Now Landry, the frontrunner to become governor on Jan. 8, has stymied a bid by Gov. John Bel Edwards to exercise that power on death row. Last week, Landry maneuvered to block Edwards’ request for the board to expedite a historic stack of clemency petitions from 55 of the state’s 56 condemned prisoners.
Advocates for those prisoners went back to court on Friday seeking a redo.
On Friday, Sister Helen Prejean, the famed Louisiana advocate against capital punishment, filed a petition to void a settlement that the Louisiana Board of Pardons reached with Landry and several district attorneys who challenged the rush of clemency bids from death-row prisoners.
Brett Malone, whose mother's killer is among those seeking a reprieve from Edwards, filed a similar petition last week.
In response to Edwards' request, the pardon board scheduled hearings over four fall dates for the first 20 death row applicants, to begin Oct. 13.
That plan changed with the settlement, which came about after Landry fired the board’s lawyers and replaced them with his own chosen counsel. The deal calls only for “administrative" hearings on those dates, to decide if those first 20 applicants will receive formal pardon hearings.
The actual hearings couldn’t take place for another 60 days under the deal, to give notice to victims and others. That means only five death row prisoners — those now scheduled for administrative hearings on Friday — could potentially receive mercy from Edwards before he leaves office.
Edwards’ first public statements this year against the death penalty helped spur the mass filing of applications to convert those sentences to life in prison. Two previous governors have granted clemency to death row inmates.
Landry’s gambit left Edwards on the sidelines as an East Baton Rouge Parish judge dismissed those legal challenges.
Prejean’s appeal says the five-member pardon board had no discretion to deny hearings for those death row inmates after Edwards’ Aug. 9 directive to “set these cases for hearing in a manner least disruptive to the non-capital cases currently pending before the Board.”
Prejean claims the board failed to follow open-meetings laws when it issued notice of a Sept. 29 meeting at which a majority of the board agreed to the settlement. The board didn’t disclose its terms and only allowed public comment after the deal was done, according to her challenge.
Prejean said in a statement that the best hopes of death-row prisoners still appear to sit with Edwards.
“We’re asking the court to enforce the law, but what we really need is for the Governor to step in and reiterate his directive that the Board hold hearings on these applications as scheduled beginning on October 13,” she said.
According to organizers of a prayer vigil scheduled for Tuesday outside of the governor’s mansion, Edwards has invited the group inside the gates and plans to attend.
Prejean and Bishop Michal Duca of the Diocese of Baton Rouge are expected to present a letter from “faith leaders” urging Edwards to force the board to hear those death-row applicants in time for his departure from office. Edwards’ office did not immediately confirm his plans for the vigil.
The June applications from 56 condemned inmates — one has since been removed from death row — drew a flurry of opposition from district attorneys.
East Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore and others soon joined Landry in fighting to prevent what they consider an arbitrary, rushed process to docket a flood of hearings in which victims would be forced to relive some of Louisiana’s most heinous violent crimes.
Francis Abbott, executive director of the Louisiana Pardon Board, pointed to a logistical logjam with the mass filing and Edwards’ request for the board to docket those cases. He said the board was forced to postpone 41 regular hearings as a result.
Buoyed by Edwards’ public statements, advocates saw a chance to make Louisiana the first in the South to clear its death row, where no one has been executed in more than a decade, and where state lawmakers have refused to touch the death penalty itself.
Support for Edwards pushing through those applications has come from as far as the Vatican, which recently urged on the governor in a letter from Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Life.
Paglia wrote that “the clearing of Louisiana’s death row would be a monumental step towards the abolition of the death penalty.”
A devout Catholic himself, Edwards broke his years-long silence on the issue of capital punishment this year by saying that the death penalty runs counter to his “pro-life” beliefs.
Cecelia Kappel, an attorney with the Capital Appeals Project who filed the clemency requests, said the governor’s Aug. 9 letter “was clear and sufficient to direct the board to hold hearings on the merits” of all of the petitions from death row.
“It’s apparent that the board needs more direction. And we call on the governor to make a clear statement once and for all that the board must docket the capital clemency applicants,” she said. “We thank the governor for showing such great leadership on an issue that we know has such great moral importance to him.”
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde