Paul Elias reports for the Associated Press about the Supreme Court’s third recent rejection of a request by Governor Jerry Brown for authority to grant clemency. (See here, here, and here.) (I’m mentioned in the article.) The article concerns the court’s refusal to recommend a pardon for Borey Ai, a recommendation which was a state constitutional prerequisite to the Governor’s intended action.
“Brown’s pardon would have effectively stopped Borey Ai’s deportation to Cambodia, a nation where his mother was born but he has never seen.” According to the report, one of Ai’s lawyers called the court’s action “definitely a disappointment and definitely a surprise,” and said lawyers are “considering other legal avenues” to reverse the state Supreme Court’s decision. Because the state constitution seems to allow the court to completely block the Governor from granting certain pardons or sentence commutations, including the pardon for Ai, it’s difficult to imagine what those “other legal avenues” might be.
