Like President Joe Biden, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards now says he is opposed to the death penalty and that he would like to see it abolished. While Biden equivocates, Gov. Edwards has an opportunity to turn his words into meaningful action. If he does so, the Democratic governor of a deep red state may offer an example for the president to follow.
Edwards has been afforded this opportunity by 51 of Louisiana’s 57 death row inmates who, last week, filed requests for clemency with the Board of Pardons and Committee on Paroles. This unusual coordinated action is the first step in a process that affords Edwards the chance to take a large bite out of the state’s death row.
The Louisiana Constitution says that the governor can commute a death sentence upon the favorable recommendation of the Board of Pardons. The governor, who appoints all of the members of the Board of Pardons, also has the power to direct it to hold hearings on applications for clemency.
The clemency process in Louisiana normally moves slowly. According to a spokesman for the Parole Board, “The process from application to hearing can take up to a year.” By that time, Edwards, who is term limited, will be long gone from the governor’s office.
That is why Gov. Edwards should announce now that he intends to commute the sentences of all of those who have submitted clemency petitions and why he should urge the Board of Pardons to act quickly and favorably on those requests.
The Pardon Board process usually takes place in two stages. In the first, the board undertakes a preliminary review to “determine if the application has merit.” If it does, the person seeking clemency has to post an advertisement notifying the public that the board will hold a hearing and of the date of that hearing.
They must also pay a $150 fee to cover the cost of an investigation to be carried out by the Division of Probation and Parole. Only when that investigation is completed will the Board schedule a hearing on the clemency petition. The person seeking clemency must appear at the hearing, “via video conferencing.”
Louisiana law states that prior to the hearing “victims and/or victim’s representatives, the judicial representative from the court of conviction, a representative from the arresting law enforcement agency and/or the District Attorney will be asked to comment on the offender’s application” and will be afforded an opportunity to testify at the hearing.
Not surprisingly, grants of clemency in capital cases have been quite rare in this deep Southern state. In fact, over the last half century, Louisiana governors have commuted only 2 death sentences.
In 1989 Gov. Buddy Roemer commuted the sentence of Ronald Monroe who had been convicted of murdering a neighbor, Lenora Collins, in 1977 as her children looked on. Roemer did so after a determined effort by Monroe’s defense lawyers to show that Collins was murdered by her estranged husband not by Collins.
The New York Times reported that at the time he announced that he would grant clemency to Monroe, Roemer said he was “convinced that Mr. Monroe was guilty, but that enough doubts had been raised that he was not prepared to go forward with the execution.” Roemer ‘explained that: “In an execution in this country, the test ought not to be reasonable doubt. The test ought to be is there any doubt. And I came to the very difficult conclusion that the Pardon Board did, that while he met the test for guilt, the test for execution was not met.’”
14 years after Roemer commuted Monroe’s sentence, Gov. Mike Foster accepted the Pardon Board’s recommendation and commuted the death sentence of Herbert Welcome.
Welcome, who suffered from a profound intellectual disability, was convicted of murder in the shooting deaths of Dorothy Guillory and Wallace Maturin in 1981. He sought clemency more than once.
He succeeded in getting his sentence commuted only after the Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that it was unconstitutional to execute people with intellectual disabilities.
Bel Edwards now has a historic opportunity for action far more sweeping than from past Louisiana governors. There’s plenty of reason for him to take that action.
Doubts about whether people who have received death sentences in Louisiana were actually guilty were raised in many of the clemency petitions filed this week. This is not surprising given the long history of legal error that has plagued the handling of capital cases in that state.
In fact, more than 80 percent of the death sentences imposed in Louisiana since 1976 have been reversed on appeal. And eleven people have been exonerated following wrongful capital convictions and death sentences, making the state 4th in the U.S. for number of death-row exonerations.
The kind of intellectual disability that had surfaced in the Welcome case 2 decades ago is very much present among people on Louisiana’s death row today. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, “There are at least 23 people serving death sentences in Louisiana—fully 40 [percent] of the state’s death row population—who have documented intellectual disability.”
The coordinated filing of clemency petitions by the 51 death row inmates also highlights racial disparity that permeates Louisiana’s death penalty system. 74 % of those awaiting execution in Louisiana are people of color, and 67 % are Black.
In addition, many of the petitions allege some kind of prosecutorial misconduct including instances where prosecutors withheld favorable evidence, presented false testimony, or used flawed forensic evidence.
Cecelia Kappel, executive director of the Capital Appeals Project in Louisiana, argues that the pattern of facts discussed in the clemency petitions filed this week “makes it clear that the system is fundamentally broken.”
Governor Edwards’ previous statements suggest he agrees.
When he announced his opposition to capital punishment in April, Edwards explained that capital punishment is “very final, not because it’s perfect, but because it ends in someone’s death, and we know that there are far more exonerations off of our death row over the last 20 years, than actual executions.”
He further called attention to the fact that the cost of executing someone far exceeds the cost of keeping them in prison for life.
While it is very significant that political leaders in Southern states are willing to speak out against the death penalty, more is needed than words to rid those states of capital punishment.
Gov. Edwards should seize the moment and follow is the footsteps of governors in other states who have used their clemency power to take decisive action to stop the death penalty. He should take counsel from, and follow the example of, former Illinois Gov. George Ryan, who in 2003 granted clemency to everyone on his state’s death row.
What Ryan said then is applicable in Louisiana and also in Washington, D.C. “The people of our state,” Ryan noted, “have vested in me to act in the interest of justice. Even if the exercise of my power becomes my burden I will bear it. Our constitution compels it. I sought this office, and…I cannot shrink from the obligations to justice and fairness that it demands.
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