Kentucky voters have shortened the time their governor has to spare the 23 people on the state’s death row. Amendment 1 passed on Nov. 3 with about 71% of the vote, and it means Gov. Andy Beshear can commute sentences only until early September 2027, not until his term ends in December.
The amendment bars a governor from issuing pardons or commutations from 60 days before a gubernatorial election through the fifth Tuesday after it. As Bolts reported Tuesday, Kentucky is now the only state with that kind of restriction. Lawmakers wrote it in response to the pardons that former Gov. Matt Bevin issued after he lost his 2019 re-election bid. Beshear opposed it. “The answer to this isn’t changing the pardon power of every other governor that hasn’t abused it this way,” he said, as Bolts quoted him.
Who sits on death row, and how they got there, is a Black question in Kentucky. A 2022 study by the University of North Carolina political scientist Frank Baumgartner, covering every death sentence since 1975, found what it called “extraordinary racial disparities.” Cases with white victims were five times as likely to end in a death sentence as cases with Black victims. When the victim was a white woman, the odds were 11 times higher than when the victim was a Black man. Where a Black defendant was accused of killing a white woman, the odds were more than 20 times greater.
The same study found a system that rarely finishes what it starts. Of 82 people sentenced to death since 1975, 41 had their sentences reversed on appeal, 3 were executed and 30 were still waiting at the time. About 71% of Kentucky counties have never imposed a death sentence. Only two, Jefferson and Fayette, home to Louisville and Lexington and two of the state’s largest Black populations, imposed ten or more death sentences.
A judge’s injunction over the state’s execution protocol has blocked executions since 2008, according to Bolts. Nothing in the amendment changes that. What it changes is the clock on mercy. Russell Allen, executive director of the Kentucky Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, told Bolts the group will launch a campaign called “Do the Right Thing Andy” in January, urging Beshear to commute every death sentence before the September cutoff.
Supporters of the amendment say no governor, of either party, should use clemency after voters can no longer respond. That is a fair principle. It was aimed at Bevin’s pardons, though, and it lands on a death row where the odds of being sentenced have tracked the race of the victim. A system with that record needs more ways to correct itself, not fewer. Beshear has about ten months to decide whether he will use the one he has left.
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