By the time she left office in January 2023, Governor Kate Brown of Oregon, over two terms, exercised her power of executive clemency a record 61,777 times, dwarfing the clemency use of her predecessors and her contemporaries in other states, according to an article by Mark Cebert and Aliza Kaplan in the latest issue of Lewis & Clark Law Review. (Doug Berman of the Sentencing Law and Policy also recently cited the article, which is entitled, "Governor Kate Brown of Oregon's Historic Use of Clemency: Using Clemency Exactly as It Was Intended.) Brown had started slower, with less controversial applications, she said. “[Clemency] is incremental and teaches you how to flex this muscle.”
Her work was not without hiccups of criticism. A local CBS affiliate ran a story headlined “‘Cold-blooded’ killer released, Oregon family not told.” The article plumbs the history of clemency and lists some of her more prominent releases. Still, after looking at the unusually high rate of clemency, the authors conclude that Brown’s 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.” Brown’s final clemency totals included 104 application-based commutations, 963 COVID-19 commutations, 41 wildfire firefighter commutations, 73 juvenile parole hearing commutations, 17 death sentence commutations, 130 application-based pardons, 47,144 marijuana pardons, 4 application-based remissions of fines, 13,300 remissions of traffic fines and fees, and 1 application-based reprieve.
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