With three robbery convictions on his record, Derek Giddins could have spent the rest of his life behind bars.
Instead, the 46-year-old ex-con went free this year. Just before midnight on July 23, Giddins and another man allegedly barged through the front door of Nilufar Yasmin’s Queens home with a gun in his hand and a black ski mask over his face.
They stole jewelry, attacked Yasmin’s father, and held a gun to her head, according eyewitness and police accounts.
Giddins, a career thief who had spent much of his adult life in state prison, was among 161 New York City murderers, robbers and other violent felons freed during the first six months of Gov. Spitzer‘s administration.
The high number was found by a Post review of thousands of prison inmate release records.
Those city residents paroled included 60 convicted killers and 92 facing the prospect of life in prison, such as Giddins, who had been denied parole six times before, The Post found.
Parole Board releases have suddenly risen after years of steady decline. Some 35 percent of eligible inmates have won parole this year, up from an all-time low of 28 percent during Gov. George Pataki’s last year in Albany, The Post found.
The increase has been sharpest among murderers and other top-level offenders, who have prevailed in 14 percent of their parole hearings, up from less than 8 percent in 2006.
The Post investigation also found that of the 161 hardened criminals let back on city streets by the Parole Board, at least five, including Giddins, were arrested for new crimes shortly after getting out.
* James Tapp, 43, was freed two years early from his 21-year robbery rap in February, despite a record of prison misbehavior. Four months later, he was arrested again for robbery, after flashing a knife at a Bronx store clerk who questioned the clothes he had stuffed in a bag, police say.
* Thomas Sanchez, 21, was let out in January, 10 months before his 2004 robbery sentence was to expire. In June, prosecutors say, Sanchez was among three men who surrounded a couple on a street corner near the Brooklyn Navy Yard and stole cash, a pocketbook and a cellphone. He was charged with robbery.
* Career criminal Gregory Gauger, 37, was charged with trespassing after he was caught sneaking into an East Harlem apartment building on Sept. 14, cops said. He had been paroled in February, after serving 10 years of a six-years-to-life sentence for attempted burglary, his fourth stint in state prison.
* Four-time loser Peter Berry, 42, was arrested in October for allegedly selling heroin to a woman on Davidson Avenue in The Bronx. He had been released in June after serving 11 years of an eight-years-to-life sentence for attempted robbery.
The statistics suggest Spitzer has loosened the iron grip Pataki held over the Parole Board during his 12-year tenure. Observers say the new governor’s policy is a reaction to a federal class-action lawsuit filed by a group of inmates denied parole.
Spitzer, who has pledged to fight the lawsuit, denies he has relaxed parole standards. Administration officials say his appointee, new Parole Board Chairman George Alexander, has ordered Parole Board members only to “follow the letter of the law.”
“That doesn’t mean that somebody will be more likely or less likely to get out,” Parole Division spokesman Mark Johnson said. “It’s just that we are following the law. This is in response to complaints about the board’s performance in the past.”
Republican lawmakers have slammed Spitzer for the surging parole rates – especially since the board cleared for release Shuaib Raheem, who in 1973 took part in a two-day hostage siege in Williamsburg that left a city police officer dead.
The governor is “returning to the failed policies of years ago,” said state Sen. Martin Golden (R-Brooklyn), a former city cop. “We put them away because we knew they were going to hurt and kill and pillage. He goes and he releases these people back into our communities.”
On average, about 2 percent of violent offenders return to prison within a year on new felony charges. But if the recidivism patterns uncovered by The Post in the first six months of 2007 continue, New York City would see 6 percent of freed violent felons returning to prison.
Giddins, meanwhile, is back behind bars, awaiting trial on new robbery charges that could earn him 25 more years in prison.
“I don’t understand it,” said Yasmin, the victim who lives in Woodhaven. “If he had robbed so many times, I don’t understand why they let him out.”
Additional reporting by Melissa Klein and Bruce Golding