In her final hours on the job, Gov. Kate Brown released a list of the latest men and women to receive clemency on her watch, including 10 people who had been sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in prison.
Brown made clemency a centerpiece of her 8-year administration, speaking about it in near spiritual terms at a Princeton University talk she gave last month when she told the audience that showing mercy can “save the world.”
Brown became among the country’s most enthusiastic governors to exercise clemency authority, drawing cheers from those who want a system that prioritizes rehabilitation over punishment and sharp criticism from some crime victims who accused the governor of overlooking them and deepening their trauma.
By the time she left office Monday, Brown had made significant and lasting decisions using her broad clemency powers, including effectively ending the death penalty, pardoning nearly 50,000 people with convictions for possession of small amounts of marijuana and making an estimated 73 juvenile offenders who were convicted in the adult court system eligible to pursue parole once they’ve served 15 years.
There was more: She commuted the sentences of nearly 1,000 people in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and about three dozen more as a reward for their firefighting efforts in the historic 2020 wildfires.
Her staff also pored over hundreds of individual requests for clemency from people serving time in Oregon’s prisons, ultimately rejecting an estimated 1,400 applications in the past year alone, according to a letter Brown sent to the Legislature this week.
In all, she commuted 104 individual cases during her tenure and granted 130 pardons. Those include 35 commutations and 68 pardons in her final 10 months.
Clemency includes commutations and pardons. A commutation is a reduction in a person’s sentence. A pardon forgives a person for the crime they committed. A law passed in 2019 ensures that those who receive pardons have their convictions erased from the record.
About three-quarters of those who received commutations were men and nearly two-thirds were people of color, according to demographic data compiled by Aliza Kaplan, a Lewis & Clark Law School professor and an authority on clemency.
Brown far outpaced her predecessors: John Kitzhaber granted eight commutations and two pardons and Ted Kulongoski granted 53 commutations and 20 pardons, reserving his authority for what he described at the time as “the most extraordinary circumstances.”
Not everyone whose sentence Brown commuted will be automatically released; in some cases, they are now eligible to seek parole.
Nationally, Brown joined 10 or so other governors “who have used their clemency power exactly as it was intended, both for individual rehabilitation and mercy and as a tool to affect change and reform in the criminal legal system,” said Kaplan, whose law school clinic represented dozens of incarcerated people who sought clemency. Brown has cited Kaplan as influential in her thinking about clemency.
A spokesperson for Brown said the former governor was traveling this week and unavailable for comment.
Speaking at Princeton a few weeks ago, Brown called clemency an “incredibly useful tool to correct injustices.”
She talked about her fervent belief in second chances and her dismay over the rise in the prison population as a result of mandatory minimum sentencing laws. She nodded to the political blowback that tends to accompany clemency decisions, saying, “I have to put on my metal underpants on a regular basis.”
“It’s much easier to sow fear and anger than it is to build compassion and understanding and healing in our communities, to create a beloved community,” said Brown, a former family law attorney in Portland.
She highlighted the case of a woman who was convicted in 2003 of felony murder. The former governor told the audience that the woman did not pull the trigger in the case but accompanied the man who did.
Brown explained how the woman was transformed in prison and became worthy of redemption. She noted the woman is Black, gay and was convicted by an all white jury.
“These are the types of people that we are giving a second chance to,” Brown said. “It is an opportunity, I think, to save lives and eventually save the world and we all have to engage with every fiber of our being in this work.”
‘Governor of Inmates’
Last summer, after some crime victims lashed out at Brown for failing to consider their perspectives, she brought in a longtime chaplain at the Oregon State Penitentiary as a victim impact liaison. In her letter to the Legislature, Brown pointed to cases where Karuna Thompson kept victims apprised of the clemency review process.
The new position made little difference, said Rosemary Brewer, executive director of the Oregon Crime Victims Law Center.
Last month, for instance, victims received two hours of notice before Brown announced she would commute the sentences of those who had been sentenced to death, Brewer said. Brown converted those sentences to life without parole.
She said the governor’s record on clemency shows a failure to strike a balance between the rights of criminal defendants and those of crime victims.
“I don’t understand how you can’t have any awareness of what’s going on for these people, the amount of trauma they have suffered and not have empathy,” Brewer said. “It shows a real lack of understanding, a lack of wanting to understand what somebody is going through.”
“She’s not just governor of inmates,” Brewer said. “She represents all of us.”
The 2021 commutations of dozens of juvenile offenders ranked among Brown’s most controversial moves. The governor created parameters for some juvenile offenders accused of the most serious crimes to have a shot at parole.
Dylan Arthur, executive director of the Oregon Board of Parole and Post-Prison Supervision, said Thursday that a couple of juvenile defendants were released after their sentences were commuted and about 24 others were immediately eligible to seek parole. The rest, he said, may begin the process once they’ve served 15 years.
He said the board has held one hearing so far, deciding to grant parole to Timothy Espinosa, 41, who was convicted of two counts of aggravated murder for the 1998 killing of Fidencio Ceja, 17, and Juan Torres, 18, in Salem. Espinosa was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole after 25 years. Espinosa was 17 at the time of the crimes.
Of the 35 people whose sentences Brown commuted in the final 10 months of her administration, 30 involved defendants serving time for violent crime, including 16 who were convicted of killing someone. Ten of them received true life sentences.
