Abelardo Chaparro, 50, outside of his home in Apache Junction. Chaparro’s case has set precedent for other cases like his where parole was discussed but never given as an option. Photo by Jerod MacDonald-Evoy | Arizona Mirror
Abelardo Chaparro is 50 years old.
He spent half his life in prison.
He goes by the name Abel, but he bears the mark of Cain, ashamed at the killing that put him away — almost forever.
In 1995, when he was 20, he killed a man who had been stalking him. He claimed it was in self-defense. A Maricopa County prosecutor thought otherwise, and so did the jury that convicted him of first-degree murder.
And then the judge imposed a sentence that no longer existed: Life with no possibility of parole for 25 years. And no one noticed for the next 22 years.
Before 1993, in Arizona and elsewhere, all life sentences carried a chance of parole after 25 or 35 years. Charles Manson and his minions got parole hearings. So did Sirhan Sirhan, who killed Robert F. Kennedy, and Mark David Chapman, who killed John Lennon.
Then in 1993, following a nationwide movement, the Arizona Legislature decided to get tough on crime. Lawmakers first created a new sentence, called natural life, which meant you stayed in prison until you died. Then they abolished parole and instead created another new mitigated sentence — a lesser punishment of life with a chance of “release” after 25 years.
But unlike in cases with parole, there was no guaranteed hearing at the end of those 25 years. The legislature didn’t bother to create a mechanism to get a hearing. Prisoners have to petition the Arizona Board of Executive Clemency (formerly the parole board) for a recommendation to the governor for pardon or relief.
So, it was tantamount to a natural life sentence.
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Despite the change in sentencing statutes, judges and prosecutors and defense attorneys kept bargaining in terms of parole for more than 20 years, as if the old law were still in effect.
Until 2017, that is, when I published an investigative series in The Arizona Republic about the continued error, shining a light on the nearly 250 prisoners who had erroneously received a sentence that promised a chance of parole, including at least 90 of which came out of plea agreements with prosecutors.
The U.S. Supreme Court had already ordered that juveniles convicted of murder could be eligible for parole. After my series came out, the Legislature moved quickly to ensure parole hearings to any prisoners who had entered into plea agreements with prosecutors.
The rest of them, like Abel Chaparro, were out of luck. And so were an equal number of 25-to-lifers who had been correctly sentenced to life with a chance of release and had gone to prison thinking they would someday return to their lives on the outside.
“I don’t believe in luck,” Abel told me recently in an interview over breakfast at a Phoenix cafe. “You make your own luck in this world.”
And he did. He heard about my series on the prison yard. And after reading it, he shared it with others who were expecting to see their families again some day.
He started studying law books, connected with attorneys at the Arizona Justice Project and counseled other prisoners. In 2020, he got out of prison when a federal judge told the Arizona Supreme Court, which had already denied him parole, that it might look into certain constitutional issues, like equal treatment under the law, unless Arizona honored the sentence imposed 25 years before.
Abel was the first of the erroneously sentenced prisoners to get parole. Others have followed suit and have been released from prison. The Arizona Board of Executive Clemency refers to them as Chaparro-identified-parole-eligible cases. And during Gov. Katie Hobbs’ administration, some of the other 25-to-lifers, the ones who were correctly sentenced to forever, have even had their sentences commuted.
It is still not easy.
When self-defense becomes murder
Abel Chaparro is a pleasant-looking, well-spoken man who is quick to smile and quick to choke back tears. He is of relatively short stature — which, appropriately, is what his surname means in Mexican-Spanish slang.
He was born in El Paso, Texas, the youngest of seven children, and he went to school in New Mexico, though he dropped out after the seventh grade to go to work.
In 1995, he was 20 years old, with a steady girlfriend and a baby on the way. He had never been arrested, never been in trouble, and had steady work laying carpeting.
Reynaldo Martinez was a family friend. “We went to each others’ families’ social functions,” Abel said. And he helped Reynaldo get a job and taught him how to install flooring. He even lent him tools, which ultimately caused the falling out.
When Abel went to ask for his tools back, Reynaldo picked up an ice pick and pressed the handle against Abel’s chest, making it clear that he would stab Abel before he would give up the tools. Abel called police, Reynaldo fled, and Abel took his tools home. But he had made an enemy.
In February, Abel and his girlfriend and her daughter had just driven home from the movies and were getting out of Abel’s vehicle when it was rammed twice from behind by a vehicle driven by Reynaldo.
The next day, when Abel was at the girlfriend’s apartment, her daughter told him someone was drawing on his car. He thought she meant kids writing with their fingers in the grime on the hood, but she said, “No, it’s grownups.”
He went to the balcony and saw Reynaldo, one of his brothers and another man breaking the windows of his vehicle. On the side of the vehicle, Reynaldo had spray painted, “Te ando buscando,” “I’ve been looking for you.” When Abel called out, Reynaldo headed up the apartment complex steps with the ice pick.
