In the latest sign that the anti-police fever that swept the nation after the death of George Floyd has waned, elected leaders across the country are pardoning or commuting the sentences of officers who are behind bars or facing prison.
President Trump, whose tough-on-crime positions helped him win the White House last year, has even been urged to consider a pardon for Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering Floyd.
In January, Mr. Trump pardoned two D.C. police officers convicted in the 2020 death of a motorcyclist who crashed his bike while trying to evade arrest.
The officers returned to their jobs at the Metropolitan Police Department on Monday.
Republican governors across the country are using their pardon powers to reject what some police advocates have long argued are politically motivated prosecutions.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, this month commuted a police officer’s three-year prison term in the fatal 2023 shooting of a fleeing shoplifter.
In December, Missouri’s governor freed an officer convicted in 2021 of fatally shooting a person who police said was armed and appeared ready to open fire.
Jason Johnson, president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, said these clemency actions are partly a result of more favorable attitudes about police after the nationwide spike in crime during the COVID-19 crisis.
He said lawmakers are examining the facts of individual cases more closely at voters’ insistence.
Mr. Johnson said people have learned to look past the “very biased mainstream media narrative about law enforcement.”
Prosecutions by district attorneys backed by liberal billionaire George Soros have come under particular scrutiny.
In Texas, police and their supporters are lobbying Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, to overturn the December conviction of an Austin police officer in the shooting death of a knife-wielding man.
Soros-backed prosecutors have overseen many of the most aggressive police prosecutions, including the Austin case and the conviction last month in New Mexico of a former officer in the 2022 shooting of a theft suspect who had injured an officer and grabbed a Taser midarrest.
“If you just look at the unfairness of these prosecutions, they were all in their own ways unprecedented,” said Mr. Johnson, whose organization helped fund legal defenses in the New Mexico, Missouri and D.C. cases.
Mr. Johnson said an anti-police bias in the media fuels some convictions.
He said left-wing prosecutions have rushed to paint police officers as loose cannons while downplaying the life-or-death encounters that landed them in court.
Wesley Shifflett, the former police officer pardoned by Mr. Youngkin, fatally shot a fleeing shoplifter in 2023 in Fairfax County.
He was sentenced to three years last week on a charge of reckless handling of a firearm. Prosecutor Steve Descano, a Democrat and a beneficiary of Mr. Soros’ campaign finance arm, was initially unable to persuade a Fairfax County grand jury to hand up an indictment. The prosecutor won an indictment from a special grand jury instead.
A jury acquitted Mr. Shifflett, 36, of the more serious charge of involuntary manslaughter, but the former police sergeant was headed to prison on the lesser charge until the governor intervened.
“I am convinced that the court’s sentence of incarceration is unjust and violates the cornerstone of our justice system — that similarly situated individuals receive proportionate sentences,” Mr. Youngkin said in a statement.
D.C. Metropolitan Police leadership decried the convictions of newly reinstated officers Terence Sutton and Andrew Zabavsky as unprecedented punitive action.
Court records show Officer Sutton and Lt. Zabavsky tried to pull over Karon Hylton-Brown in October 2020 when the officer saw Hylton-Brown driving his motorbike on the sidewalk in Northwest.
Hylton-Brown sped off, beginning a multiblock pursuit. Prosecutors said the two officers raced after the driver and even went in the opposite direction on a one-way street.
Police followed Hylton-Brown into an alley before the 20-year-old driver zoomed out of the narrow passage and was hit by a passing motorist, according to court documents. Hylton-Brown died in a hospital days later.
Prosecutors said the two officers covered up the crash by turning off their body cameras to discuss the incident privately and then lying to their superiors about how the pursuit unfolded and the severity of Hylton-Brown’s injuries.
D.C. police officers are not allowed to pursue suspects over traffic violations alone.
A judge sentenced Lt. Zabavsky this fall to four years in prison on conspiracy and obstruction of justice charges. Officer Sutton was sentenced to more than five years for a conviction of second-degree murder.
