Between 2018 and 2020, after decades of campaigning and new legal challenges to Pennsylvania's parole practices, the surviving MOVE 9 members — Debbie, Mike, Janet, Janine, Eddie, Delbert, and Chuck Africa — were finally released, the last of them, Chuck, in February 2020 after more than 41 years. Two of the nine, Merle and Phil, had died inside; Delbert and Chuck both died within months of release, their supporters counting those deaths, too, against the sentence.
In 2021 the city's violence reached back into the news: the remains of children killed in the 1985 bombing had been kept for decades by the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton, used in an online forensic anthropology course without the family's knowledge, and the city health commissioner resigned after admitting other victims' remains had been cremated without notifying relatives. The scandal forced formal apologies and returned the bombing to national attention as an unhealed atrocity.