Clemency coalition seeks freedom for 14 Missouri women

ST. LOUIS -- A former governor and retired state appellate judge are part of a new coalition of Missouri lawyers and law professors asking Gov. Jay Nixon to commute the prison sentences of 14 women, most of whom the group says were victims of domestic abuse.

The Community Coalition for Clemency, which includes former governor Bob Holden and former Missouri Court of Appeals Judge James R. Dowd, made its public appeal Tuesday at a news conference at the Saint Louis University School of Law. The announcement coincides with Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

Group members said the women received sentences disproportionate to their crimes, and in some cases more severe than those received by men convicted of similar offenses. Four of the inmates are older than 65, four have been imprisoned at least 25 years and eight are serving life sentences.

"I would like to speak today for women who have never had a voice. Society turned its back on them years ago," said Anne Geraghty-Rathert, a Webster University professor who oversees a legal clinic that represents three of the 14 women, each "having suffered severe physical, sexual and mental violence throughout their lives."

"They slipped through every possible crack," she said. "No one stepped in to intervene on their behalf. No neighbor, no teacher, no friend, no relative, no one."

Nixon, who as attorney general spent 16 years as Missouri's top prosecutor, has granted just one clemency request since taking office in 2009. That's by far the fewest among Missouri's previous six governors, regardless of party affiliation.

Former Republican governors John Ashcroft and Matt Blunt commuted the prison sentences or pardoned 30 and 16 inmates while in office for eight and four years, respectively. Nixon's past three predecessors as Democratic chief executives -- Mel Carnahan, Roger Wilson and Holden -- approved early release for between 32 and 45 inmates each.

Holden did not attend Tuesday's news conference.

Coalition members repeatedly asked Nixon to "show mercy," though several later suggested that his possible interest in national office after he his second term as governor expires in two years could make such a gesture politically risky. A Nixon spokesman did not immediately respond to an Associated Press request for comment.

Dowd criticized the state's explosive growth in its prison population from an estimated 5,000 inmates when he joined the appellate court to more than 30,000 today.

"Every one of these women [is] serving excessive sentences under any evidence-based analysis," said Dowd, a St. Louis lawyer who spent 23 years on the appeals court before retiring from the bench in 2002. "That's why we ask the governor to employ this extraordinary constitutional authority .... to employ that level of mercy that we believe the people of Missouri would show to these women."

Many members of the new group led an earlier effort to change state law by making it easier for offenders who had killed their spouses gain parole if they had served at least 15 years in prison, had no prior felony convictions and had a history of significant physical abuse or sexual domestic violence not presented at trial. That led to the release of 11 women.