In June 1998 the governor of Texas looked at the file of a man who had confessed to some 600 killings and decided that the state should not put him to death. George W. Bush commuted a single death sentence in his years as governor, and he gave it to Henry Lee Lucas. The reason he gave was not mercy in any ordinary sense. It was doubt, and doubt about one case only.
Clemency is the oldest safety valve in criminal law and the least predictable. A president, a governor, a board or a court can take a sentence that has passed every appeal and change it, for reasons that may have nothing to do with the crime. In the cases of men and women convicted of serial murder, the power has been used to answer doubt, to correct what an official saw as a broken system, to carry out a policy, to punish a government’s own delay and to reward work done in prison. It has also been refused, sometimes in a single sentence. The record of who granted it, who refused it and what reasons they put on paper says a good deal about how the state thinks about its harshest punishment.
Lucas was a drifter who had already served prison time for killing his mother in Michigan, a conviction for second-degree murder in 1960. Arrested in Montague County, Texas, in June 1983, he began confessing. In November 1983 a Denton County jury convicted him of murdering Becky Powell, his 15-year-old traveling companion, and sentenced him to life. He pleaded guilty to the murder of Kate Rich, an elderly widow, and received 75 years. In 1984 a jury in San Angelo convicted him of capital murder in the death of a young woman then unidentified, and he was sentenced to death. Amnesty International later described that verdict as based almost entirely on his confession.
Most of the confessions did not hold. In April 1985 the Dallas Times Herald published records placing Lucas in other states on the days of killings he had claimed, and Jim Mattox, the Texas Attorney General, opened an inquiry that ended with his office calling the confessions a hoax. The capital conviction, though, survived every appeal. Lucas filed three state habeas applications and was scheduled for execution four times. Texas set the last date for June 30, 1998.
The Attorney General by then was Dan Morales. He said it was "not impossible, but highly improbable" that Lucas had committed the murder for which he was condemned, since his office had turned up work records placing him in Florida at the time, but he said it would not be appropriate for his office to intervene. Lucas put his own chances at zero. "They’re going to execute me for lying," he said that month.
At Bush’s request the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles reviewed the conviction and recommended commutation. Sister Helen Prejean later reported the vote as 17 to 1. Bush accepted the recommendation and reduced the sentence to life. The jurors, he said, "did not and could not have known" of Lucas’s pattern of lying and confessing to crimes he had not committed, and it was the first case he had reviewed as governor in which there was some doubt about the person’s guilt.
Not everyone accepted that. Ken Anderson, a prosecutor, pointed out that 23 judges had reviewed the case and let the verdict stand. In Michigan, the prosecutor who had convicted Lucas of his mother’s death in 1960 supported the decision and called him the only murderer he had ever felt sorry for. Lucas, true to form, told reporters he saw an "80 percent chance" of walking free someday. He did not. He died in custody at the Ellis I Unit in Huntsville in March 2001, aged 64, of what prison officials said appeared to be natural causes. In 2019 Williamson County authorities identified the woman whose death had put him on death row as Debra Jackson, 23, of Abilene.
The other convictions were never touched. Bush’s grant was narrow by design: it addressed a single verdict that the state’s own lawyers doubted, and left a man convicted of other murders in prison for life.
In Illinois the same governor refused clemency and then granted it on a scale no American governor had attempted.
Andrew Kokoraleis was one of four men police and the press linked to the abductions and killings of women in Chicago and its western suburbs in 1981 and 1982. A DuPage County jury convicted him of the murder of Lorraine Borowski and sentenced him to death, and the Illinois Supreme Court affirmed in October 1989. On the evening of March 16, 1999, Governor George Ryan denied him clemency. He was executed early the next morning, at 35. Amnesty International said he had been put to death despite doubts about his guilt.
Edward Spreitzer, a younger man from the same circle, had pleaded guilty in April 1984 to four murders in Cook County. In March 1986 he was convicted in DuPage County of the murder and aggravated kidnapping of Linda Sutton, 26, and a jury sentenced him to death. His case went up and down the courts for the next decade and more. The Illinois Supreme Court affirmed in 1988 and denied post-conviction relief in 1991. A federal court granted habeas relief on the sentence in 1996, and the Seventh Circuit reversed that ruling in 1997. By the turn of the century the sentence was settled law.
