Michelle and Robert Lind in family photos.
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Most mornings, Michelle Lind turns on the TV in her Kingston, New York, home to watch Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s pandemic briefing, hoping he will say something about granting clemency to incarcerated people who are elderly and at high risk for COVID-19.
The rest of the day, she hovers by the phone, anxiously waiting for a call from the Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, where her husband, Robert, 73, has been incarcerated for decades after a shootout with police in Washington Heights. Now he has contracted COVID-19 and pneumonia.
According to Release Aging People in Prison, a nonprofit clemency campaign, 78 percent of incarcerated people who died in New York since March 30 were aged 55 and up.