Parole board reviews decisions in Liczbinski case
In prison, the three ex-cons accused in the Saturday killing of a Philadelphia police officer fomented unrest among some Muslim inmates and were repeatedly cited for misconduct, but state authorities did not deem them a threat to public safety, officials said.
In prison, the three ex-cons accused in the Saturday killing of a Philadelphia police officer fomented unrest among some Muslim inmates and were repeatedly cited for misconduct, but state authorities did not deem them a threat to public safety, officials said.
The nature and severity of the friction was not clear, but it prompted officials to separate the three from Muslim inmates, said Susan McNaughton, spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections. Such separations are ordered whenever an inmate is deemed a danger to another inmate or to prison staff.
The state Board of Probation and Parole is reviewing its decisions to grant parole to the two suspects no longer at large, board spokesman Leon Dunn said.
In paroling Howard Cain, who police said had fired the fatal shots at Sgt. Stephen Liczbinski, the board wrote on Aug. 28, 2006, that it had determined that "your best interests justify you being paroled/reparoled; and the interests of the commonwealth will not be injured."
Police killed Cain, 34, minutes after Liczbinski was shot.
That same boilerplate language was used in the Oct. 13, 2004, decision to parole Levon T. Warner, 39, who is held without bail on charges of murder and related offenses in the Port Richmond bank robbery that led to Liczbinski's death.
Cain and Warner were on supervised parole at the time of the robbery.
The third suspect, Eric DeShann Floyd - Philadelphia's most-wanted fugitive - is an escapee from a Reading halfway house. Floyd, 33, had been due for a parole hearing in March.
All three had been in and out of prison for robbery and other crimes, and for several years all were in the prison system at the same time. It was during those years that they apparently stirred trouble among Muslim inmates. For the bank robbery, police say, Cain and Floyd wore women's Muslim garb as disguises.
All three "had created friction in the Muslim communities at the prisons in which they were housed," McNaughton said.
When they were separated from Muslim inmates, Cain and Warner were at the state prison in Huntingdon and Floyd was at the prison in Mahanoy.
During their repeated incarcerations, the three also were cited for misconduct ranging from failing to obey an order to fighting.
Cain had 16 misconduct citations, Floyd 12, and Warner 7.
McNaughton said that separations were not taken into account during the parole process but that misconduct citations were.
In Cain's and Warner's cases, he said, the misconduct was either not recent enough or severe enough to weigh against a favorable parole recommendation.
Warner and Floyd had been denied parole during the 1990s, and Warner had been recommitted for parole violations.
Parole was much harder to get then, especially after Robert "Mudman" Simon, a Warlocks biker-gang member, was paroled in 1995 from Graterford Prison and less than three months later shot and killed a Gloucester County police officer.
That led to a major drop in parole granted in Pennsylvania and a big rise in the state prison population.
Since then, the parole trend has reversed. In recent years, parole agents have complained that Philadelphia is understaffed given the increased number of inmates being released.
View the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole's actions involving Eric Floyd, Levon T. Warner and Howard Cain at