Louisiana's pardon board can't waive a procedural hurdle to weigh clemency requests from death row prisoners, Attorney General Jeff Landry wrote in an opinion released Wednesday as the board sifts through a historic batch of filings in capital cases.
The state's Board of Pardons and Committee on Parole asked Landry's office this week whether it can take up clemency requests filed more than a year after a judge has issued an appeal ruling in capital cases. The request to Landry's office came little more than a month after most prisoners on death row asked the board and Gov. John Bel Edwards to spare their lives.
All of those prisoners' requests were filed more than a year after appeal rulings were issued in their cases.
In a four-page opinion, Landry said that the board can't, in fact, ignore its existing policy, which would not allow it to consider requests made after the one-year mark. Exceptions are allowed under the policy in some extenuating circumstances, like when an execution date is near. But Louisiana's death penalty prisoners do not have execution dates scheduled, the opinion notes.
"The broad and ill-defined waiver in (the rules) ostensibly empowers the board to repeal portions of its own rules and enact new ones at will, on an ad-hoc basis, and without any notice to the public," Landry wrote. "Such a result is impermissible under Louisiana law."
Attorney General opinions, which can be requested by government offices, boards and law enforcement agencies across the state, are "advisory only" and do not carry the force of law. Still, the documents can be influential.
The swath of controversial clemency requests seek to have Edwards, a Democrat, commute the sentences of almost all of the prisoners on the state's death row to life in prison. Most of them — 51 — were filed en masse on June 13. Attorneys filed five more clemency applications in subsequent weeks, bringing the total to 56 of the 57 prisoners on Louisiana's death row.
The attorney general, a vocal death penalty supporter and a leading candidate for governor, previously said he plans to formally oppose the clemency pleas.
Landry's opinion is a "dishonest" attempt at halting legitimate clemency applications, said Cecelia Kappel, executive director of the Capital Appeals Project, which led a group of attorneys who represent death row prisoners in filing the batch of requests.
"Attorney General Landry’s opinion has no binding force," Kappel said. "It is a baseless attempt to prevent the board from considering the prisoners’ claims of innocence, intellectual disability, serious mental illness, racial bias, prosecutorial misconduct, and other problems exemplifying Louisiana’s broken death penalty system."
Over the years, the panel has ignored the one-year limit multiple times when death row prisoners sought clemency, Kappel argued in a letter to the pardons and parole board this week. It has "never rejected a capital applicant on timeliness grounds," wrote Kappel, who has defended Louisiana death row prisoners since 2009. She cited death row defendants Herbert Welcome, Christopher Sepulvado and Michael Lagrand as examples of cases where clemency requests were considered outside the one-year limit.
The pardons board has broad authority over how it drafts and adheres to policies for handling clemency requests. Bill Quigley, a professor emeritus at Loyola Law School, said Wednesday that Landry’s opinion has "no factual or legal basis" given the panel's autonomy over how it conducts its business.
"(The board) appears to be making every effort to conduct the required procedures as fairly and expeditiously as possible," Quigley said in an email. "I am disheartened to see the Attorney General, whose job is to do justice and not to ‘win,’ trying to prevent these prisoners from even having their clemency claims considered.”
Board of Pardons and Committee on Parole Director Francis Abbott said Wednesday that he could not immediately comment on Landry's opinion.
The opinion is the latest in an ongoing battle over the death penalty prisoners' clemency request — and the future of capital punishment in Louisiana, which has not executed anyone since 2010. Earlier this week, Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney Hillar Moore hit out at the process being used to review the death penalty requests, calling it “accelerated” and saying his office needs information and time to prepare opposition for any hearings.
His concerns were echoed Wednesday by Loren Lampert, executive director of the Louisiana District Attorneys Association.
"What is so troubling is we are trying to shoehorn in 56 of the most egregious cases in the history of Louisiana in a compressed time frame, when really we should be taking more time to analyze and investigate these claims," Lampert said in an interview. He praised the pardons board for requesting the opinion from Landry's office, saying it showed the panel was trying to follow proper procedure.
After years of silence, Edwards recently came out against executions. Appearing with talk show host Jim Engster Wednesday on “Ask the Governor,” Edwards did not tip his hand on whether he would commute any pardon recommendations that come to him.
“I don’t know if any will come to me,” the governor said. “I’ll review those files individually."
He reiterated his opposition to the death penalty, citing his "pro-life" beliefs, and noted that the death row inmates seeking clemency are requesting to have their sentences become life without parole.
_____________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________
FOLLOW US ON:
CONTACT: deathpenaltynews@gmail.com
"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde