Man Wrongfully Imprisoned for Murder of Wallingford Woman Appointed to State Parole Board

Kenneth Ireland, an innocent man who spent 21 years in prison for the murder of a Wallingford woman, was appointed to the state parole board by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy.

Ireland was appointed, along with four others, to paid positions on the Board of Pardons and Paroles on Wednesday, according to the New Haven Register.

Ireland was sent to prison when he was 18 years old for the 1986 rape and murder of Wallingford’s Barbara Pelkey, a 30-year-old mother of four.

In July, he recounted those 21 years behind bars to Claims Commissioner J. Paul Vance Jr. during a compensation hearing, he is seeking up to $8 million under Connecticut’s wrongful incarceration law, and said he always believed he would die in prison before ever being exonerated.

“I was resigned I was going to die in prison, either of old age or more likely, in a violent altercation,” Ireland said, according to CTNewsJunkie.com.

Ireland was in fact eventually exonerated after lawyers with the Connecticut Innocence Project pushed for DNA tests and he was freed in 2009 after the tests proved he wasn’t guilty and Kevin Benefield was identified as the real killer.

Malloy told the Connecticut Mirror that Ireland is “intimately familiar with the criminal justice system and knows better than most that there are individuals who deserve to be in prison, and there are individuals whom society should give another chance.”

Read the full story here.

(Image via shutterstock)

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