Before handing over power to Gov. Andy Beshear (D) last week, former Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin (R) used his final days in office to issue hundreds of pardons, including people convicted of sexual assault and murder.

The decision has drawn criticism from both the left and the right, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell calling the pardons “completely inappropriate” and Beshear calling the pardon of Dayton Jones, who was convicted of raping a child, “wrong.”

Overall, the former governor issued 428 pardons, including Jones; a man who was convicted of killing his parents at age 16; and Patrick Brian Baker, who was convicted of homicide and other crimes, and whose family has raised thousands of dollars to retire debt from Bevin’s 2015 gubernatorial campaign, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal.

On Twitter, Bevin pushed back against “suggestions that financial or political considerations played a part in the decision making process,” calling such allegations “both highly offensive and entirely false.” He also wrote he issued the pardons because “America is a nation that was established with an understanding and support for redemption and second chances.”

But party leaders in the state do not agree. McConnell, who has represented Kentucky in the US Senate since 1985, told media at a press conference following his decision to file for re-election, “I expect he had the power to do it, but looking at the examples of people who were incarcerated as a result of heinous crimes — no, I don’t approve of it.”

And Beshear told NPR’s Here & Now that although he would not comment on all of the pardons, he was particularly bothered by the pardoning of Jones, whose case he worked on during his time as Kentucky’s attorney general. He said Jones had committed one of the “worst crimes” his office had ever seen. 

“It was an awful case where a young man in high school was attacked, was violated. It was filmed. It was sent out to different people at his school,” he said. “I fully disagree with that pardon. … It is a shame. And it’s wrong.”

Republican state officials had similar worries. Kentucky Senate President Robert Stivers has advocated for the US attorney in Kentucky to investigate the pardons, and Republican Commonwealth’s Attorney Jackie Steele called into question why Bevin didn’t pardon Baker’s co-conspirators in robbery and homicide, arguing that choice seemed to suggest the donations of Baker’s family may have played a role in Bevin’s calculus.

Some Democrats have joined Stivers’ call for an independent investigation, and Senate Minority Floor Leader Morgan McGarvey (D) told journalists “Gov. Bevin’s pardons show what is a shocking lack of judgment and potentially an abuse of our system of justice.”

Bevin obviously disagrees, writing on Twitter, “The criminal justice system is intended to find the proper balance between justice for the victims and rehabilitation for the offenders … When it is not possible to guarantee more of either being accomplished by further incarceration, it is reasonable for a person to be considered for either a commutation or a pardon.”

Bevin’s pardons further muddle an already complex criminal justice legacy

What frustrates his critics, however, is that Bevin found that balance he referred to on Twitter himself, and sometimes did so by ignoring the concerns of judges, like in the case of his commutation of Paul Donel Hurt’s sentence. As Vox’s Anna North has explained, Hurt was convicted of sexually abusing his 6-year-old stepdaughter in 2001; several judges refused to overturn Hurt’s conviction despite his stepdaughter retracting her allegations due to what was believed to be a judge’s meddling in the case.

For Bevin, the pardons have become a controversial capstone to a complex criminal justice legacy.

In many ways, Bevin made criminal justice issues a priority during his governorship. In 2018, Bevin attended a White House prison reform roundtable and was present when President Donald Trump signed the First Step Act, which eliminates three-strike mandatory life sentencing minimums and gives some offenders the ability to petition courts for a review of their sentences, into law.

And during a gubernatorial debate this year, Bevin said the state’s prison population hasn’t increased while he has been governor. “We have expanded our prison population not one lick, I’ve made clear I’m not building more prisons,” he said.

As WFPL pointed out, that claim was not quite true, with there now being more people in Kentucky prisons than when Bevin took office in 2015, and more people incarcerated there than at any point in the state’s history. His efforts to reduce the number of incarcerated people — in part by reclassifying certain felonies as misdemeanors — failed.

He was more successful in expanding work release programs and in rolling back voting rights for the formerly incarcerated.

Beshear has reversed Bevin’s restrictions on voting, but will not be able to counteract the pardons. And those remain of deep concern to officials across party lines, although whether enough of a concern to merit an inquiry remains to be seen.

