Melinda Mills is still furious at Matt Bevin.

Her brother Donald was murdered in 2014 when a group of men impersonating law enforcement broke into his house to rob him. One man fatally shot Mills while his wife and kids were held in another room.

Prosecutors identified the shooter as Patrick Baker, who a jury in 2017 found to be guilty of reckless homicide, robbery and other crimes, and sentenced to 19 years in prison.

That is, until Bevin, just before leaving the Kentucky governor’s mansion in December of 2019, granted Baker a full and unconditional pardon — one of the most controversial of his hundreds of clemency actions.

Bevin claimed — falsely in some cases — the evidence was “sketchy at best” against Baker, whose family had held a fundraiser for the governor’s campaign at their large estate the previous year. The day after Baker’s pardon was announced, Melinda Mills told a Courier Journal reporter that “Matt Bevin can rot in hell.”

“I still feel the same way about that guy, nothing has changed,” Mills told Kentucky Public Radio recently. “I hate that son of a bitch.”

Mills says she is hopeful that families will not have to suffer what she went through if Kentucky voters approve a new constitutional amendment in the Nov. 3 election, which would restrict a governor’s clemency powers in the 60 days leading up to an election and the 35 days from that election to the inauguration.

“I am for that 100% all the way,” Mills said.

After many years of trying, starting with the 2020 session in the wake of Bevin’s pardons, Republican state Sen. Chris McDaniel of Ryland Heights finally got his bill through the General Assembly this year, putting the proposed amendment on the ballot for voters to decide.

McDaniel says Bevin’s clemency actions — including others convicted of murder or sexually abusing children — were an abuse of power that should never be repeated.

“There were just so many tragic examples of how badly this power can be abused, and it needs to be reined in,” McDaniel said. “So, Amendment One is a simple, common sense measure to rein in the (pardon) power of a governor and return a check and balance to that last bit of power in the judicial system.”

Unlike extremely expensive Kentucky ballot amendment fights on abortion rights in 2022 and private education funding 2024 — in which PACs spent a combined $22 million on ads — no groups are spending any significant funds to sway voters on the pardon amendment. In fact, McDaniel is spending out of his own pocket, using gas money to travel across Kentucky and speak to groups and media.

Opposing McDaniel’s amendment is Damon Preston, who led the Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy for nearly a decade until his retirement earlier this year.

Preston’s main concern relates to capital punishment, though a Kentucky inmate has not been put to death in nearly 20 years due to an ongoing court order. He envisions a hypothetical situation where a death row inmate could waive all appeals near the end of a governor’s term, but still merit an intervention by a governor before the statutorily required execution in roughly five weeks.

Preston also argues that separating politics from pardons can be a good thing, as governors leaving office may be able to provide justice in cases where that decision is not popular among the public.

“I get the high level desire to say the public should have some say in this rapist being released,” Preston said. “But the traditional power of pardon goes much greater than one or two cases we disagree with, and I think there are less significant steps that could be taken than this.”

Pardons inside or outside of ‘politics’

McDaniel emphasizes that the governor’s power to issue pardons and commutations would still exist unchanged for three years and nine months of a governor’s term, only affecting the five-week “lame duck” period after a gubernatorial election and the 60 days preceding that election.

He says if governors truly believe that clemency is warranted, they should have to take that action in advance of an election and make their case to voters

”That 60 days before an election part is to let people know that if someone has issued a pardon, there's enough time for it to be out in the public sphere for people to be informed before they cast their ballot,” McDaniel said. “And, ideally, put a check on the governor's ability and willingness to issue some of these more controversial pardons.”

But Preston argues that there are downsides to taking away pardons during lame duck periods, as sometimes there are cases where clemency is unpopular, but still needed.

“Yes, he could do it in July when he's up for election in November, but then he or she is paying a political cost for doing the right thing,” Preston said. “So I think there is a benefit of saying some of this is outside of politics, and the only way to get it outside of politics is to allow these to occur after the election has occurred.”

Bevin and Trump complicate view of pardons

Preston says that for most of Kentucky history, clemency actions have not been controversial.

“This is really only a problem in the last 10 years,” Preston said. “We had Gov. Bevin… and I would say President Trump are the two executives who have had high profile abuses of the system, if that's what they're perceived to be.”

Some of Trump’s pardons have made the Baker family fundraiser for Bevin seem like child’s play.

Trump pardoned ChangPeng Zhao, the founder of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, who pleaded guilty to felony money laundering and ordered to pay $4 billion in penalties. The pardon came after Trump was lobbied in the Oval Office and Binance purchased $2 billion of stablecoin from World Liberty, the company founded and owned by Trump and his family.

Trump also pardoned other wealthy business executives convicted of theft, fraud and bribery after they gave millions of dollars to his super PAC, including Trevor Milton, Paul Walczak and Julio Herrera Velutini. Pardons have also become a lucrative business, as lobbyists with access to Trump now solicit million-dollar fees to push him for clemency.

Trump’s pardons also included hundreds who were charged or convicted of assaulting law enforcement during the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol Building, and former Honduras President Juan Orlando Hernandez, former president of Honduras, who was sentenced to 45 years for taking bribes and allowing traffickers to export more than 400 tons of cocaine into the United States.

McDaniel says his amendment should also be welcome at the federal level, as “unchecked power does not belong there eith...

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