Lee’s big talk on criminal justice reform belies inaction
By all accounts, Gov. Bill Lee was once genuinely committed to criminal justice reform.
As a candidate, he ran ads about it. In his early days as governor, he scheduled events devoted to it. Notably, when Lee was sworn in as Tennessee’s 50th governor, advocates across the political spectrum who yearned for a fresh approach to criminal justice reform also lauded his professed enthusiasm for it, believing that meaningful change would finally be forthcoming.
Regrettably, the early optimism about Governor Lee’s commitment to criminal justice reform made his later inaction feel less like a letdown than a betrayal. Although Lee has occasionally tinkered around the edges of reform in ways that matter, he has also acquiesced to legislative impulses that go in the opposite direction. Nowhere, however, is the gulf between Lee’s words and Lee’s actions more evident than clemency—a power that is his alone to exercise, and thus, represents a failure for which Lee alone bears responsibility.
Vested exclusively in the Office of the Governor, Tennessee’s clemency power allows Lee to grant pardons, commutations and exonerations to deserving applicants who have reformed, are serving unduly harsh sentences or did not commit the crimes for which they were convicted at all.
Significantly, Governor Lee’s predecessor, Bill Haslam – a man who scarcely exercised his clemency power and overlooked countless deserving applicants as a result – has openly shared his regret about failing to take a serious approach to clemency until his waning days in office, thereby leaving insufficient time for review. In retrospect, Haslam lamented, he would have “staggered clemency decisions throughout his eight years,” the Tennessean reported in 2019, and he expressly encouraged Lee to learn from his mistakes.
At least initially, Lee appeared to take Haslam’s advice to heart. In January 2019 – prior to being sworn in – Lee promised to consider clemency applications on a “case by case” basis throughout his time in office. In July 2019, Lee’s spokeswoman reiterated that Lee “believes granting clemency is a deeply thoughtful endeavor that requires devoting significant time to reviewing the facts and circumstances of each case,” affirming again that Lee planned to exercise his clemency power “throughout his time in office” as he had promised. Shortly after that, Lee even took affirmative steps to reform his clemency protocols to make obtaining clemency easier – at least in theory – generating public praise from many, including the author of this article, as a consequence.
When compared against Lee’s public statements about his commitment to granting clemency throughout his term, though, Lee’s actual approach to clemency has been indifferent at best – if not outright duplicitous. Even during a deadly pandemic that is ravaging Tennessee’s prisons – and even after the General Assembly itself reformed Tennessee’s most excessive mandatory minimum sentence, giving Lee all the cover he could ever need to begin granting commutations to the many deserving applicants who were convicted under the previous version of the law – to date, Lee has not commuted even a single person’s sentence, for any offense, for any reason. He has not issued a single pardon to anyone, either. Neither has he issued any exonerations – even to applicants who were exonerated by the judicial system and released several years ago.
While failing, month after month, to grant clemency to anybody, however, Lee’s office is still reliably recycling his professed public commitment to clemency, recently telling reporters again that Lee would “review sentences on a case-by-case basis” to determine whether clemency was warranted. In light of Lee’s consistent failure to grant a single commutation, pardon or exoneration to anyone for any reason, though, one is left to wonder how – over the course of nearly two years of supposedly “thoughtful” and rolling review of clemency applications – Lee has been unable to identify any case that is worthy.
Perhaps Lee lacks the courage to follow through. Perhaps he isn’t up to the task. Or perhaps Lee has just been lying, preferring to be viewed as a champion of criminal justice reform rather than actually being one.
Whatever the reason for his fecklessness, Governor Lee sadly cannot be trusted to keep his promises on criminal justice reform. Whether he has any intention of granting clemency at any point in the future remains uncertain. What is certain at this point, though, is that there is an enormous gulf between what Lee says about criminal justice reform and what Lee does about criminal justice reform. As the saying goes, actions speak louder than words, and at least where clemency is concerned, once the noise of his substantively vacuous public statements is removed, Governor’s Lee’s actions can’t be heard at all.