« More notable Marshall Project coverage on the political perspectives of incarcerated persons | Main | LA District Attorney announces that he will seek resentencing for the Menendez brothers »
October 24, 2024
"Governor Kate Brown of Oregon's Historic Use of Clemency: Using Clemency Exactly as It Was Intended"
The title of this post is the title of this new article that I just saw in the latest issue of Lewis & Clark Law Review authored by Mark Cebert and Aliza Kaplan. Here is its abstract:
In Oregon, executive clemency is among the most expansive, yet historically underused, power a governor possesses. Yet, across her two terms as Oregon’s 38th governor, Governor Kate Brown exercised her power of executive clemency a record 61,777 times, dwarfing the clemency use of her predecessors and her contemporaries in other states. Governor Brown’s proactive approach to clemency presents a model for executive involvement in criminal justice reform and aligns with her beliefs of a redemptive and rehabilitative criminal legal system. In this Article, we examine Governor Brown’s use of clemency, analyzing what her stated and implied rationales reveal about her concerns for the nuanced impacts of criminal sanctions, as well as for the Oregonians most impacted by the criminal legal system. We contextualize Governor Brown’s use of clemency with her predecessors and compare the constitutional structure and use of clemency in Oregon with other states. We detail and examine Governor Brown’s grants of clemency by type: pardons, commutations, reprieves, and remissions. We discuss the media’s response to Governor Brown’s historic exercise of her clemency power, and finally, in Governor Brown’s own words, discuss the future of clemency in Oregon and beyond.
October 24, 2024 at 04:22 PM | Permalink
Comments
I write to explain how former Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin came to make so many hundred bad clemency decisions at the end of his term as governor, 2015 to December 2019. Two of those decisions were so bad that the U.S. Department of Justice took the unprecedented action of indicting those persons under Federal criminal law, using Dual Sovereignty (not a violation of Double Jeopardy). Those two defendants are now serving very long Federal prison sentences, which were affirmed on direct appeals. Initially, it is worth noting that Bevin is not an attorney but has a background in finance and pension fund management, so he knew little about his clemency powers as governor. Two members of Kentuckians for the Abolition of the Death Penalty approached Bevin thru his Chief of Staff (who was an attorney) about the possibility of the governor commuting the death sentences of all 28 inmates then on death row (there are now only 26 inmates on Kentucky's death row) to sentences of life without the possibility of parole. As part of their effort, those Members gave the Governor and his Chief of Staff copies of a Legal Memorandum they had written outlining the full extent of a Kentucky governor's clemency powers, with legal citations. Governor Bevin never commuted any death sentences, as the members had hoped he might. But it does appear that the Memorandum they provided made Gov. Bevin fully aware for the first time of the extent of his clemency powers, which he used in hundreds of cases at eh end of his term in office. The Members' Legal Memorandum not only failed to be used in the manner they had intended, but it was used in a contrary manner, to grant hundreds of poorly thought out clemency petitions. One of those members was my dear friend, attorney Donald Vish, who passed away in November 2023. Don Vish was a legal scholar, having graduated #1 in his law school class, winning the National Moot Court Competition during his third year of law school, writing the 5-volume treatise The American Law of Mining (Vish was not a law professor, but wrote his treatise at night and on weekends, while serving as General Counsel of a large coal mining company), and becoming a Life Member of the American law Institute at age 34.
Posted by: Jim Gormley | Oct 24, 2024 10:06:59 PM
