for help, though they can only take on a couple dozen cases in any given year.
So far, they’ve helped around 85 people win release.
Stephen “Jamel” Bellamy is among them.
Bellamy was convicted of murder and sentenced to 62-and-a-half years in prison in 1985.
He was 23 at the time.
After six years, Bellamy said, he was a “totally different person in thinking, attitude, behavior.”
But it wasn’t until 2023, after he had served 38 years in prison, that Gov. Kathy Hochul granted him clemency.
Now he works with a group called Release Aging People in Prison, which is pushing for parole reform, including the passage of an “elder parole” bill.
If something like a second look law were in place, he might have begun this work decades earlier, Bellamy said.
“Somewhere during the course of my life, while I was out here in the streets, as we would say, I lost my humanity,” Bellamy said.
“It’s sad that I had to go to prison to regain that humanity and become compassionate, to become caring and there was no mechanism in place to even recognize that.”
It’s sad that I had to go to prison to regain that humanity and become compassionate, to become caring, and there was no mechanism in place to even recognize that.
Stephen “Jamel” Bellamy, who served 37 years for murder until Gov. Kathy Hochul granted him clemency.
Novel strategies
Another avenue has revealed itself in recent years, stemming from a growing sense in the courts that the lengthy sentences handed down in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly as they applied to very young perpetrators, should be reconsidered.
In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court banned the death penalty for those under age 18.
Seven years later, the court extended the ban to life without parole.
Underpinning these decisions were advances in neuroscience that questioned the extent of a person's culpability when their mind was still developing.
Younger people are more impulsive and susceptible to peer influence — they’re also more malleable, said Laurence Steinberg, a psychology professor at Temple University and one of the world’s leading experts on the topic.
“They’re still changing, and so it’s impossible to predict whether they’re going to be dangerous for the rest of their lives and it doesn’t make sense to levy these really harsh, long punishments on people who are that age,” Steinberg said.
Building on that research, Barbara Zolot, an attorney at the Center for Appellate Litigation, has developed a legal strategy focused on people who were under 25 years old at the time of their offense.
Along with her colleague Allison Haupt, she runs the Youth and Emergent Adult Resentencing Project, or YEARS.
Their approach argues that defense attorneys in these cases failed to present mitigating evidence about their clients’ life circumstances that could have influenced sentencing.
This idea that a defense attorney has a duty to present this sort of evidence has been well established in death penalty cases, Zolot said, but a New York Supreme Court case in 2019 extended it more broadly.
So far, YEARS has won three cases using this strategy and is currently working on about 20 more.
Based on information requests, Zolot and Haupt estimate that roughly 250 people in New York prisons who were sentenced under the age of 21 could be eligible — more if you include those under the age of 25.
But working through the backlog could take decades.
If a second look law were to pass, their work wouldn’t stop, but it would be made easier, Zolot said.
The attorneys would have to present the same sort of mitigating evidence, but they would no longer need to find a “sentence illegality” in the original defense attorney’s performance.
“The courts often see that our clients have changed,” Zolot said.
“They see that our client may be deserving of resentence, but they may feel their hands are tied because in a given case, they may not believe that the representation falls below that constitutional standard.”
Building momentum
Earlier this month, nearly 100 people gathered at a town hall organized by Center for Community Alternatives to rally support for a second look bill.
Shawn and Charisse Peace are both members.
From Green Haven, Shawn sent a brief welcome message.
“The Second Look Act is not about erasing the past, it’s not about overlooking harm and it’s not a free pass,” he said.
“The Second Look Act is about recognizing human transformation.”
Chief Judge Rowan Wilson and Assemblymember Latrice Walker both attended the event — as did state Sen. Shelley Mayer, who represents Yonkers.
Wilson spoke about bringing two lawmakers on a prison visit.
Mayer urged supporters to call their representatives.
Organizers announced plans to bus supporters to Albany.
Wilson framed his support around the limits of foresight.
A sentence might seem appropriate at the time, he said, but what justice requires can change as a person changes.
“ I've made a lot of decisions that were good decisions at the time, but turned out to not really work,” he said.
Shawn Peace said his own journey back home to himself didn’t happen right away.
It came years in his prison sentence during a conversation with his sister — the first in four years — after he finally learned that she had turned him in.
He asked her: Why?
How could she have done that to him?
“She told me that she didn't recognize me anymore,” he said.
“And that's when I started to realize that I had become far removed from the person or the man that my mother raised me to be.”
He hopes to one day have a chance to tell a judge how much he's changed.
“For individuals like myself who have been putting in the work, who deserves a second chance?
This is the last hope,” he said.
“The second look act is the last hope.”
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