A bill that would provide a new path for early release for some incarcerated people in Virginia is making its way to a full floor vote in both the House and Senate.

“We’re excited to have cleared a house courts committee, which we haven’t done the last two years,” says Shawn Weneta, policy strategist for the ACLU of Virginia, which is supporting the so-called Second Look bill for the third year in a row.

“This would allow people that are serving a long-term prison sentence to petition their sentencing courts to look at their sentence and determine if [that sentence is] still appropriate,” Weneta told Charlottesville Right Now.

Since Virginia abolished parole under Governor George Allen in 1995, executive clemency has been the only option for pursuing early release in the state.

The new law is “really based on the premise that people change and our laws should make space for that,” Weneta said. 

In previous years, the bill has been blocked in house committee. Weneta hopes the bill will have greater bipartisan support this year thanks to several changes. Earlier iterations of the bill called for incarcerated people to be allowed to petition courts after a flat 15 years. This year, the bill has been modified to create a tiered petition schedule with some people able to petition their sentencing court after 15 years, some after 20 years and some after 25 years, depending on the seriousness of the offense.

Weneta said the Second Look bill makes the process of requesting a sentence review nonpartisan since it puts the onus for review back onto the courts instead of leaving it to the governor alone to review petitions for clemency.

“You never know what governor’s going to be in there and the pardon process is pretty opaque,” Weneta said. “There’s a lot of us that think that government doesn’t always get it right. If we don’t get it right in taxes, if we don’t get it right in education, if we don’t get it right in other places in government, then what makes us think that we always get it right in the courts?”

Listen to the full interview with Shawn Weneta here.