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Fetterman’s Push for Clemency Becomes an Attack Line for Oz [1]
['Trip Gabriel']
Date: 2022-09-27
While individual pardon cases are complex, requiring voters to absorb details and nuance, the G.O.P. attacks on Mr. Fetterman are meant to deliver the opposite: a blunt, visceral punch.
The Oz campaign created a website called Inmates for Fetterman, highlighting the crimes of convicted murderers whose release Mr. Fetterman sought, and asking for donations to Dr. Oz.
The Oz campaign has singled out the Horton brothers, whose release Mr. Fetterman calls one of the pinnacles of his career in public office. The brothers share a name but are not related to the most infamous released inmate in a political attack ad, Willie Horton, whose crime spree while on a furlough program hurt the presidential candidacy of Michael Dukakis in 1988.
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Invoking that episode explicitly, Mr. Fetterman said he had anticipated that opponents would “Horton us” over his championing the brothers’ release.
Like more than 1,100 lifers in Pennsylvania’s prisons, 70 percent of them Black, the Horton brothers were convicted of second-degree murder, a charge filed against suspects who participate in a felony — such as robbery, arson or rape — that leads to a death. It also includes accomplices not directly responsible for a fatality who drove a getaway car or acted as a lookout.
Pennsylvania is an outlier in mandating life without parole for second-degree murder, and reformers argue that it violates constitutional protections against unduly cruel punishments.
With no possibility of release through the normal parole process, these inmates have been encouraged by Mr. Fetterman to seek commutations before the pardons board. The board can recommend either pardons (for inmates already released) or commutations (for those still behind bars). The five-member board, which includes Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the Democrats’ nominee for governor, must unanimously approve commutations, and the governor must sign off. Mr. Fetterman said that in each commutation case he supported, he asked the prisoner’s warden if he would want that individual as a neighbor. “And they’re like, ‘Absolutely,’” he said.
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/27/us/politics/fetterman-oz-crime-justice.html
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