Oregon Governor Kate Brown (D) commuted the sentences of the state’s 17 death row inmates to life imprisonment without parole.
Oregon Governor Kate Brown (D) commuted the sentences of 17 people on death row to life imprisonment without parole on Tuesday, the latest step in a years-long effort to use her power of clemency to correct extreme sentencing practices and provide a second chance.
“I’ve long believed that justice doesn’t advance justice by taking a life, and that the state shouldn’t be in charge of executing people, even if a terrible crime put them in jail,” Brown said. in a press release.
“Unlike previous commutations I have granted to individuals who have demonstrated extraordinary growth and rehabilitation, this commutation is not based on any rehabilitation efforts on the part of death row inmates,” a- she continued.
“Instead, it reflects the recognition that the death penalty is immoral. It is an irreversible punishment that does not allow for correction; is a waste of taxpayers’ money; does not make communities safer; and cannot be and never has been administered fairly and equitably.
Prior to Brown’s announcement, Oregon had already moved away from using the death penalty. A moratorium on executions has existed since 2011, before Brown took office. In 2019, the state legislature passed a law that greatly limited the circumstances under which the death penalty can be imposed. The following year, the Oregon Department of Corrections announcement it would close the state’s physical death row and house death row inmates along with the rest of the prison population.
Brown’s decision does not eliminate the death penalty, but it does mean those who have been sentenced to death cannot be executed if a future governor decides to reinstate the sentence. Brown’s office said it believed she was the seventh US governor in the past 50 years to commute all death sentences in a state.
President Joe Biden campaigned on eliminating the federal death penalty, but has so far failed to commute the sentences of federal death row inmates.
Brown, who leaves office next month, has embraced clemency “as a tool of criminal justice reform and as an act of grace, exercising the belief that compassionate mercy and ensuring public safety are not mutually exclusive mutually”. the Guardian wrote in September.
She approved the early release of 963 people to help limit the spread of COVID-19 in prisons, removed a year from the sentences of 41 incarcerated firefighters, and created pathways to liberate for 73 people who committed crimes before the age of 18. She also forgave around 45,000 people with marijuana convictions.
Over the years, Brown has granted more commutations and pardons than all of Oregon’s governors in the past 50 years combined, but his efforts are not unprecedented. They are rather a return to historical use of leniency redress injusticesa practice that slowed with the rise of tough-on-crime policies in the 1980s and 1990s.
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