MS- Lawmakers vow to take up pardon

4-12-2009 Mississippi:

Efforts by Coast lawmakers to require public hearings before the governor may pardon an incarcerated person have failed for this legislative session, but the legislators say they’ll bring it up again next year.

The measure was in response to the public outcry that arose in South Mississippi in 2008 after Gov. Haley Barbour freed Michael David Graham, a trusty in the governor’s mansion, who was convicted of shooting his wife, Adrienne Klasky, to death with a 12-gauge shotgun at a busy intersection in Pascagoula.

Locals were upset, partly because the pardon for the 1989 crime came with no notice to local law enforcement and little notice to those involved with the case.

Rep. Brandon Jones, D-Pascagoula, and Sen. David Baria, D-Bay St. Louis, both attorneys, had submitted similar bills that would have required the governor’s office to notify the district attorney’s office where the crime occurred when seeking a pardon.

Public hearings also would have to be held before a pardon could occur.

“I don’t think a single politician should be able to turn back the entire justice system with the stroke of a pen,” Jones said.

Baria said he was bothered that some members of the Legislature believed the measure would limit the governor’s ability to pardon.

“The governor can still do whatever he or she wants, but it allows folks to be heard on the issue,” Baria said.

(eAdvocate Post)

A bill Baria submitted, which mirrored one by Jones to get the public hearings, died in committee. But a similar amendment by Sens. Baria; Michael Watson, R-Pascagoula; and Billy Hudson, R-Purivs, was added to a House bill that dealt with the parole board.

It passed the Senate. But lawmakers wound up taking the whole bill to conference and the measure was removed there.

Efforts to recommit the bill so it could be put back in failed.

Barbour signed House Bill 2 without the provision this week.

The bill changes the requirements for parole for sex crimes and murders and now requires a 4-1 vote by the parole board. Some lawmakers were outraged by the case of Douglas Hodgkin, who was recently released after a 3-2 vote.

Hodgkin was convicted of murdering University of Mississippi graduate student Jean Elizabeth Gillies in 1987.

Jones had also submitted a bill that would eliminate the governor’s ability to give a pardon or any other reprieve for anyone who has been convicted of capital murder, but the bill failed.

Another bill would have prevented those convicted of certain crimes from being eligible to become a trusty. But that measure also failed.

Jones said the attention to the issue of early release may have helped some of his other measures succeed.

He said he was able to get a measure passed that takes a portion of bail bonds and sets it aside for victims of domestic violence.

The House also passed a measure that requires anyone convicted of a murder where a sexual crime is also involved to register as a sex offender.

Both Baria and Jones said the pardon measure’s failure rests with all members of the conference committee because they signed a conference report that didn’t include the measure.

Sens. Willie Simmons, D-Cleveland, Lydia Chassaniol, R-Winona, Alice Harden, D-Jackson and Reps. Bennett Malone, D-Carthage, Tracy Arinder, D-Morton and Sara R. Thomas, D-Indianola, were the conferees on the bill.

Chassaniol, a north Mississippi lawmaker, said she doesn’t support any changes to the way the governor handles pardons, as she believes it is his authority and not the Legislature’s. She said she was not familiar with the specifics of the Graham case, but she doesn’t think Coast people would have cared about pardons if the Graham case hadn’t happened here.

“I don’t have a problem with (the system) because the system has worked well for all these years,” she said.

She said she believes the measure was really more about politics.

“It is interesting what people start doing when they are looking ahead to the next election cycle,” she said. ..News Source.. by MICHAEL NEWSOM