The purpose of criminal pardons and commutations is to give political leaders a mechanism to remedy miscarriages of justice. But a commutation issued Friday by Missouri Gov. Mike Parson is itself a miscarriage of justice — not for the person whose prison sentence he commuted but for that person’s victim.
On Dec. 3, 2019, Cameron Lamb, 26, who was Black, was sitting in his car in his own driveway in Kansas City when he was fatally shot by Kansas City police detective Eric DeValkenaere, who is white. DeValkenaere was convicted in 2021 of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to six years in prison.
Parson’s commutation announcement on Friday afternoon offered no reasoning for it, but DeValkenaere’s case had become a cause among conservative politicians and activists. Like other pardons and commutations lately that appear tinged by politics, this one undermines the legitimacy of this important tool of official mercy.
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Lamb had been speeding in his neighborhood that day during an argument with his girlfriend. DeValkenaere and his partner, called to the scene, approached Lamb as he sat in his pickup truck in his driveway, making a call on his cellphone.
DeValkenaere’s trial would establish that he entered the property without a warrant and, just nine seconds later, fatally shot Lamb. Prosecutors would contend that the gun DeValkenaere claims Cameron pointed at his partner was in fact planted at the scene.
DeValkenaere’s conviction by a judge at his bench trial was upheld on appeal; the Missouri Supreme Court declined to review the case. Separately, a federal judge in a civil suit found DeValkenaere liable for violating Lamb’s constitutional rights.
Yet Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, tried to intervene in the criminal case on DeValkenaere’s behalf, in opposition to local prosecutors — a virtually unheard of position for the state’s top lawyer.
Gov.-elect Mike Kehoe, who will succeed fellow Republican Parson next month, had indicated in public statements he would free DeValkenaere if he was still imprisoned when Kehoe takes office. Appallingly, Kehoe explained that intention in part by referencing his pre-existing friendship with DeValkenaere and his wife.
Parson’s apparent reasoning for the commutation he granted Friday isn’t much better. Last year, Parson told a Kansas City radio station he was uneasy about DeValkenaere’s conviction because it occurred at “a time when there was a lot of civil unrest,” adding: “(Y)ou don’t ever want anyone convicted because of the political side of things.”
There’s no evidence that’s what happened in DeValkenaere’s case. But politics has certainly played key roles in some of Parson’s uses of pardons and commutations.
In 2021, Parson pardoned Mark and Patricia McCloskey of misdemeanor assault and harassment convictions for waving their guns at Black Lives Matter protesters who were marching peacefully past their St. Louis home. The couple’s dangerous stunt had made them national darlings of the MAGA movement.
In March, Parson, a fervent Kansas City Chiefs fan, commuted the three-year prison sentence of former Chiefs assistant coach Britt Reid, son of head coach Andy Reid, for a DUI crash that left a 5-year-old girl with a traumatic brain injury.
Conversely, Parson refused to grant clemency to Kevin Strickland or Lamar Johnson, two Black men who spent decades in prison for separate crimes they didn’t commit before the legal system finally exonerated and freed them. Parson also refused to commute the death sentence of Marcellus Williams, despite pleas from some prosecutors who harbored doubts about his guilt. Williams, who was Black, was executed on Sept. 24.
Even Missouri’s distressing inconsistency and abuse regarding executive mercy pales next to some of what has happened at the federal level lately.
President Joe Biden’s wide-ranging pardon of son Hunter was a brazen betrayal of his own word and a fundamental misuse of presidential power. President-elect Donald Trump was prodigious in his political and personal abuse of pardons in his first term, even granting one to his son-in-law’s father. If second-term Trump carries out his vow to pardon some or all of those who attacked the Capitol and wounded democracy itself on Jan. 6, 2021, it will stand as an unprecedented abomination.
Like those politically grubby federal pardons, the commutation of DeValkenaere’s sentence tarnishes the noble concept of executive mercy. No one should contemplate ending the option of pardons and commutations; they remain the last exit ramp when justice veers off course. But politicians (and parties) that abuse them should be punished at the polling place, not rewarded.