Metropolitan Police Chief Pamela A. Smith wrote a sharply worded rebuke of the sentences published soon after their January pardons.
“Never before, in any other jurisdiction in the country, has a police officer been charged with second-degree murder for pursuing a suspect,” the statement read. “These members could never have imagined that engaging in a core function of their job would be prosecuted as a crime.”
Mr. Johnson, who worked with Officer Sutton’s defense team, said key information, including the fact that Officer Sutton had previously arrested Hylton-Brown with guns and drugs and knew he was a member of a local gang, the Kennedy Street Crew, was ignored in much of the media coverage of the case.
Reporting on Hylton-Brown’s death factored into a surge of protests in the District that piggybacked on the national anger directed at police in 2020 after Floyd’s death.
Calls for Mr. Trump to pardon the officer convicted of murder in Floyd’s death spiked this week after conservative media personality Ben Shapiro argued for clemency.
“The evidence demonstrates that Derek Chauvin did not, in fact, murder George Floyd,” Mr. Shapiro said. He mentioned fentanyl in Floyd’s system and a heart condition that factored into his death. The podcaster said an autopsy showed no damage to Floyd’s neck. Chauvin’s knee restraint was blamed for suffocating Floyd.
Billionaire technology magnate and White House adviser Elon Musk reposted the Shapiro argument on X, and the post has been viewed more than 40 million times.
Mr. Trump can pardon Chauvin only for federal civil rights convictions. The former police officer would still have to serve out his 22-year state murder sentence in Minnesota.
Months before Floyd’s killing, residents in Kansas City, Missouri, were outraged over a veteran detective’s shooting of a man who seemed to be moments away from pulling a gun on a fellow officer.
The case against former Detective Eric DeValkenaere produced an involuntary manslaughter conviction for his lethal shooting of Cameron Lamb, 26, in December 2019.
The detective testified that he fired his gun to save the life of another officer, but a Jackson County judge in 2022 sentenced DeValkenaere to six years.
Gov. Mike Parson commuted the prison term in December before leaving office.
Mr. Johnson, whose organization also supported DeValkenaere’s legal defense, said judges aren’t immune from the public furor surrounding police prosecutions. He said he suspects some judges handle cases involving accused officers differently because of the pressure they receive.
In two recent cases in the Southwest, one officer was sentenced to prison and another was convicted in connection with deadly interactions.
Police officer Christopher Taylor in Austin, Texas, was given a two-year prison sentence in December for the 2019 death of Mauris DeSilva.
Court records said Taylor fatally shot DeSilva, 46, who was suffering from a mental health episode and threatening to harm himself by holding a knife to his own throat. Taylor shot DeSilva after he ignored commands to drop the knife.
Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza, another beneficiary of Mr. Soros’ campaign machine, brought the charges of deadly conduct. He was elected to office in 2020 on promises to rein in police misconduct.
Mr. Abbott also washed away high-profile convictions from Mr. Garza’s office by granting clemency last year for Daniel Perry, a former Army sergeant convicted of murder in the death of a Black Lives Matter protester in 2020.
Taylor was released on bond and is appealing the case.
The Washington Times reached out to Gov. Abbott’s office for comment on a potential pardon for Taylor.
Another Soros-backed prosecutor led a conviction last month in New Mexico.
Former Las Cruces police officer Brad Lunsford was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the 2022 shooting of Presley Eze.
Lunsford said Eze injured another officer and grabbed that officer’s Taser.
Lunsford faces up to nine years in prison if the verdict is upheld.
Mr. Johnson said his organization is assisting in Lunsford’s case, which local prosecutors never pursued but became a priority for New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez in October 2023.
“The killing of Presley Eze is a tragedy,” said Mr. Torrez, a Democrat who, like many of the other prosecutors who have targeted law enforcement, has received campaign funds from Mr. Soros.
He called the shooting of Eze an “unjustifiable use of force to subdue an individual resisting arrest for the commission of a minor crime.”