Then Ryan changed course. On December 19, 2002, he granted a full pardon based on innocence to R.C., a young Aurora man twice sentenced to death for the 1983 murder of a 10-year-old girl and acquitted at a third trial in 1995. Weeks later, as he left office on January 11, 2003, Ryan commuted the sentences of all 167 people on the state’s death row, most of them to life in prison. Spreitzer’s sentence for the murder of Linda Sutton became a life sentence with the rest.
The blanket commutation did not weigh one case against another. It reached men whose guilt no one disputed and men whose convictions had been questioned, and it reached a man who had pleaded guilty to four murders as readily as anyone else. Twenty years later ABC7 Chicago asked Ryan about it. He had, the station reported, no regrets. None of Spreitzer’s victims' families was reported as having spoken about his commutation.
Andrew Urdiales shows how little a commutation can settle when a prisoner has crimes in more than one place.
A former Marine who had been stationed at Camp Pendleton and Twentynine Palms, Urdiales was convicted in Cook County in 2002 of the first-degree murders of Laura Uylaki and Lynn Huber. The jury rejected his insanity defense, and he was sentenced to death on September 3, 2002. Four months later Ryan’s mass commutation turned the sentence into natural life without the possibility of parole; the Illinois Supreme Court dated Ryan’s order in his case January 10, 2003.
The state was not done. Cassandra Corum’s death had come to light in Livingston County, downstate, and a grand jury there had indicted Urdiales in 1998. The case came to trial in 2004, after the Cook County commutation. The court rejected his plea of guilty but mentally ill and his insanity defense and convicted him of first-degree murder, and a sentencing jury returned a verdict of death. A man whose death sentence had just been commuted was condemned again, by the same state, for a different victim. The Illinois Supreme Court reviewed that judgment in 2007.
In March 2011 Governor Pat Quinn signed the law abolishing the death penalty in Illinois and commuted the sentences of the 15 men then on death row, Urdiales among them. Within hours, CBS Chicago reported, Orange County prosecutors in California began working to extradite him. Jim McKay, the former Cook County prosecutor, called the situation a joke and said Urdiales had killed eight women "without remorse."
California tried him for the murders of five women killed between 1986 and 1995: Robbin Brandley, Julie McGhee, Mary Ann Wells, Tammie Erwin and Denise Maney. An Orange County jury convicted him in May 2018, and on October 5, 2018, Judge Gregg Prickett sentenced him, at 54, to death on all five counts. He was received on San Quentin’s death row a week later. He died there on November 3, 2018, in what prison officials investigated as a suicide. Two governors had spared him in Illinois. A third state’s sentence was the one he was under at his death.
Quinn’s commutations were not acts of mercy toward anyone in particular. They were the last step of a legislative decision, and they fell on whoever happened to be on death row that day. One of them was Brian Dugan.
Dugan’s case turned on a bargain that was refused. In 1985, held for a series of crimes in Kane and LaSalle counties, he told prosecutors he would admit everything if the death penalty came off the table. "We heard he was willing to confess and clear all cases we had against him if we took death off the table," John Barsanti, later Kane County state’s attorney, recalled in 2009. He got that deal on two murders. On November 19, 1985, he pleaded guilty to the murders of Donna Schnorr, a 27-year-old nurse from Geneva, and Melissa Ackerman, 7, of Somonauk, and received two life sentences.
He also said he had killed Jeanine Nicarico, 10, in February 1983, and that he had acted alone. He would confess formally, his public defender told prosecutors, only if his life was spared. They refused. Two other young Aurora men, R.C. and A.H., had already been sentenced to death for the crime. Their cases ran another ten years before R.C. was acquitted in November 1995 and the charges against A.H. were dropped weeks later. Ryan’s pardon of R.C. in December 2002 came after DNA results released by DuPage State’s Attorney Joseph Birkett pointed to Dugan.
A DuPage County grand jury indicted Dugan for the murder in November 2005. On July 28, 2009, with no promise of any kind, he pleaded guilty. "It has been his desire to admit to this crime for 25 years," his lawyer, Steven Greenberg, told the court. Birkett had said there would be "no deals," and in November 2009 a jury sentenced Dugan to death. Judge George Bakalis imposed the sentence on December 16, 2009.
