A judge gave him a chance at freedom. The Alabama parole board shot it down.

Reginald Stovall spent the last 25 years thinking he would die in prison. But then a judge and prosecutor surprised him.

They took a look at his appeal over a grocery store stickup that landed him in prison for life without the chance of parole, and a judge decided to resentence Stovall to a shorter term behind bars and give him a shot at getting released on parole.

But when his turn finally came, the Alabama parole board denied him, as they do the vast majority of prisoners these days.

Parole hearings last just minutes and prisoners do not get to attend. And Stovall suspects that a misunderstanding over paperwork may have sunk his case.

“I just want the parole board to look at the man who now stands before them, not the man who committed that crime 25 years ago,” said Stovall in a statement he sent to the parole board and provided to AL.com.

Stovall, now 50, was sentenced in the summer of 1999 to life in prison without the possibility of parole for a Winn-Dixie robbery that left no one injured. He got the life sentence because of the state’s then-mandatory Habitual Felony Offender Act — he had five priors. Two were for breaking into a car, and two others were for theft. Another was for receiving stolen property.

Although none were violent or serious crimes, he was ordered to spend his life behind bars without a chance at parole.

“I’ve made some mistakes but please don’t let me have to pay for it the rest of my life,” Stovall wrote to a Pike County judge in 2008.

“I’m not asking for the court to cut me loose,” he wrote. “I just want one chance at life to be with my family and be the person they raised me to be…”

He asked for even a life sentence that would give him a shot at parole to “prove myself.”

That letter didn’t earn him a sentence reduction.

He sat in prison, taking classes and completing programs, earning his upholstery trade certificate. He got four disciplinary write-ups soon after arriving in prison, he said, but that’s it. He said his prison record has been clean for the past 24 years.

“I’m not going to come to prison and get filled up with all the negative stuff,” Stovall said from a prison phone. “I still kept my head down, took classes and got my education. I put myself in a better position, you know.”

Years went by. Finally, Stovall got a lawyer to file an appeal focusing on the facts of his case—and he won.

In 2021, Stovall’s lawyer said that a former witness in the case had come forward, recanting her statements from 1999. Prosecutors didn’t agree with the facts in that appeal, court records show, but agreed that Stovall should be resentenced to “a term of imprisonment that would comply with recent sentencing standards.”

In February 2022, a Pike County judge resentenced Stovall to 40 years in prison, with credit for all the time he’s already spent behind bars.

That sentence change left him eligible for parole, which he had a shot at in September 2022.

But the judge’s order, the DA’s agreement in the sentence reduction, and the clean record in prison didn’t matter.

At the parole board, a representative from the Alabama Attorney General’s Office spoke against his release. Stovall’s former lawyer, his father and his wife all asked for parole. But he was denied.

The waiting room at the Alabama Bureau of Pardons and Paroles in Montgomery, Alabama, January 9, 2024.  Tamika Moore | AL.com

The board members cited the severity of the grocery store robbery for his denial.

“Out of 25 years I can’t change the severity of the crime,” Stovall told AL.com.

But he thinks there may have been a misunderstanding, that the board didn’t look at the resentencing information which shortened his prison term and even gave him a shot at getting parole.

“I feel like they turned me down because they thought I just got to prison and had a fresh 40 years,” he said.

Records on the Alabama Department of Corrections’ public-facing website show Stovall’s 40-year sentence was handed down in 2022, but don’t reflect that the case was actually from the 1990s and not for a new crime.

Officials at the parole bureau said his file instead does reflect the time he has already served — over 8,000 days at the time he was denied parole — as jail credit. But the parole board does not comment on individual cases, so Stovall won’t ever know if his timesheet played a role in their decision.

He’s now set to come up again for parole in 2026. “It’s more about incarceration than rehabilitation,” Stovall said.

Stovall said he has hope that one day he’ll walk out of prison. He wants to go to college and open his own upholstery shop, and plans to live with his wife in Montgomery.

“They were misinformed and didn’t have all the info they needed,” Stovall said.

“And who’s going to believe an inmate?”

This project was completed with the support of a grant from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights in conjunction with Arnold Ventures.