Alfred A. Brissette Jr., who spent some 13 years in prison out of what was a 35-year prison sentence for the 1999 murder of a Woonsocket woman, was released on parole Tuesday.
Brissette was sentenced to prison for conspiring with another man, Marc Girard, to kill and bury Jeannette Descoteaux in what one Rhode Island Supreme Court justice called a "brutal, barbaric and utterly senseless thrill kill."
The Parole Board voted unanimously in February to affirm its June 2012 decision to parole Brissette, a vote that drew criticism from the Rhode Island Brotherhood of Correctional Officers.
At the time, union president David Mellon called the board's decision "nonsensical" and suggested that releasing Brissette into the community would endanger Rhode Islanders.
Matthew Degnan, the state Parole Board administrator, said Tuesday that Brissette's release had waited on an appropriate release plan to be in place that "covers everything from where a person is going to live [to] what type of rehabilitative structure will be put in while he is out there to help him transition back into the community."
A state Department of Corrections spokeswoman said that Brissette was released Tuesday morning.
Superior Court Judge Judith C. Savage in 2004 sentenced Brissette to 60 years, with 35 of that to serve at the Adult Correctional Institutions in Cranston.
According to authorities, Girard and Brissette lured the 38-year-old Descoteaux into a wooded area of Burrillville by promising her cocaine and then beat her with various objects until she was dead. Brissette hit her in the head with a wrench several times.
Less than three years after his sentencing, Brissette was claiming that he had turned his life around through courses and workshops taken through the Community College of Rhode Island and Brown University and through his devotion to God.