This board used to commute people. Tough guys like Charley Thone and Jim Exon would commute people. We commute none. Why do we even have a Pardons Board?“1
– Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning, the lone dissenting vote in the Board’s 2005 decision not to commute the sentence of Jeremy Herman.
The Pardons Board – made up of the Governor, Attorney General, and Secretary of State – is an institution provided for in the Nebraska Constitution (CIV-13). The Board is granted the power to commute life without parole sentences to indeterminate life sentences, allowing the grantee the possibility of parole after a specified number of years. A commutation does not mean immediate release.
Since 1990, the Board has broken with tradition and become extremely reluctant to exercise the power granted it. From the period of 1973 to 1990, 32 life sentences were commuted by the Board. In the 20 years since 1990, they have commuted only one.2
Many of those currently serving life without parole sentences for offenses committed in their youth were sentenced in the period before the Board took a hard-line stance on issuing commutations. As these youth began their sentences they were told by their lawyers that commutation and parole were likely in their cases. It was a reasonable assumption at the time, but times have changed.
Many people have attributed the precipitous drop in commutations to the increased politicization of the process and the need for politicians to appear tough on crime. After the Board voted to deny Jeremy Herman, a former youth serving a sentence of life without the possibility of parole, Board Member and Attorney General Jon Bruning asked “We say we need to be tough on crime – I’ve been so tough on crime, it makes me want to throw up sometimes. How tough on crime can we be?”3
According to the Omaha World-Herald, Secretary of State John Gale explained his vote not to commute Herman’s sentence by “[stating] in an interview that if there’s a problem with the system, it’s up to the legislature to re-examine sentencing laws.”4 (Herman was sentenced according to a law that requires a sentence of life without the possibility of parole for individuals convicted of kidnapping in cases where victim is not returned alive. This sentence is mandatory even if – as in Herman’s case – the individual convicted did not plan or participate in the victim’s death. It operates similarly to the felony murder rule.)
We urge the board to return to the pre-1990 practice of exercising the power granted them in the state constitution. We also recognize that, as Secretary Gale suggests, there are systemic issues at play here, and that those issues will require systemic reform. If Nebraska wants to follow through on the belief that youth are different, and that their neurological immaturity and capacity to change should be taken into account during sentencing, then we must act, through the legislature, to end the practice of sentencing youth to life without the possibility of parole in our state.
- Cordes, Henry J., Leslie Reed, “No Mercy for Lifers,” Omaha World-Herald, Oct. 9th, 2005.
- Hicks, Nancy, “Pardons Board Commutes Man’s Life Sentence,” Lincoln Journal-Star, Nov. 10th, 2009.
- Cordes, Henry J., Leslie Reed, “No Mercy for Lifers,” Omaha World-Herald, Oct. 9th, 2005.
- Ibid.