Finding bipartisan agreement on just about anything in this ideologically divided era is usually close to impossible. In that sense, Gov. Mike Parson has suddenly achieved something rare: Missouri voices from the left, right and center expressed uniform shock and outrage over the weekend at Parson’s surprise decision to commute the prison sentence of a well-known pro football coach whose drunken driving left a 5-year-old girl with permanent brain damage.
Their outrage is warranted. At a minimum, Parson owes Missourians an explanation as to why this mercy — which he’d previously denied in the cases of two men who’d spent decades in prison for murders they didn’t commit — was bestowed upon a quasi-celebrity serving an already-modest sentence for his devastating crime.
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If Parson, in his final year in office, wants to make lemonade out of this sour situation, here’s a suggestion: He should drop his opposition to reforming Missouri’s stingiest-in-the-nation system for , and instead lead the charge to pass it this year.
Parson’s office last week announced he had reduced the three-year prison sentence of former Kansas City Chiefs assistant coach Britt Reid in the 2021 crash, allowing him to serve under house arrest until the sentence ends in October 2025.
Reid, son of Chiefs coach Andy Reid, pleaded guilty in November 2022 to driving while intoxicated, causing the crash that left Ariel Young, 5, with a traumatic brain injury.
Parson, an enthusiastic Chiefs fan, didn’t consult with the girl’s family nor with the prosecutors in the case while making the decision. His office released it with little explanation among a list of other commutations and pardons announced late Friday afternoon — a time frame politicians traditionally use to drop news that they hope doesn’t get much attention.
If that was the strategy here, it failed. Reid’s commutation drew immediate and appropriate condemnation from across the state’s political landscape.
“[W]hile the Reid family obviously holds a special place in the hearts of Missourians and Kansas City Chiefs’ fans, that does not entitle them to special treatment,” Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, a fellow Republican who seeks to succeed Parson as governor, said in a statement.
Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker, a Democrat who prosecuted the case, noted in a statement that Reid was a repeat offender. “I had believed that the sentence was an example for others that even those with resources and privilege were not above the law,” she wrote. Parson, she added, “used his political power to free a man with status, privilege and connections.”
“This isn’t justice,” tweeted state Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman, R-Arnold, who is running for Congress.
In an interview with the , an attorney for the little girl’s family, Tom Porto, said the family is “horrified” and “disgusted” by the commutation. In a statement, the girl’s mother, Felicia Miller, asked, “How would the governor feel if this was his daughter?”
“It seems the laws don’t apply equally to the haves and have nots,” her statement added. “The haves get favors. The have nots serve their sentence.”
The losing end of that dynamic has included Kevin Strickland and Lamar Johnson. Both spent decades in prison on separate murder convictions before courts and prosecutors finally exonerated them in 2021 and 2023, respectively. In both cases, their freedom came later than it should have because Parson refused to intercede as evidence of their innocence was brought to light.
Parson, going into the final year of his term-limited tenure as governor, has an unusually high clemency rate among Missouri governors. But that legacy of mercy comes with a disturbing asterisk: A 2022 analysis of Parson’s pardons and commutations found that, in cases in which the race of the offender could be determined, almost 90% of the recipients of Parson’s clemency were white, from a prison system in which just 63% of all inmates are white.
Parson’s office at the time responded that the governor generally has no way of knowing the race of those applying for clemency — though that certainly wasn’t the situation in the well-publicized cases of Strickland and Johnson, who are Black, or of Reid, who is white.
Regardless of whether Reid’s race or sports celebrity had anything to do with Parson’s clemency, the commutation is, as Ashcroft put it, “not a good look.”
If legacy regarding this issue is on Parson’s mind, he has a Nixon-to-China opportunity right in front of him.
Missouri, alone among U.S. states, doesn’t allow wrongly convicted people to collect state compensation for their time in prison unless their exoneration came via DNA evidence, which is a small slice of all exonerations.
Parson last year vetoed a bill that would have changed that, making it possible for victims like Strickland and Johnson to win compensation for their lost years.
The idea still has bipartisan support in Jefferson City and could be revived if Parson were to publicly announce his support for it. It might just soften the ugly shadow of privileged injustice that the Reid commutation has cast upon Parson’s final stretch of public service. It also happens to be the right thing to do.
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