Among those who received commutations: Hawkin Groenendaal, 36, who was convicted at 19 of killing his father William with ax handle in Deschutes County; Adam Thomas, 40, who was 18 in 2001 when he and four acquaintances killed his mother Barbara Thomas in Deschutes County; Toshio Takanobu, 38, an accomplice in the 2007 shooting of a Southeast Portland convenience store clerk, Chester Yeom, 41, who was paralyzed as a result and later died in an adult care facility; and Danielle Cox, 38, who was convicted of murder and assault for her part in the 2003 “street family” killing in Portland of Jessica K. Williams, 23.
Brown also commuted the sentences of Randall Clegg and Reschard Steward, who are both 48. The two were found guilty of aggravated murder and sentenced to life without parole for their roles in plotting and carrying out the killing of Christina “Tina” L. Clegg in July 1993.
Race, Age Factor In
Tina Clegg’s fatal shooting at the Albina Head Start, where she worked as a receptionist, rocked Portland at the time and dominated headlines.
The shooters also shot a woman who survived. She opposed clemency for all three men.
Tina Clegg’s husband, Grover Clegg, now 57, was convicted of aggravated murder for his role as the mastermind in his wife’s slaying. Brown rejected his bid for clemency. Randall Clegg is his brother.
All three men have long maintained their innocence.
Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt wrote to Brown that he remained “troubled” by the Cleggs’ lack of remorse for the murder and the pain it caused.
“I’m still concerned by the petition’s failure to recognize Tina Clegg: at most Grover’s wife and the mother of his children, at least an innocent person who lost her life through no fault of her own,” Schmidt wrote.
Yet Schmidt supported making the Cleggs and Steward eligible to seek parole after they have served at least 30 years, saying they no longer pose a public safety threat and that the sentence of life without parole should be reserved for “extraordinary cases.”
The sentence, Schmidt wrote, conveys to a defendant that they “are undeserving of any kind of mercy,” are “beyond redemption” and the community will not be safe unless they are “permanently removed from it.”
“For the Cleggs,” Schmidt wrote, “not one of these justifications are true any longer.”
Kendra Hughes, a witness to the shooting, said the governor’s victim liaison came to her home in November to discuss the clemency applications for Randall Clegg and Steward.
She said Thompson told her Brown’s considerations included the defendants’ ages at the time of the killing and the role race played in the case. The two lead detectives, prosecutors, judge and jury were white. The Cleggs and Steward are Black.
“I told her white guilt is showing up in all this leniency,” Hughes, who is Black, told The Oregonian/OregonLive in an interview Friday. “A Black man killed a Black woman in the Black community and was intentional about it and did it in her workplace, an upstanding organization in the Black community. I wasn’t buying it.”
Records show that two years earlier, Thompson herself had written the governor a letter supporting clemency for the Cleggs. Of Randall Clegg, Thomson wrote that he “demonstrated tremendous interest in self reflection.” Thompson returned to her chaplain position at the state penitentiary a week ago.
In explaining her decision, Brown wrote to the Legislature that Randall Clegg and Steward’s “continued incarceration does not serve the best interests of the State of Oregon.” Both men were released last month.
Brown provided the Legislature with a brief synopsis of the charges involving those whose sentences she commuted this year, noting 33 of the defendants had expressed “sincere remorse” for their actions.
That did not include Randall Clegg and Steward, though Brown noted the men had “sincere empathy for the crime” and showed “extraordinary evidence” of rehabilitation.
Billy J. Williams, who prosecuted the Cleggs and Steward in 1995 as a deputy Multnomah County district attorney and went on to serve as U.S. attorney for Oregon, said their petitions dwell heavily on claims of innocence, a version of events he described as “fiction.”
“I considered this one of the worst domestic violence cases in the history of Oregon because of how orchestrated it was by the husband and his brother,” Williams said. The woman who was wounded also is Black and she was shot, Williams said, to make the wife’s killing look like a random robbery.
“How does this demonstrate to domestic violence victims that the loss of their lives matters? You are talking about women of color, a woman of color being shot and killed at the request of her husband,” he said. “How does that make the lives of Black women matter?”
‘A True Fresh Start’
In addition to commutations, Brown pardoned and wiped clean the felony records of dozens of people in her final months, most of them men and more than half of them people of color.
Brandon Hoggans, 43, of Kent, Washington, was among those Brown pardoned.
Raised in Portland, he went to prison at 18 for multiple robbery convictions and emerged in 2012. He was qualified for work but the felony mark meant he faced barriers to landing a job. He also worried about getting stopped by police, who would run his record and see his past convictions.
“I imagine that puts them on alert and it makes me extremely nervous,” he said. “I don’t have to worry about that anymore. The psychological consequences of being a felon are relieved.”
Hoggans went on to obtain an undergraduate degree from Marylhurst University in psychology and a master’s degree in social work from the University of Washington. He works as a psychotherapist in the evenings and a behavior intervention specialist at a Washington elementary school during the day — work he described as “a dream job.”
On Dec. 21, he got a call from the Lewis & Clark clemency clinic with the news that Brown had pardoned him. The call, he said, left him speechless.
“For the first time in my life, I am an adult without a record,” he said.
“I am the example that life can come full circle,” he said. “You can get a true fresh start.”