Abel called police again, and the men, including Reynaldo, were arrested. Reynaldo and his brother were Mexican nationals who were in the country illegally. The brother was deported, but Reynaldo was able to trade his freedom for testimony about a murder he had witnessed. But he was more angry than before. Word spread that he was going to get even with Abel.
A police officer advised Abel to get a gun to protect himself. So, one of his brothers bought him a semiautomatic handgun, which he registered, and he took target practice.
The court record confirms that Reynaldo had stalked and assaulted Abel on multiple occasions. But it also notes that, on May 19, 1995, Abel’s car was seen cruising past Reynaldo’s brother’s house, and the next day, Abel came asking about Reynaldo at the home of mutual friends, and then went off “cruising” with one of them, ostensibly to find Reynaldo. One person testified that Abel said he wanted to “kill that son of a bitch.”
And a day later, according to court records, Abel “found” Reynaldo at a Circle K at 21st Avenue and Van Buren Street in Phoenix.
In Abel’s telling, he had been drag racing on I-17 and pulled off at Van Buren because his fuel was running low. While he was pumping gas, Reynaldo came out of the convenience store and began yelling that he was going to kill Abel. Believing that Reynaldo carried a gun, Abel got in his car to leave and drove out of the parking lot — right into a red light.
Reynaldo walked up toward the passenger door, still screaming, so Abel made a right turn, but still couldn’t get through traffic. Then he made a U-turn.
He said Reynaldo was running toward him, screaming. He ran right into a car, fell over, then picked himself up and kept advancing toward Abel.
Abel was sitting on his gun. He pulled it out, leaned back and pulled the trigger, firing 15 shots in as many seconds through the open car window. Nine of them hit Reynaldo, and he dropped in the street.
Abel called the police and waited by his car. At one point, when a car drove too close to Reynaldo’s body, he jumped out in front of it, raised his hands and yelled “stop.”
“I didn’t leave. I took responsibility. I called police,” he said.
Nonetheless, when police came, he was arrested, and the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office charged him with first-degree murder.
“You’re talking literally seconds,” he said, “and your life is done.”
Meeting his daughter through prison glass
“I met my daughter in Madison Street Jail,” Abel told me. She was born after he was arrested, and her mother had come to visit Abel, but they weren’t allowed to come close.
“You see your daughter right there,” he said. “You can’t touch her.”
His voice cracks as he tells the story: “I will never forget this. One of the guards, she asked me, ‘Is that your daughter?’”
He said it was. She beckoned to him — “Come here,” she said — and she walked him around the visitor barriers and let him hold his baby.
When he went to trial in 1996, his attorney told him that prosecutors had verbally offered him a plea deal that carried a range of sentences from seven-and-a-half years to 10 to 21.
If he went to trial, he was assured, the worst outcome would be 25-to-life with a chance of getting out on parole. There was also a chance he would be acquitted, and Abel felt so strongly that he had acted in self-defense that he took the chance. Besides, he had heard through the grapevine that judges usually impose the maximum number of years, so 25 instead of 21 seemed a pretty good gamble.
He lost the bet. The U-turn, the testimony about looking for Reynaldo, the target practice, the number of shots fired and the fact that some of them went into Reynaldo’s back when he turned to flee, all served as evidence of premeditation. He was convicted of first-degree murder.
The judge imposed a sentence that never existed: natural life with no possibility of parole for 25 years. Natural life, by definition, means no parole, so a few months later, the judge corrected the sentence to life in prison with that promise of a parole hearing after 25 years. And no one thought twice about it, because judges were imposing similar sentences all the time.
Navigating prison through psychology
“Nobody in my family had ever been in prison, “ Abel told me over breakfast in Phoenix.
“There’s nothing but violence in there. Drugs and getting assaulted. It’s not somewhere you go to become a better person. It helps nobody.”
“Your morals go out the window, and you can’t be a nice person because they take advantage of you.”
He couldn’t enroll in classes because of his classification, though he read voraciously on his own, especially law books and psychology. He observed everything and everyone to the point where he felt he could predict what was going to happen.
“It’s like living in the lab,” he said. “You see psychology in progress.”
He tried to stay out of trouble, which mostly meant trouble as defined by prison-yard rules.
“You can’t do time by yourself. You can’t be an outsider or you’ll be targeted, ” he said. “If there’s a race riot, you have to play your part, even if the others are your best friends. You knew days in advance who was going to be murdered, but can’t do anything. … That bothers your conscience, but you do it.”
His self-taught psychology helped him survive. One day when one of the yard bosses sent a stooge to beat him up because he didn’t hang out enough with other Mexicans, Abel confronted him directly.
“Before we fight,” he said, “one question: Who hurt you as a child?”
The man denied having problems. Abel persisted. “Stop lying to me. You’re not normal for a reason.”
