As soon as news broke last week that a New Orleans grand jury had , Gov. Jeff Landry took to social media, promising to pardon her.
Murrill “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,” Landry wrote in a July 2 . “The criminal justice system is a circus at its finest in Orleans and we will not have any of that!”
But 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.
The Louisiana Constitution requires the governor to get a recommendation from the Board of Pardons before he 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.
“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.
What’s more, during his first year in office, Landry signed legislation that made the clemency application process stricter.
Murrill’s charges are connected to , in which 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. Mayor Helena Moreno and District Attorney Jason Williams were among those who received letters.
On Friday, the Louisiana Supreme Court stayed the indictment, citing “procedural defects and improprieties” in the legal process and saying Murrill was likely to succeed on a motion to quash the charges.
A spokesperson for Landry and a representative from Murrill’s office declined to comment.
The clemency process
Receiving clemency requires prisoners to go through a bureaucratic application process, with steps such as victim notification and hearings before the Board of Pardons.
There are two types of clemency: commutations, in which the state grants a lighter sentence to an inmate, and pardons, in which a conviction is wiped from the applicant’s criminal record.
According to attorneys, commutations are for people still serving in prison, while pardons are typically granted to those who have already served their full sentences. They may want their convictions cleared so that their gun rights can be restored, for example.
Right now, clients must usually wait a year before they can get a hearing before the board, according to Hogan. Another advocate familiar with the pardon process put the estimate at two years.
“It’s a very long process that a lot of people are queuing up to get in to,” Hogan said.
More ‘guardrails’
In 2024, of the regular legislative session tightened some of the rules around the clemency application process.
The law, sponsored by state Rep. Laurie Schlegel, R-Metairie, required the Board of Pardons, “to the extent feasible,” 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.
Act 660 set “guardrails” that ensure victims and proper authorities are notified during the application process and before commutations occur, said Schlegel. For example, victims’ kin must be told that an application is being considered at least 30 days in advance of the hearing.
Schlegel said she sponsored the legislation after former during his last days in office. A few of the board’s recommendations for the commuted sentences had been sitting on Edwards’ desk for years.
At the time, Schlegel called the commutations offensive to victims, and she questioned whether victims’ families were properly notified.
Not all the inmates whose sentences were commuted were released from prison.
Edwards also faced criticism when he came out against the death penalty during his final year in office, prompting a swath of clemency applications from most of the state’s death row prisoners.
Landry, then the attorney general, on procedural grounds and successfully stopped them from being expedited while Edwards was still in office.
New Orleans vs. Louisiana
Right now, a conviction against Murrill appears far off, and it is unclear whether the case against her will even go forward after the Louisiana Supreme Court took the unusual step of staying her indictment.
The indictment marked a dramatic escalation in a series of conflicts between Republican state leaders and Democratic elected officials from Orleans, mostly over the parish’s court system.
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.
Moreno, the city’s mayor, and Williams, the parish district attorney, sought to appoint an interim leader to head the unified office pending a special election. They were supported by five city council members.
Murrill accused the officials of helping to “usurp” the authority of civil clerk Chelsea Richard Napoleon, whom the Legislature selected to lead the office. The Louisiana Supreme Court upheld the state law that put Napoleon in charge.
But Moreno did not take kindly to Murrill’s letters, and she shot back at Murrill in a video, saying there was “a criminal law that prohibits intimidating or threatening a public official in an effort to try to influence their decision or change their position.”
Also during the recent legislative session, Republicans angered New Orleans when they reduced the number of judgeships in Orleans Parish and redistributed state aid from Williams’ office to other prosecutors’ offices. Proponents have said those decisions are meant to right-size the Orleans justice system.