Republican governor thwarts his own pardon of indicted GOP ally

No sooner did news break last week that a New Orleans grand jury had indicted Attorney General Liz Murrill, Gov. Jeff Landry got on social media and promised to pardon her.

But now Baton Rouge, La. newspaper The Advocate says Landry may have loused up his own promise with his hard-on-crime anti-pardon policies.

“Pardoning Murrill — who faces eight counts of intimidation and eight more of malfeasance, but whose indictment has been stayed by the Louisiana Supreme Court — may not be as simple as it sounds,” wrote Advocate reporter Meghan Friedmann

Landry promised Murill “will not have to worry about having her reputation tarnished by this kangaroo grand jury or the Orleans Kangaroo court as I will pardon her as fast as the law allows,” in a July 2 post on X, while calling the criminal justice system in New Orleans “a circus at its finest … and we will not have any of that!”

However, during his first year in office, the Advocate reports “Landry signed legislation that made the clemency application process stricter.”

Former Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards, who opposed the state’s death penalty, ramped up commutations of prisoners during his last days in office, against the desire of the state’s growing Republican majority. At the time, Republicans, including then state AG Landry called the commutations offensive to victims. The Advocate reports Landry even challenged the validity of the clemency applications on procedural grounds and successfully stopped them from being expedited while Edwards was still in office.

Later Landry would put his name to Act 660 in 2024, which tightened the rules and guardrails around the state's clemency application process by requiring the Board of Pardons to “schedule hearings for pardon or commutation of sentence in the order in which the applications are filed.”

“In other words, Murrill would likely have to wait in line before being considered for a pardon,” reports the Advocate.

The Louisiana Constitution already requires the governor to get a recommendation from the Board of Pardons before the governor can grant clemency to an inmate — and preemptive pardons “do not exist in Louisiana, like they do on the federal level, according to multiple attorneys and people familiar with the clemency process,” said the Advocate.

“You can’t just automatically, with the stroke of a pen, sign somebody out of a criminal conviction in Louisiana,” said Jane Hogan, a Hammond-based attorney who has been practicing before the Board of Pardons for a decade and formerly taught clemency law at LSU.

Clients must usually wait a year before they can get a hearing before the board, according to Hogan. And another advocate familiar with the process put the estimate more at two years.

Murrill’s charges are connected to letters she sent to elected New Orleans officials, including Mayor Helena Moreno and District Attorney Jason Williams, wherein she warned they could lose their positions after they appointed an interim leader of the newly unified clerk of court’s office and called for an election.

“In the spring, the Republican legislature combined New Orleans’ civil and criminal clerks’ offices, denying former life prisoner Calvin Duncan his seat as criminal clerk after his landslide win,” reports the Advocate.

Miffed at the GOP-dominated legislature’s interference with the local democratic process, Moreno and Williams sought to appoint an interim leader to head the unified office pending a special election. But Murrill accused officials of trying to “usurp” the authority of the civil clerk the Legislature selected to lead the office.

Moreno apparently did not appreciate Murrill’s threatening letters, and said there is “a criminal law that prohibits intimidating or threatening a public official in an effort to try to influence their decision or change their position.”

Indictments came down from a local grand jury soon after.