The man started crying. Abel walked him back toward his boss on the yard.
“I returned his foot soldier in tears,” he said.
When hope turned to shock
My stories about parole were published beginning in March 2017.
“I’m walking on the yard, and this white dude comes up and says, ‘Hey, you’re Chapo, there’s these stories,” Abel remembers. “There’s no parole in Arizona, there’s an article about it.’”
He was caught off guard and immediately called his brother, who read the series and then sent it to Abel.
“I got it and read it, and I was just in shock. I couldn’t believe it,” he said.
“Hey, we’re all going to die here,” he told his friends who had the same sentence.
And when he asked the Corrections Department about what should have been his imminent parole hearing, he was formally notified that he could not be certified because the law didn’t allow it. There was no parole.
Abel borrowed phones from the drug dealers and started calling everyone he could think of: the parole board, the governor’s office.
He wrote letters and filed motions in court, basing his arguments on what he read in law books and by borrowing the court filings of other prisoners and mimicking the language.
He filed a petition for post-conviction relief — which is just what it sounds like — in Maricopa County Superior Court. The judge appointed him an attorney, who then set him up with the Arizona Justice Project, a non-profit law clinic, which was already addressing the parole question.
Abel still hadn’t served his 25 years, and so the case was ruled “untimely.” But the judge took interest and sent the case on through the system. It became “timely” in 2020, and still bounced around the courts. When the Arizona Supreme Court knocked it down, the attorneys took the case to federal court.
A federal judge asked how it made sense that defendants who had signed plea agreements with prosecutors stipulating to parole could get hearings when defendants sentenced by judges could not. The U.S. Constitution, after all, promised equal treatment under the law. The federal judge sent it back to the Arizona Supreme Court with an implied threat that he could investigate that constitutional question.
Back in front of the Arizona Supreme Court, attorneys for the state argued that the words “parole” and “release” were often used synonymously, and therefore defendants could not seek relief.
“They wanted to pretend nothing happened,” Abel said.
But the justices read the dictionary definitions to the state and told the attorneys that they couldn’t amend the imposed sentence after 25 years. Abel won his case.
On April 20, 2020, the Arizona Board of Executive Clemency, which converts into a parole board when it needs to, heard Abel’s case and granted him home arrest. He was released from prison on June 22, 2020. He was 45, and though he still had his family for support, he only had $150 in his pocket.
His girlfriend had married. His daughter grew up not knowing he existed, until she found letters in a closet that mentioned him. He’s trying to build a relationship with her now, “But she doesn’t know me,” he said.
And he was living with the pain of having killed someone.
“You just feel so ashamed,” he said. “You just feel lost.”
Abel was branded with the mark of Cain.
Nearly a year later, he asked the board to grant him full parole so that he could get his driver’s license back, which was granted and took effect May 18, 2021.
Abel now wants his parole terminated completely so that he can get a contractor’s license. And when he asks the parole board when that will happen, the answer that comes back, he says, is “Good question.”
He has filed yet another petition in court for post-conviction relief, perhaps his eighth, this time to prove that his attorney provided ineffective assistance of counsel, which, until recent court rulings was also deemed untimely, considering that the counsel took place 30 years ago. But if the court rules in his favor, he feels he can sue for malpractice.
A legacy of legal change
When I was first researching the 2017 series, I wrote letters to multiple prisoners with 25-to-life sentences. Every single one was shocked to learn that their parole was a mirage. Judges and attorneys said there was nothing to be done.
Abel’s case set precedent. After he got his parole hearing, the Arizona Department of Correction Rehabilitation & Reentry stopped telling prisoners that they were not entitled to parole. Instead, the department started going through its records and notifying prisoners and the Clemency Board as to who was eligible for hearings.
Several have been.
In 2017, there were as many 25-to-lifers who had been correctly sentenced to “release” as were offered parole, and that number has only grown. According to the Governor’s Office and sources close to the Arizona Board of Executive Clemency, some have been recommended to Hobbs for release or commutation, and she has signed off.
Every one of those prisoners killed people. But the fact that they received the lesser sentence of 25-to-life means that there were mitigating circumstances, like Abel’s, that stopped a prosecutor from seeking harsher punishment, and stopped a judge or jury from sentencing them to death or to natural life. There was an acknowledgment that they might some day come back to society. It was more than a promise. It was a deal, sometimes cut in exchange for a plea. And they served the time demanded of them.
“All these people that are in jail?’ Abel said. “I think the State Bar has an obligation to tell these lawyers, all these cases, that you guys screwed up. You should be man enough to stand up for all these guys you gave bad advice to.
“That’s all I want. At the very least acknowledge the scope of what happened.”
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This post was originally authored and published by Michael Kiefer from AZ Mirror via RSS Feed. Join today to get your news feed on Nationwide Report®.
