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NJ Gov. Murphy says ‘broad’ groups will be eligible for clemency soon
By
Mike Hayes
Published Feb 14, 2024
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Charles O'Rear / Getty Images
By
Mike Hayes
Published Feb 14, 2024
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New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy says large groups of people convicted of crimes could become eligible for clemency soon.
“I would hope sooner than later, within the next month or two, we're going to unveil a process … that will be, I think, revolutionary relative to what you've seen in New Jersey historically,” Murphy said Tuesday during the monthly “Ask Governor Murphy” call-in show on WNYC.
Murphy said the initiative would look at “broad categories of individuals who would automatically be eligible upon application for accelerated consideration” of clemency.
The governor, however, stopped short of saying who might receive clemency, or for what types of crimes.
Murphy’s comments expand the brief mention he made last month during his State of the State address, when he promised to unveil a clemency initiative “that will ensure we live up to our promise as the state for second chances.”
Since taking office in 2018, the governor has not taken clemency actions, either through reducing prisoners’ sentences or granting pardons, Politico reports.
On Tuesday, Murphy said the initiative is still being worked on, but promised that New Jerseyans would hear more about it soon.
Pressed on why he has yet to take any clemency actions, Murphy said that’s “not atypical” for a governor. He said that his impression is that most officials with clemency authority wait until the end of their time in office to make those decisions.
Murphy’s predecessor, former Gov. Chris Christie, issued 55 clemency orders during his time in office, and about half happened in the final days of his term. The recipients included a reliable donor to his 2009 gubernatorial and 2016 presidential campaigns who’d been convicted of arson and unlawful sale of a weapon.
Christie, a former federal prosecutor, also commuted the sentence for a woman who said she’d been battered before stabbing her fiancé to death. And he commuted sentences for several people convicted of gun possession crimes, including some who had valid permits from other states, which New Jersey does not recognize.
During Tuesday’s show, Murphy said he shared a caller’s frustration over years-long backlogs in the state’s expungement process. In 2019, Murphy signed a law allowing New Jerseyans to expunge their records of most crimes, with exceptions such as murder and sexual assault, if they kept their record clean for ten years.
But in October 2023, the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender filed a class-action lawsuit against the state police over delays in processing expungement orders.
“We need to get a much better pace,” Murphy said Tuesday. “This is the difference between getting a job or not, or a home or not — that’s unacceptable.”
Tagged
public safety
new jersey
Politics
Mike Hayes
Mike Hayes covers equity and access to opportunity in New Jersey. He joined WNYC and Gothamist in 2023. Before that, he worked as a freelance journalist writing about policing and criminal justice. He has written for ProPublica, CNN, HuffPost, BuzzFeed News and The Appeal. He is also the author of the book, “The Secret Files: Bill De Blasio, The NYPD, and the Broken Promises of Police Reform.” In 2019, he was a finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists.
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