A federal appeals court blocked Mississippi’s 15 week abortion ban on Friday, simultaneously affirming abortion access in the state, and paving the way for further legal challenges to current federal abortion regulations.

Jackson Women’s Health Organization — the only abortion clinic left in Mississippi — sued the state in 2018 to block the law banning the procedure; a judge ruled in the clinic’s favor that year.

Friday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals supported that ruling after the clinic argued that no medical evidence shows a fetus would be viable 15 weeks into a person’s pregnancy, causing the ban to violate the US Supreme Court cases Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, both of which say states can’t ban abortion before a fetus is viable; Planned Parenthood puts viability at about 24 weeks.

Mississippi argued the law was a regulation and not a ban, and therefore not subject to the Supreme Court rulings. But the court found the law placed an undue — and therefore unconstitutional — burden on women’s right to an abortion before viability. Appeals court judges wrote:

In an unbroken line dating to Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s abortion cases have established (and affirmed, and re-affirmed) a woman’s right to choose an abortion before viability. States may regulate abortion procedures prior to viability so long as they do not impose an undue burden on the woman’s right but they may not ban abortions. The law at issue is a ban. Thus, we affirm the district court’s invalidation of the law.

The ruling on the law, which did not include exceptions for cases of rape or incest, means that Mississippi’s current abortion regulations will stay in place for now. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that focuses on reproductive health and rights, the state currently requires ultrasounds be taken before an abortion, that those seeking an abortion wait at least 24 hours and be counseled before the procedure, and that there be a medical need for abortions after 18 weeks.

The ruling will affect not just Mississippi, but Louisiana as well, which passed a 15 week abortion ban that would take effect only if Mississippi’s law was upheld.

And although the state of Mississippi has lost its appeal, it could petition for the Supreme Court to hear the case, setting the stage for another direct challenge to Roe v. Wade.

Gestational bans are part of a longer term anti-abortion strategy

The loss for Mississippi comes on the heels of a federal judge blocking an even more restrictive abortion law in the state — a so called “heartbeat bill” that bans abortions at six weeks, around when fetal heartbeats can generally begin to be detected.

Mississippi is just one of a number of states to pass restrictive abortion bans — others include Ohio, Georgia, Kentucky, and Alabama. By November of this year, state legislatures had enacted 58 abortion restrictions; 25 of those would ban some or most abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute. None of the gestational age bans enacted by nine states this year have taken effect, however, as all have been blocked or stayed by the courts.

This, as Vox’s Anna North and Catherine Kim have explained, is by design: anti-abortion activists hope a challenge to one or more of these laws will be heard by the US Supreme Court. Under President Donald Trump, that court’s conservative majority has been strengthened by the additions of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, and state lawmakers are passing abortion bans with the explicit goal of the Supreme Court gutting or overturning Roe v. Wade. 

In Iowa, Rep. Shannon Lundgren, acknowledged a 2018 abortion ban she was managing on the Iowa House floor ran in opposition to settled law, but said, “It is time for the Supreme Court to weigh in on the issue of life.”

And the conservative allies of lawmakers like Lundgren have been equally candid. Last year, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a nonprofit that has opposed abortion and LGBTQ rights, told an Evangelicals for Life Conference in Washington DC that it is focused on gestational age ban legislation to start legal battles that could eventually end Roe v. Wade.

“I can guarantee you that they will not be able to ignore a 15-week limitation, which is in essence limiting abortion to the first trimester,” Denise Burke, senior counsel at ADF said at the time. “We’re kind of basically baiting them, ‘Come on, fight us on turf that we have already set up and established.’”

Thus far, these efforts have been unsuccessful: but in October, the Supreme Court signaled it is willing to hear cases that challenge settled abortion law. It plans to hear June Medical Services v. Gee, a case that centers on a Louisiana law mandating abortion providers have admitting privileges at a local hospital.

While the case does not address gestation, it could also undo Roe v. Wade and severely restrict abortion access. Should justices uphold the law, whether abortions are banned at 15 weeks would become irrelevant, as there would be few — if any — legal providers available to conduct the procedure at any stage of pregnancy.