Brooks: Redemption within reach as Minnesota revamps pardon system

For their anniversary, Jason Sole and his wife flew to Cancun to celebrate.

The airport customs agent greeted him with a question. The same question Sole has been fielding from strangers for almost 20 years.

“What’d you go to prison for?”

It was a question for the 26-year-old who had done time for a drug conviction in 2005. But it was the 46-year-old husband, father and college professor who had to answer, again and again: “Drugs.”

Half a lifetime after he served his time, Sole is ready for his sentence to end.

Sole is one of many Minnesotans petitioning the state for clemency this summer — a pardon for long-ago crimes. If granted, he would no longer have a criminal record. His past would no longer define his present.

Mercy has been part of the legal system as long as there have been laws. Four thousand years ago, the Code of Hammurabi offered the possibility of pardon along with the threat of an eye for an eye. The ancient Romans revered the goddess of clemency. George Washington pardoned two men who had been sentenced to hang as traitors for their roles in the Whiskey Rebellion.

“Clemency is mercy,” said University of St. Thomas School of Law professor Mark Osler, a former federal prosecutor turned clemency advocate. He carries an ancient coin dedicated to Clementia, the goddess of mercy. “It is society acknowledging that someone has changed. That is a real act of restoring someone to the community, and that’s good for the community too.”

Minnesota offers clemency but, until recently, we didn’t make it easy. Pardons used to be out of reach to all but the few who could sit in a room and persuade the governor, the attorney general and the chief justice of the state Supreme Court — and it had to be a unanimous decision of all three — to agree to a fresh start.

It was like trying to water a garden through a straw. While nearby states pardoned hundreds of citizens a year, Minnesota granted dozens. A recent change in the law handed the clemency system a garden hose.

The state’s new Clemency Review Commission evaluates clemency requests and makes recommendations, which the pardon board can accept without a need for a formal hearing. Only a few petitioners will end up in a room with the governor, the AG and the chief justice, answering questions.

“As opposed to five years ago, we’re seeing 300 to 400 percent more grants, more petitions,” Osler said. “Too often, we read about when government messes up. This is a success story.”

But seven months into the wait for his pardon review, Sole pitched a suggestion to the state: Why not speed things along and grant 50 pardons on Juneteenth?

“Have you ever waited — day after day, week after week — for a piece of mail that could literally change your life?" he wrote in an opinion piece for Strib Voices in May.

But Juneteenth came and went. The clemency process had been revamped, but it had not been fitted with an accelerator. The Board of Pardons meets next on July 9. The Clemency Review Commission will meet on Aug. 1.

The docket includes more than 100 pardon requests filed in the first five months of this year, and another 71 still pending from 2024 — including Sole’s.

“I’m excited to prove who I really am,” Sole said, sitting in a bookstore coffee shop in downtown Minneapolis, just another proud dad, bracing himself to send his daughter off to college in the fall.

He filed the pardon paperwork late last year, lined up testimonials and drew up a list of his contributions to the community. Author, advocate, educator, entrepreneur. Hamline University adjunct professor. Bush Foundation fellow. Co-founder of the Humanize My Hoodie movement.

Will Sole’s petition be enough to win him a pardon? It wasn’t last time.

He tried a few years ago. The governor thought he deserved a pardon. The attorney general agreed. The chief justice did not.

The unanimous vote requirement was ruled unconstitutional in 2021, and in 2023, the Minnesota Legislature changed the law. Pardon decisions no longer have to be unanimous, as long as one of the votes in favor is the governor’s.

So Sole waits, and hopes, and imagines life with that clean slate.

“Yes, I’ve had success in my life, but that came at a cost,” Sole said. “I’m still sized up. People know, colleagues know: felonies, felonies, felonies. I want to know what it feels like to be pardoned. How would you look at me then? Does the stigma go away?”