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Among the approximately 45,000 pardons Gov. Kate Brown has issued in the past month, one is of particular significance to WW readers.
Brown has pardoned Larry Muzzy, the subject of a WW profile two years ago (“Larry Muzzy’s History,” Nov. 11, 2020). Muzzy, now 42 and living in Charleston, S.C., was one of the first teenagers in Oregon incarcerated under Measure 11 when he was convicted of first-degree robbery in 1997 at age 17.
Brown spokeswoman Liz Merah says the governor based Muzzy’s pardon on the fact that he has been a contributing member of society, led a crime-free life, and volunteered his time since leaving prison. Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt and the crime’s victim both supported the pardon.
“As exemplified in Mr. Muzzy’s case,” Merah says, “the governor’s constitutional clemency powers not only provide an important safety valve in our criminal justice system, but also allow for acts of mercy and redemption.”
After reading WW’s story, Aliza Kaplan, director of the Criminal Justice Reform Clinic at Lewis & Clark Law School, offered to help Muzzy submit a clemency application. Kaplan and her team submitted the WW piece to the governor, along with letters of recommendation from Muzzy’s family and community, in June 2021.
And then, he waited.
Muzzy, a bartender and real estate wholesaler, was starting to lose hope that his application would make it across Gov. Brown’s desk before she left office in January.
“I was trying to come to terms with the fact that it wasn’t going to happen for me,” he says. “It was starting to weigh on me.”
But on Nov. 14, Muzzy and his partner had just put their two young sons to bed when he heard from his attorney. Gov. Brown had granted him a full pardon.
He cried. He popped a bottle of Champagne.
“I woke up the next day feeling like a completely different man,” he says. “There is nothing holding me back from everything that I want to do.”
As the WW story explained, my father, Douglas Beckman, was the Multnomah County Circuit Court judge who found Muzzy guilty of first-degree robbery for participating in a stickup at a MAX station. Because of Measure 11—Oregon’s contribution to the “tough on crime” era of the 1990s—Beckman had little choice but to sentence Muzzy to the mandatory minimum: 90 months in prison with no possibility of parole.
The prison sentence was just the beginning. Muzzy, who is interracial, has navigated the world with a felony conviction on his record for his entire adult life. It has been on every job and apartment application. In 2020, he could not coach his son’s Little League team.
“When I got off the phone, this whole weight had been lifted off my shoulders,” he says. “It feels so much better than I ever thought it could.”
The person on the other end of the call was also ebullient. Natalie O. Hollabaugh Johnstone started working on Muzzy’s clemency application when she was still a student at Lewis & Clark Law. He is her first client ever to get a full pardon.
Now graduated and working full time at CJRC, Johnstone works mostly with youth convicted in adult court. “There are still people deeply impacted by Measure 11 every day,” Johnstone says, “and we need to look at how it changes the trajectory of people’s entire lives.”
She used to get an ice cream cone every time a client got clemency (usually by getting a sentence commuted or shortened), but she’s had to curtail that tradition in the past few months because Gov. Brown has been granting clemency so frequently (see chart left). “It’s been a fantastic year,” she says.
The governor can grant two kinds of clemency: pardons and commutations. A pardon wipes a convicted person’s slate clean. A commutation reduces their sentence, such as with early release.
On Dec. 13, Brown commuted the sentences of the 17 people on Oregon’s death row, giving them life imprisonment without possibility of parole. Three weeks earlier, she pardoned about 45,000 Oregonians convicted of possession of marijuana and forgave more than $14 million in associated fees and fines.
“For the last few decades, the ‘tough on crime’ policies and our heated desire to punish everybody made the idea of using clemency power seem so ‘out there,’” Kaplan says. “But really, this is what clemency is for and how it is supposed to be used.”
Clemency in Oregon
Gov. John Kitzhaber, 1995-2003, 2011-2015: 8 commutations and 2 pardons
Gov. Ted Kulongoski, 2003-2011: 53 commutations and 20 pardons
Gov. Kate Brown, 2015-present: Approximately 46,200 commutations and pardons combined
Source: State of Oregon