The appeals never ran their course. On March 9, 2011, Quinn signed the abolition law, effective July 1, and commuted the 15 death sentences to life. The man who had spent 1985 trying to trade a confession for his life received, 26 years later and without asking, the sentence he had asked for. The commuted sentences were life without parole, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
Federal clemency rests with the president alone, and in December 2024 Joe Biden used it to empty most of federal death row.
Iouri Mikhel, born in Leningrad, and Jurijus Kadamovas, a Lithuanian national, ran an aquarium business in Los Angeles. A federal jury convicted them in January 2007 of conspiracy to take hostages resulting in death and three counts of hostage taking resulting in death, in a scheme in which five people were abducted for ransom and killed between October 2001 and January 2002: Meyer Muscatel, Rita Pekler, Alexander Umansky, Nick Kharabadze and George Safiev. The crew collected more than $1 million. The jury recommended death after deliberating less than a day, finding every aggravating factor the government had alleged and no mitigating factor, and Judge Dickran M. Tevrizian imposed death on March 12, 2007. The Ninth Circuit affirmed in May 2018, calling the evidence of guilt "detailed, comprehensive, and in a word, overwhelming." The Supreme Court declined to hear either man’s case in October 2019.
On December 23, 2024, Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 of the 40 men on federal death row to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Both men were on the list. The reason, as Novaya Gazeta reported it, was not anything in their files: Biden said he could not stand aside and let a new administration resume the federal executions he had halted. Kadamovas’s lawyer, Timothy Foley, told The Epoch Times that the Lithuanian authorities had supported the request.
In Tuolumne County, where two of the five victims had been killed, the reaction was cooler. Death penalty opponents welcomed the commutations; some victims' families criticized them. The former sheriff told The Union Democrat that some crimes shock the public conscience enough to warrant death. "I just feel that it brings up the wounds to these families," he said.
The commutation changed the sentence but not the argument. President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14164 directed the Attorney General to ensure that the men whose sentences had been commuted were imprisoned in conditions consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes. On April 16, 2025, Kadamovas, Mikhel and 19 others sued in federal court in Washington to block their transfer to the federal supermax at Florence, Colorado. In October 2026 the Bureau of Prisons still listed Kadamovas at the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.
In India the power to pardon or commute belongs to the Governor of a state under Article 161 of the Constitution and to the President under Article 72. In the case of Renuka Kiran Shinde and her sister Seema Mohan Gavit, both refused it. The sisters were spared anyway, and the reason was the time those offices had taken to say no.
The courts found that the sisters, their mother and Renuka’s husband lived by theft across Maharashtra and that the people they killed were young children. The only pardon in the case went to the husband, who turned approver in October 1997 and gave evidence for the prosecution under Section 306 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. The mother died in custody before she could be tried. The sessions court in Kolhapur convicted the sisters of murder, with other charges, and sentenced both to death on June 28, 2001. The Bombay High Court upheld five murders and the death sentences in 2004, and the Supreme Court of India confirmed them on August 31, 2006. The sisters were expected to become the first women hanged in independent India.
Appeals for mercy from residents of Canada, Japan, the United States and India reached the President within days of the Supreme Court’s ruling. On September 15, 2006, the Union interior ministry sent them to Maharashtra, noting that the Governor had to consider them first. What followed, set out date by date in the High Court’s later judgment, was a file that moved from prison to the Inspector General of Prisons to the state government and back, held up at one stage by the need for English translations. On June 21, 2012, a fire at Mantralaya, the state government’s headquarters in Mumbai, destroyed the case papers. The Governor rejected Seema’s petition; the judgment gives the date once as March 26, 2012, and elsewhere as August 17, 2013. The President’s Secretariat twice returned the file, once to be reconsidered in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Shatrughan Chauhan v. Union of India, which held that unexplained delay could justify commutation. President Pranab Mukherjee rejected both sisters' petitions on July 7, 2014. They were told on July 30.
