Larry Hoover Pushes For Clemency From Illinois Gov. Pritzker

[ad_1] by Jeroslyn JoVonn October 23, 2025

Legal professionals for Hoover, 74, say his well being is deteriorating.

Legal professionals for Larry Hoover, founding father of the Gangster Disciples, are asking Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker to grant him state clemency following Donald Trump’s commutation of his federal life sentence earlier this yr.

In a petition filed on Oct. 22 with the jail board, attorneys for Hoover, 74, say his well being is deteriorating, noting he has suffered three coronary heart assaults whereas performing jail labor, the newest in September, and describe his remedy as “a gradual, state-sanctioned loss of life sentence,” ABC Information stories. They're urging Gov. Pritzker to acknowledge his transformation and permit Hoover to spend his remaining years in freedom after greater than 50 years behind bars since his 1973 state homicide conviction.

“To disclaim clemency now will not be a impartial act,” lawyer Justin Moore stated within the petition. “It's a willful choice to let a 74-year-old man with important well being challenges die in a cage.”

Regardless of receiving federal clemency from Trump in Might, Hoover nonetheless faces a state sentence for his 1973 homicide conviction. His attorneys say he stays in “excessive situations of confinement” on the Colorado State Penitentiary. Since his switch from the supermax, they allege, he has been subjected to “excruciatingly intense labor,” together with kitchen duties that require stacking trays by the handfuls beneath strict time stress.

“It’s very excruciating,” Moore stated. “He’s the oldest individual on the work line that he’s working by a niche of 10 to fifteen years. He’s been rushed to the hospital a minimum of as soon as, and there’s nice considerations that the situation that he’s in could lead on him to really die in jail as a result of labor situations. He’s successfully being labored to loss of life.”

Hoover, who based the Gangster Disciples on Chicago’s South Aspect within the late Sixties, was sentenced to 200 years beneath Illinois’ former indeterminate sentencing system after being convicted of ordering the 1973 homicide of 19-year-old drug seller William “Pooky” Younger, accused of stealing from the gang. Extra fees got here in 1997, following a 17-year federal investigation that discovered Hoover responsible of directing gang operations from jail. He was convicted on 40 counts, together with drug conspiracy and racketeering, sentences that Trump commuted earlier this yr.

Hoover’s 39-page clemency petition is now earlier than the Illinois Prisoner Evaluate Board and Gov. Pritzker, that includes two private letters the place he displays on his decades-long journey towards redemption and acknowledges the “disservice” he has finished himself by remaining silent about his public persona.

“Individuals, when writing about me within the papers, at all times use pictures of me depicting the best way I appeared 40 years in the past, as if I’m nonetheless a younger, sturdy and rebellious gang chief. That man not exists,” Hoover wrote in a typed letter to the yet-to-be-determined decide.

“I'm not the Larry Hoover individuals typically discuss, or he who's written about within the papers, or the crime determine described by the federal government. That man has over these a few years, reworked into the person I'm right now. It's true that some males by no means study, or that jail makes some into monsters; I’ve seen it, however for me, over time, jail — this jail particularly — turned a spot of reflection.”

In his letter, Hoover expressed “immense regret” for the injury attributable to his previous actions, admitting he squandered his abilities on selections that harmed Chicago, his neighborhood, and society at giant. He harassed that he has lengthy renounced all ties to the Gangster Disciples and any legal exercise, affirming that he desires nothing to do with that life “now and endlessly.”