'Tough on crime' Kentucky GOP AG candidate has long history of not prosecuting career criminals

Republican Russell Coleman, who is running to be Kentucky's next attorney general, has campaigned as a tough lawman and defender of helpless victims. However, his record as a prosecutor shows a reticence to actually prosecute some of Kentucky's worst offenders.

A Monday report in The New Republic delved into Coleman's record as a US Attorney for the Western District of Kentucky, a position he held throughout Donald Trump's presidency after he was first appointed to the post in 2017.

In 2019, following former Kentucky Republican Governor Matt Bevin's unsuccessful bid for re-election, the outgoing governor issued a wave of pardons to more than 600 convicts during the lame duck period. Many of those pardoned committed serious violent and sexually predatory crimes, and several hundred were in Coleman's jurisdiction.

The New Republic found that of more than 100 offenders pardoned by Bevin — under Coleman's purview — only two were prosecuted, given plea deals and minimum sentences.

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One of the two clemency recipients Coleman prosecuted was Dayton Ross Jones, who was convicted of "violently" raping an unconscious 15-year-old boy with a foot-long instrument and broadcasting the act on Snapchat. Jones' brutal assault led to the boy suffering a perforated bowel, nearly killing him. Even though Jones was convicted in 2016 and sentenced to 15 years in prison, Bevin commuted his sentence to time served.

Coleman filed federal charges against Jones for the same crime in 2020, which would have carried a maximum sentence of 30 years if convicted. However, Coleman's office ultimately offered Jones a plea deal, in which the defendant would only serve eight years for one child pornography charge, while also agreeing to aid the Department of Justice in a drug trafficking investigation. No arrests were made from the information Jones volunteered.

The only other recipient of a Bevin commutation that Coleman prosecuted was Kenneth Embry, who was charged with a separate federal drug trafficking charge after he was freed in 2019. Had Embry been found guilty of the original charges of armed drug trafficking, he could have served the rest of his life behind bars. Instead, Coleman offered Embry a plea deal and recommended the minimum sentence of just 10 years in 2021. Aside from Jones and Embry, there were at least 114 Bevin clemency recipients who were in Coleman's jurisdiction.

In a statement to the New Republic, Coleman insisted that his office "aggressively prosecuted the cases where we had federal jurisdiction and the statute of limitations had not run. Full stop."

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"Any accusation otherwise is both misinformed and a totally false, 11th-hour liberal smear," he added.

Coleman faces off against Democratic candidate and retired Air Force Colonel Pamela Stevenson in a Tuesday, November 7 election.