N.J. man granted clemency walks free with plan to fight for prison justice

By Dana Difilippo

BRIDGETON — For 17 years, LaShawn Fitch has fought for his freedom, saying he never participated in the 2008 murder in Eatontown that landed him behind bars on a 40-year prison term.

Thursday, he was released from South Woods State Prison to an impatient, joyful crowd of family and other supporters, after Gov. Phil Murphy commuted his sentence last month. He was one of 283 people to get clemency so far under a sweeping initiative Murphy began last year.

Although he walked out the prison doors two hours later than scheduled, he loitered in the cold sunshine across the street to hug loved ones, FaceTime friends, give a speech, change into an outfit his mom brought, make sure boxes of legal paperwork got into the right car, muse about his future, and do any other number of things besides leave.

“C’mon, you got to get off of these prison grounds,” supporter Derrick Hamilton told him after about 40 minutes. “You’ve been here long enough.”

So everyone hit the road home. But Fitch said he’s far from done with the prison system.

“I’m not going to stop until my name is exonerated,” he said. “I’ve been helping brothers with lawsuits. I still got three, four pending lawsuits against prisons right now … So just know this: This is just being written. We still going. We moving forward.”

    Barbara Robinson gazes at her son LaShawn Fitch after he was released from South Woods State Prison in Bridgeton on Dec. 4, 2025. (Photo by Dana DiFilippo/New Jersey Monitor)
  

Fitch’s fervor is unsurprising to anyone who knows him.

At New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, he became a paralegal and eventually director of the inmate legal association, a prisoner-run group in some prisons that helps incarcerated people with court filings. He has filed grievances, sued the state, and spoken out publicly over everything from better computer access for incarcerated people to solitary confinement to pandemic restrictions that lingered long after the crisis ended. 

He suspects he was transferred from Trenton, where he’d spent most of his time incarcerated, to South Woods, the state’s largest lockup, as retaliation for his prison activism, so he sued over that too.

Thursday, he took advantage of the moment to continue agitating for change. He thanked Murphy for his “courage and boldness” in granting more than twice as many clemencies as previous governors combined in the past 30 years — and then he called on Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill to carry on the work.

“There’s so many deserving brothers and sisters that need the opportunity that I get today,” he said.

He also blasted New Jersey’s worst-in-the-nation racial disparities in its prison population and urged lawmakers to act on Murphy’s stalled plan to stop sending technical parole violators back to prison. Those are people who break the conditions of their parole, rather than get charged with new crimes.

Two exonerees joined Fitch’s family outside the prison to cheer his release — Hamilton, who left prison 14 years ago after his wrongful conviction in a New York case, and Sean Washington, who was exonerated in 2020 in a Camden case and befriended Fitch when both were incarcerated in Trenton.

Both men beamed at Fitch as he flitted among his relatives for hugs and high-fives, remembering well the days they finally saw freedom.

“I like to say we left in the Flintstone era and came back in the Jetsons era. Everything is so fast, these phones, this technology, you know, everything’s changed over the years. It’s a rough transition,” Washington said.

    

Hamilton thinks Fitch will be just fine. Hamilton is now the deputy director of Cardozo School of Law’s Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice, and his center has been investigating Fitch’s case for two years with the goal of clearing his name.

“We going to do everything we can to find the evidence that we can to exonerate him,” Hamilton said. “We take our time. We want to make sure we get it right.”