The sisters went back to court. On January 18, 2022, a Bombay High Court bench of Justices Nitin Jamdar and Sarang Kotwal commuted both death sentences to life imprisonment. The judges did not soften their view of the crimes, writing that "only an extremely depraved mind could have perpetuated such brutal killings." But they measured the delay at seven years, ten months and 15 days and held it "entirely attributable to the officers of the Respondent - Governments." "Though the procedure for deciding the mercy petitions mandates speed and expediency," they wrote, "the State machinery showed indifference and laxity at each stage of processing the files." The court refused the sisters' request to be released at once after 25 years in prison.
Maharashtra appealed. On April 13, 2023, the Supreme Court let the commutation stand, holding that "inordinate delay in disposal of the mercy petitions can also be said to be a relevant consideration," but directed that the sisters serve "life imprisonment for natural life and without any remission." It then sent its order to the chief secretaries of every state and union territory, warning that if mercy petitions were left undecided, "the object and purpose of the death sentence would be frustrated." Press Trust of India reported the bench’s concern that condemned prisoners were taking advantage of such delays. As of July 21, 2026, a further writ petition by the sisters was pending before the Bombay High Court.
Clemency does not always concern the condemned. As governor of Oregon, Kate Brown granted commutations or clemency to more than 1,000 people, more than other governors, according to the Oregon Capital Chronicle. In 2021 she commuted the sentences of 41 prisoners who had fought wildfires on prison crews in 2020, after a determination, the Associated Press reported, that they did not pose an unacceptable risk to public safety.
One of them was Jesse Lee Calhoun. His record went back two decades, to a third-degree assault conviction in Baker County in 2003; in 2019 he had been convicted of assaulting a public safety officer, interfering with a law enforcement animal, burglary and unauthorized use of a vehicle, and sentenced to 50 months. The commutation took about a year off that term. KPTV later reported that the Multnomah County District Attorney’s office, which usually had about a month to review such lists, had one week, and took no position on his release.
The commutation was conditional, and in 2023 it was withdrawn. On June 30 a senior deputy district attorney in Multnomah County wrote to Governor Tina Kotek’s office that Calhoun had "been involved in criminal activity currently under investigation by Oregon law enforcement." Kotek revoked the commutation on July 3. Her spokesperson said she had acted on the district attorney’s recommendation, that a governor can overturn a commutation only when its terms are violated, and that those who violate them "must be held accountable." Calhoun was returned to prison to finish his original sentence.
What followed made the commutation a political issue. Brown said she was "absolutely horrified for the victims, their families, and all those who have experienced these losses." Two members of Congress, Cliff Bentz and Lori Chavez-DeRemer, wrote to Kotek on July 20, 2023, urging her "to review every single conditional commutation granted by governor brown." All 25 members of the Oregon House Republican Caucus wrote that Brown’s commutations had "bypassed many of the existing safeguards" in the parole and probation system.
In May 2024 a Multnomah County grand jury indicted Calhoun for murder in the deaths of three women. By September 2026 the charges had grown to second-degree murder in the deaths of five women and first-degree manslaughter in the death of a sixth, all of whom prosecutors say died between November 2022 and April 2023. He has pleaded not guilty to every count and is presumed innocent. As of September 21, 2026, no trial date had been set.
Thomas Eugene Creech has spent more than 50 years in Idaho custody. He was convicted of five murders in three states: two house painters in Valley County, Idaho, in November 1974; a man in Oregon and a man in California the same year; and David Dale Jensen, a 23-year-old fellow prisoner with physical and mental disabilities, killed at the Idaho State Correctional Institution in May 1981 while Creech was already serving life. He pleaded guilty to Jensen’s murder. Judge Robert Newhouse sentenced him to death in 1982 and, after reversals, again on April 17, 1995.
When an Ada County judge signed a death warrant in October 2023, Creech asked the Idaho Commission of Pardons and Parole for commutation, and the commission agreed to hear him. His supporters at the January 2024 hearing were not the usual ones. They included former prison workers, a serving corrections officer, a former legislator and Newhouse himself, the judge who had sent him to death row and now opposed his execution. Jim Harris, the prosecutor who had sought the death sentence, opposed it too. Creech apologized. "It was wrong. I wish I could go back and change it," he said. Jensen’s daughter, younger sister and two nieces spoke last and asked the commission to deny clemency, describing "generational torment and heartache."
