10 years after pleading guilty to murdering her mother, Jamie Silvonek seeks to have sentence commuted
Jamie Silvonek, who admitted helping her soldier boyfriend murder her mother when she was 14, is seeking to have her 35-years-to-life sentence changed to a term that would allow her to leave prison much sooner.
With every other appeal option exhausted, Silvonek, now 24, is seeking commutation, a process that could eventually end with the governor of Pennsylvania signing her release papers.
If she’s successful, she’ll be one of the rare “lifers” to be granted an extraordinary second chance. Since 1971, when Pennsylvania’s current commutation process was put in place, only 355 of the 1,455 prisoners who made it before the state Board of Pardons had their petitions granted by the governor. Of those, only 15 were women.
In a Your View column published Tuesday in The Morning Call, Silvonek, the youngest female ever charged as an adult with homicide in Lehigh County, said she’s not daunted by those statistics.
“I believe in commutation because I believe that every human being is more than the worst decisions they’ve ever made,” she wrote.
