*1 APPEAL by Tina Marie Stanford, as the Chairperson of the State Board of Parole, in a proceeding pursuant to CPLR article 78 to review a determination of the New York State Board of Parole dated July 30, 2014, which, after a parole release review and interview pursuant to Executive Law §259-i, denied the petitioner’s request to be released on parole, as limited by her brief, from so much of an order of the Supreme Court (Victor G. Grossman, J.) dated December 2, 2015, and entered in Putnam County, as granted the petitioner’s motion to hold her in civil contempt for failure to comply with a judgment of the same court dated May 14, 2015.*2
MARK DILLON, J.POPINION & ORDERThis is an appeal from an order holding the Chairperson of the New York State Board of Parole (hereinafter the Board) in civil contempt for the manner in which the Board proceeded after the Supreme Court remitted the matter for a “de novo hearing.” In determining this appeal, we are called upon to define and clarify the distinction in Executive Law §259-i between a parole “hearing” and a parole “interview.”I. FactsThe petitioner, Frank H. Banks, was convicted on February 26, 1987, in the Supreme Court, Kings County (Pincus, J.), of murder in the second degree, manslaughter in the first degree, attempted robbery in the first degree, and criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree. The convictions arose out of an incident which had occurred three years earlier, in which the petitioner and others committed an attempted armed robbery of a taxi dispatch garage. During the attempted robbery, the petitioner and his accomplices ordered the garage employees to lie on the floor, and several gunshots were fired. When a 60-year-old garage employee attempted to resist, the petitioner shot him in the stomach “at point blank range,” killing him. The petitioner and his accomplices fled the scene in a vehicle that almost ran down a sanitation worker when it mounted a sidewalk in an attempt to bypass a garbage truck. A license plate number was taken, which helped lead to the petitioner’s arrest.The petitioner committed the attempted robbery to support what he later described as a “gambling fetish.” He had previously been convicted of various crimes, including criminal possession of a weapon in the fourth degree in 1981, attempted grand larceny in the third degree in 1982, and criminal possession of a weapon in the third degree in 1983. As relevant here, the petitioner was sentenced by the Supreme Court to a term of imprisonment of 25 years to life for
