Oregon Gov. Kate Brown commutes 17 death sentences — ending death row

The list includes notorious killers, including a father and son who bombed a Woodburn bank in 2008 citing fears that newly elected President Barack Obama would take their guns, and a man who murdered his wife and young children and fled to Mexico.

In a statement, Brown said the commutations didn’t reflect efforts by any of the death row inmates to rehabilitate themselves.

“Instead, it reflects the recognition that the death penalty is immoral,” Brown said. “It is an irreversible punishment that does not allow for correction; is wasteful of taxpayer dollars; does not make communities safer; and cannot be and never has been administered fairly and equitably.”

A Brown spokeswoman said the governor’s office spoke with Gov.-elect Tina Kotek’s team about the decision, and that the Oregon Justice Department’s victim advocacy staff have been notifying victims’ families.

“I also recognize the pain and uncertainty victims experience as they wait for decades while individuals sit on death row – especially in states with moratoriums on executions – without resolution,” Brown said. “My hope is that this commutation will bring us a significant step closer to finality in these cases.”

Brown’s office said in a statement that the 17 death sentences will be commuted to life without the possibility of parole. Her spokeswoman did not respond immediately to a follow-up question.

Since she took office in 2015, Brown has pardoned or commuted sentences for nearly 50,000 people – most recently with a batch of 47,144 pardons for minor marijuana convictions from before the state legalized recreational marijuana in 2016. The 1,147 pardons or commutations Brown had issued as of September were more than those issued by every other Oregon governor in the last 50 years combined, according to an article in The Guardian.

Criminal justice reform groups including the Oregon Justice Resource Center have applauded Brown’s focus on clemency. In a statement after Brown’s announcement, the center’s executive director, Bobbin Singh, said it was past time to end the death penalty.

“It’s been said before, but capital punishment is more a statement about who we are as a society than about the people we sentence to death,” Singh said. “Oregon should not be engaged in the state-sanctioned killing of its own residents; we should not pursue a policy that intentionally targets the poor, the broken, and those on the margins. Oregon enters a new era today where the values that make our state better come to the forefront and we leave behind the death penalty as a relic of a cruel past.”

Only two people have been executed in Oregon since 1984, the year voters approved a constitutional amendment adopting the death penalty in limited circumstances. Douglas Franklin Wright, a serial killer linked to seven deaths between 1969 and 1991, was executed in 1996. Harry Charles Moore, executed in 1997, was convicted of killing his half-sister and her former husband.

Former Gov. John Kitzhaber oversaw both executions. In 2011, during his second stint as governor, Kitzhaber blocked a scheduled execution and declared a moratorium, which Brown continued. Kotek indicated during her campaign that she would continue that moratorium.

Capital offense limits

As governor, Brown ordered the closure of the state Department of Corrections’ death row housing unit, mixing people facing death sentences with the general prison population. And she signed a 2019 law that limited capital offenses to murdering a law enforcement officer or a child younger than 14, killing at least two people during a terrorist attack or killing someone in prison while serving time for a murder conviction.

The law wasn’t retroactive, but a 2021 Oregon Supreme Court ruling effectively made it so. In that case, the court revoked the death sentence of David Bartol, a member of a white supremacist gang who killed another inmate at the Marion County Jail while awaiting trial in 2013.

Several other death row inmates have since had their death sentences revoked following the court’s precedent. Before Brown’s action, there were 17 people facing the death penalty, several of whom would not have been subject to the death penalty if they were sentenced today.

That includes Randy Guzek, who in 1987 shot and killed Rod and Lois Houser of Terrebonne while burgling their house. Guzek has been sentenced to death four times, most recently in 2010, after courts ordered new sentencing trials.

Former Clatsop County District Attorney Joshua Marquis prosecuted the case, and he said Brown’s action will make Guzek and a handful of others immediately available for parole because life without parole wasn’t a sentencing option before 1990.

Marquis predicted that Brown’s commutations will result in legal petitions by some of the people on death row that would result in years of litigation and prisoners appearing before the parole board.

“This is going to be a real horror show because of Kate in what is clearly last-minute grandstanding,” Marquis said.

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