Gordon’s “lack of full disclosure,” the board rejected him.
I’m not going to try in any way to sully his reputation.”Ĭiting Mr. “I was led to believe it was an unwanted sexual encounter,” he added, “and that’s the end of that part of it for me, because I’m not going to disparage Dr.
“The person that committed the murder was young, very young at that time, and I did what I did in order to protect that person,” he said at his first appearance before the board, in 2017. He has long hesitated to say who did and why. He admits to hiding the body in a remote wooded area in Putnam County and ditching the doctor’s car in a New Jersey parking lot. Gordon’s home in Elmsford, N.Y., he covered up the murder. Daniel Pack, a 38-year-old neurologist with a wife and two young children, was shot to death in the basement of Mr. Gordon’s situation may be more impossible than most. “People who maintain their innocence remain in an impossible situation.” “The board expects them to accept responsibility and express remorse,” said Michelle Lewin, executive director of the Parole Preparation Project. It is a conundrum faced by scores of prisoners who insist they’re not guilty. His refusal to admit guilt, the parole panels ruled, showed that he lacked remorse for his crime. Gordon, who is Black, was convicted of the 1991 murder of a white Westchester County doctor. In their decisions, board members focused chiefly on a single and apparently unforgivable flaw: He insists he is innocent of the crime that sent him to prison. Gordon had received since 2017, when he completed the minimum term of his sentence of 25 years to life in prison. “Your release at this time is not compatible with the welfare of society,” the panel ruled, “and would so deprecate the serious nature of your crime as to undermine respect for the law.” It was the fifth parole denial Mr. Joseph Gordon, he wrote, has “the character and moral compass to return to society as a productive member of his community.” Gordon was only the second inmate he had ever recommended for release. The superintendent, Leroy Fields, noted that in his more than 37 years as a corrections official, Mr. Gordon had changed the lives of many mentally ill prisoners), was a letter from a former superintendent at Fishkill Correctional Facility, in Beacon, N.Y. In addition to endorsements from corrections officers, civilian prison employees and a psychiatric social worker (who wrote that Mr. When Joseph Gordon, a 78-year-old man who has spent nearly three decades in prison for murder, went before the New York State parole board in March, among the letters supporting his bid for freedom was an extraordinary appeal.