Micah Schoettle was sent to prison after a middle schooler testified that he had repeatedly sexually assaulted her, starting from the time she was 9.
Matt Bevin, Ousted in Kentucky, Sets Off Furor With 'Extreme Pardons'
Delmar Partin was convicted of strangling a woman and stuffing her body in a barrel.
Patrick Baker was found guilty of killing a man and impersonating a U.S. marshal during a robbery.
All three men walked out of prison this week after Kentucky’s outgoing governor, Matt Bevin, issued more than 400 pardons and commutations during the final days of his administration.
His actions set off a controversy that continued to ripple across the commonwealth Friday, days after Bevin, a Republican whose administration was fraught with conflict and who lost reelection in a red state by more than 5,000 votes, officially left office.
Lawmakers called for investigations, and prosecutors complained that neither they nor victims’ families had been consulted or notified. The Courier Journal, based in Louisville, ran a front-page article quoting a relative of a slain victim with the headline: “Matt Bevin can rot in hell.”
Among those seeking an investigation was a leader of Bevin’s own party, Robert Stivers, the Republican president of the state Senate. Late Friday, he asked the U.S. attorney’s office to look into the matter.
“From what we know of former Governor Bevin’s extreme pardons and commutations, the Senate Republican majority condemns his actions as a travesty and perversion of justice,” Stivers said in a statement. “Our citizens, and especially the crime victims and their families, deserve better.”
In a 20-part defense posted on Twitter late Friday, Bevin characterized his process as fair and thorough and argued that many of the offenders he had pardoned had, in fact, been out of prison for years.
“I personally spent hundreds of hours reading every application and file of those who received a pardon,” he said, adding that he “personally wrote every word of justification for each pardon granted and each sentence commuted.”
He added that “suggestions that financial or political considerations played a part in the decision making process are both highly offensive and entirely false.”
It’s not unusual for a chief executive to issue pardons on the way out the door, and most of the people freed by Bevin this week were serving low-level drug convictions. But the governor also released inmates who had been convicted of violent crimes, including one whose family had supported his campaign.
Drawing particular scrutiny was the pardon of Baker, who was convicted of shooting and killing a man during a home invasion in 2014; he was later sentenced to 19 years in prison. His family hosted a fundraiser for Bevin that raised $21,500 last year, The Courier Journal reported.
In an executive order pardoning Baker, the former governor wrote that “the evidence supporting his conviction is sketchy at best.” He said that Baker had “made a series of unwise decisions in his adult life” and that “his drug addiction resulted in his association with people that in turn led to his arrest, prosecution and conviction for murder.”
Two other men who participated in the home invasion did not receive pardons and remain in prison.
(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.)
In another case that drew scrutiny, Partin was convicted of murdering a woman he had been having an affair with; he served 25 years before being released. The governor’s executive order said he was letting Partin out because of a lack of DNA testing, although the prosecutor said such tests wouldn’t have been relevant.
Pardoning and commutation decisions by governors are generally final and cannot be undone, said Rachel E. Barkow, a law professor at New York University who focuses on criminal justice.
“It’s always rough when there are particular instances that people don’t like and it causes people to question the entire enterprise,” she said, but the governor’s power is meant to act as “a check on mistakes in the system and overzealous prosecutors.”
She added, “It’s really important that we have governors who actually take this power seriously.”
(END OPTIONAL TRIM.)
Not all of the orders issued this week were controversial. The Lexington Herald Leader reported that Bevin had commuted the sentence of a man who was halfway through a 20-year prison term for a drug crime he did not commit.
But in a handful of cases, prosecutors and families spoke out in particularly strong terms.
“I’m disgusted,” said Rob Sanders, a Republican commonwealth’s attorney in Kenton County, near Cincinnati, who had supported Bevin and donated to his campaign. His office had prosecuted the case against Schoettle, who was convicted by a jury of rape, sodomy and sexual abuse of a child. Schoettle had been at the start of a 23-year prison sentence when the outgoing governor deemed the investigation and prosecution into the case “sloppy at best.” He was released Wednesday.
(STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL MATERIAL FOLLOWS.)
The victim’s mother, who asked not to be identified in order to protect her daughter’s identity, said that she had been at home making dinner and a milkshake when she got a call from the commonwealth’s attorney’s office Wednesday night.
“I just picked the blender up and threw it against the wall,” she said in a phone interview. “I still have to scrub the ice cream off my walls.”
She said that her family had only begun to recover from the trial, which wrapped up last year.
“I still haven’t wrapped my mind around it, how is this even possible that he’s walking around scot-free now?” she said. “It scares me to think that he knows he got away with it.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times .
Eyewitness? Submit your stories now via social or:
Email: news@pulselive.co.ke