One commissioner recused himself. On January 29, 2024, the remaining six split 3 to 3. In Idaho a tie means no recommendation, and without a recommendation the governor cannot commute a death sentence. The three who favored commutation wrote that they relied on the time that had passed, the views of the sentencing judge and a former deputy prosecutor, and the change in law that now requires juries to decide death sentences, and that their vote reflected no doubt about his guilt. The three opposed cited the "coldblooded nature" of Jensen’s murder, the number of people Creech had killed and their view that he was not capable of true remorse. If the sentence could not be upheld in this case, they wrote, it would "mean nothing in the state of Idaho."
Governor Brad Little said he had "zero intention of taking any action that would halt or delay" the execution. On February 28, 2024, the Idaho Department of Correction tried to carry it out by lethal injection; the medical team could not set an intravenous line, and the execution was called off after about an hour. In March 2025 Little signed a law making the firing squad Idaho’s primary method of execution from July 1, 2026. On October 1, 2026, the Boise station KBOI reported that Creech remained on death row, one of eight people under sentence of death in the state, and that the ACLU of Idaho had asked the state to let him die in prison.
John Edward Robinson Sr. was an Olathe businessman with a fraud record going back to 1969. A Johnson County jury convicted him in October 2002 of the capital murder of Suzette Trouten, and he was sentenced to death in January 2003. In October 2003 he pleaded guilty in Cass County, Missouri, to five counts of first-degree murder and received life without parole on each. In November 2015 the Kansas Supreme Court kept one capital murder conviction and the death sentence, the first time it had upheld a death sentence since Kansas restored capital punishment in 1994.
Under Kansas procedure a condemned prisoner asks the Prisoner Review Board for commutation, and the board has up to 120 days to report to the governor. On June 9, 2026, Attorney General Kris Kobach urged Governor Laura Kelly to deny clemency to eight death-sentenced inmates, warning against grants in the final weeks of a governor’s term. Robinson’s was the only request before her. On June 18 Kelly denied it. Her statement noted that the death penalty is still the law in Kansas and said that because his request showed neither a credible claim of innocence nor evidence of manifest injustice, she had denied it. Her office declined to say what criteria she had weighed.
Cohen, his lawyer, said Robinson was almost 83, one of the oldest people on death row in the country, and that given his age, his health and the pending litigation it was nearly certain he would die of natural causes before Kansas could execute him. The denial, she said, meant the state would keep spending money defending a sentence it could have settled with life without parole. Kansas has carried out no execution since 1965. As of September 15, 2026, Robinson was 82, held at El Dorado Correctional Facility, with his post-conviction appeal under submission at the Kansas Supreme Court.
Under Indonesian law a prisoner sentenced to death may ask the president for clemency, called grasi. Ahmad Suradji, a village dukun, or traditional healer, near Medan in North Sumatra, was convicted of the killings of 42 women and girls between 1986 and 1997, tried as one continuing offense of murder under Article 338 of the Criminal Code. The Lubuk Pakam District Court sentenced him to death on April 27, 1998, and the higher courts upheld the sentence the same year. His wife was convicted as an accomplice.
With the help of the Medan Legal Aid Institute he petitioned for clemency in 2004. The Jakarta Post reported that a first letter, submitted in October 2004, was rejected, and that his wife sent a second in December 2007. According to Hukumonline, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono rejected his petition on December 27, 2007. No reason was reported. On July 4, 2008, the Deputy Attorney General said that eight prisoners, Suradji among them, would be executed soon because they had exhausted their appeals and clemency pleas. Amnesty International, which had appealed on his behalf, noted that Indonesia published no official death penalty statistics and that at least 112 people were known to be under sentence of death. A police mobile brigade firing squad executed Suradji in Deli Serdang regency at 9:58 p.m. on July 10, 2008. He was 57.
Set side by side, the grants rarely rested on the prisoner. Bush spared Lucas because of a single verdict his own Attorney General doubted, and left every other conviction in place. Ryan and Quinn acted on the death penalty itself, and the men who benefited, Spreitzer, Urdiales and Dugan among them, did so because of the date on the calendar. Biden’s December 2024 commutations were framed as a stand against a successor’s policy. The Bombay High Court commuted the Maharashtra sisters' sentences while writing that the crimes were beyond words to condemn; the reason was a file that had sat in government offices for almost eight years. Brown’s wildfire commutations were a reward for work, and they produced the only grant in this group to be taken back.
