Last October, Kate Brown, the governor of Oregon, signed an executive order granting clemency to 73 people who had committed crimes as juveniles, clearing a path for them to apply for parole, reported The Guardian.
The move marked the high point in a remarkable arc:
as Brown approaches the end of her second term in January, she has granted
commutations or pardons to 1,147 people – more than all of Oregon’s governors
from the last 50 years combined.
The story of clemency in Oregon is one of major
societal developments colliding: the pressure the Covid-19 pandemic put on the
prison system and growing momentum for criminal justice reform.
It’s also a story of a governor’s personal
convictions and how she came to embrace clemency as a tool for criminal justice
reform and as an act of grace, exercising the belief that compassionate mercy
and ensuring public safety are not mutually exclusive.
“If you are confident that you can keep people safe,
you’ve given victims the opportunity to have their voices heard and made sure
their concerns are addressed, and individuals have gone through an extensive
amount of rehabilitation and shown accountability, what is the point of
continuing to incarcerate someone, other than retribution?” Brown said in a
June interview.
When Brown, a Democrat, became governor in Oregon in
2015, she received the power of executive clemency – an umbrella term
referring to the ability of American governors and the president to grant mercy
to criminal defendants. Clemency includes pardons, which fully forgive someone
who has committed a crime; commutations, which change prison sentences, often
resulting in early release; reprieves, which pause punishment; and eliminating
court-related fines and fees.
During the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic,
Brown was one of 18
governors across the US who used clemency to quickly reduce prison
populations in the hopes of curbing virus transmission.
She approved the early release of 963 people who had
committed nonviolent crimes and met six
additional criteria – not enough, according to estimates by the
state’s department of corrections, to enable
physical distancing, and far less than California, which released about
5,300 people, and New Jersey, which released 40% of its prison population.
But Brown’s clemency acts stand out in other ways. Brown removed one year from the sentences of 41 prisoners who worked as firefighters during the 2020 wildfire season, the most destructive in Oregon history.
She has pardoned 63 people. Most notably, she has
commuted the sentences of 144 people convicted of crimes as serious as murder,
yet have demonstrated “extraordinary evidence of rehabilitation”.
Democratic and Republican governors in North
Carolina, Louisiana, Missouri, Kansas and Ohio have
granted clemency for similar reasons. Yet Brown’s numbers are among the highest
in the US, and the impact of her decisions are profound: Oregon’s prison
population declined for the first time since the passage of the state’s Measure
11 mandatory minimum sentencing law in 1994.
Measure 11 codified mandatory sentences for 16
violent crimes, required juveniles over the age of 15 charged with those crimes
to be tried as adults, and ended earned time. Since its passage, Oregon’s
prison population tripled to nearly 15,000 people and three new prisons were
built.
Brown also stands out for who she grants clemency
to. Forty per cent of Brown’s commutations are Black, in response to Black
Oregonians being incarcerated at a rate five times higher than their share of
the state’s population. Nearly two dozen other clemency recipients were
convicted as juveniles. Many were sentenced to life without parole and other
lengthy sentences.
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