Cowan v. NJ State Parole Board

Amicus brief arguing that the Parole Board’s imposition of a 200-month future eligibility term was arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable.

On April 7, 2025, the ACLU of New Jersey submitted an amicus brief in Cowan v. NJ State Parole Board, an appeal from the Appellate Division’s affirmance of the State Parole Board’s decision, when denying an application for parole, to set a 200-month Future Eligibility Term (FET) before the person would be eligible to apply again. The length of the FET is almost 8 times the average FET of 27 months, and represents a troubling pattern of the Parole Board’s arbitrary denials of parole and increasingly larger FETs. These extreme terms of ineligibility inflate New Jersey’s prison population and undermine rehabilitation goals. The brief argues that the 200-month FET violated Mr. Cowan’s legal rights because it was arbitrary, not based on any factual underpinning, relied on a vague finding of “lack of insight” by Mr. Cowan (a factor that is not defined in the controlling standards), failed to use the required risk assessment tool, and failed to consider the evidence that older prisoners are less likely to be recidivists, if released on parole.