The refusals were just as revealing. Ryan denied Kokoraleis in March 1999 and commuted everyone else less than four years later. Idaho’s commission divided evenly on Creech, with a sentencing judge and a prosecutor on the side of mercy and a victim’s family on the other, and the tie decided it. Kelly wrote that Robinson had shown neither innocence nor manifest injustice, and declined to say more. Yudhoyono gave no public reason at all.
Only one act in all these files was a finding of innocence: Ryan’s pardon of R.C., a man who had never killed anyone, in December 2002. Everything else was a judgment about the sentence, the system or the calendar. Lucas died under the commuted sentence in 2001, Urdiales under a new one in 2018. As of the autumn of 2026 Creech and Robinson were still under sentence of death, waiting on courts and on governors who had already said no.
• 1960: Henry Lee Lucas convicted of second-degree murder in Michigan.
• November 1983: Denton County jury convicts Lucas of murdering Becky Powell; life sentence.
• 1984: San Angelo jury convicts Lucas of capital murder; death sentence.
• April 1984: Edward Spreitzer pleads guilty to four murders in Cook County, Illinois.
• November 19, 1985: Brian Dugan pleads guilty to the murders of Donna Schnorr and Melissa Ackerman; two life sentences.
• March 1986: Spreitzer convicted in DuPage County of the murder and aggravated kidnapping of Linda Sutton; later sentenced to death.
• April 27, 1998: Ahmad Suradji sentenced to death by the Lubuk Pakam District Court.
• June 1998: Governor George W. Bush commutes Lucas’s death sentence to life on the recommendation of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles.
• March 16 to 17, 1999: Governor George Ryan denies clemency to Andrew Kokoraleis, who is executed the next morning.
• March 2001: Lucas dies in custody in Huntsville, Texas.
• June 28, 2001: Renuka Shinde and Seema Gavit sentenced to death in Kolhapur.
• September 3, 2002: Andrew Urdiales sentenced to death in Cook County.
• December 19, 2002: Ryan pardons R.C. on grounds of innocence.
• January 2003: Ryan commutes all 167 Illinois death sentences, including those of Spreitzer and Urdiales.
• 2004: Urdiales sentenced to death again, in Livingston County.
• August 31, 2006: Supreme Court of India confirms the sisters' death sentences.
• March 12, 2007: Iouri Mikhel and Jurijus Kadamovas sentenced to death in Los Angeles.
• December 27, 2007: President Yudhoyono rejects Suradji’s clemency petition.
• July 10, 2008: Suradji executed in Deli Serdang, North Sumatra.
• July 28, 2009: Dugan pleads guilty to the murder of Jeanine Nicarico; sentenced to death that November and December.
• March 9, 2011: Governor Pat Quinn signs the abolition of the Illinois death penalty and commutes 15 sentences, including those of Dugan and Urdiales.
• July 7, 2014: President Pranab Mukherjee rejects the sisters' mercy petitions.
• October 5, 2018: Urdiales sentenced to death in Orange County, California; he dies at San Quentin on November 3, 2018.
• June 2021: Governor Kate Brown commutes the sentences of 41 wildfire-crew prisoners, Jesse Lee Calhoun among them.
• January 18, 2022: Bombay High Court commutes the sisters' death sentences for delay.
• April 13, 2023: Supreme Court of India orders life for natural life without remission.
• July 3, 2023: Governor Tina Kotek revokes Calhoun’s commutation.
• January 29, 2024: Idaho Commission of Pardons and Parole splits 3 to 3 on Thomas Creech.
• February 28, 2024: Creech’s execution halted.
• May 2024: Calhoun indicted on murder charges in Multnomah County.
• December 23, 2024: President Joe Biden commutes 37 federal death sentences, including those of Mikhel and Kadamovas.
• June 18, 2026: Governor Laura Kelly denies clemency to John Edward Robinson Sr.
• September 21, 2026: Calhoun pleads not guilty to a sixth charge; no trial date set.
• October 1, 2026: Creech reported still on Idaho death row.