Did the family of the convicted killer, Patrick Baker, have political connections to Governor Matt Bevin?
Baker’s family hosted a fundraiser for the former Republican governor which put a spotlight on the case.
In May 2014, Patrick Baker and two accomplices set out to rob a house in Knox County, Kentucky.
Baker must have known the hardest part of the home invasion would be getting through the front door, so the intruders dressed up as police officers conducting a routine investigation.
This from theguardian.com.
Baker was convicted, in 2017, of killing Donald Mills, a drug dealer, while robbing Mills of cash and pain pills. Baker, posing as a U.S. Marshal, held Mills’ pregnant wife and children at gunpoint while they ransacked the home.
Melinda Mills, sister of Donald Mills who was killed by Patrick Baker
Once inside the Mills family home, Baker revealed his true colours. He tied up the mother of the family, ignoring the pleas of the three children present, stole money and objects, then turned a gun on the father, Donald Mills, shooting him dead.
When Judge David Williams sentenced Baker in December 2017 to 19 years in prison for reckless homicide, burglary, and impersonating a police officer, he said he would have given a longer punishment if he could. “I’ve been practicing law for 30-something years, and I’ve never seen a more compelling or complete case, the evidence was just overwhelming.”
Fast-forward just two years and Patrick Baker becomes a free man, released by Kentucky’s outgoing governor in an act that has been dubbed “extreme pardon.”
The brutal killing was just one of the extraordinary elements of the eleventh-hour move by Governor Matt Bevin who has astonished and angered his state with his pardons.
It was the final act of a governor who was elected in 2016, making Kentucky the last southern state in America to turn Republican, only to be voted out of office in 2020.
What motivated a politician who had spent the previous three years waging bitter wars with teachers, trade unionists, voters, liberals, scientists, and reproductive rights advocates to suddenly display such profuse mercy towards prisoners became the talk of Kentucky?
Even his own previously loyal Republican peers have expressed bewilderment. The top Republican in the state senate has called for an investigation of Bevin’s “extreme pardons and commutations”.
Speculation of what drove Bevin to his action initially focused on money, after the Louisville-based Courier Journal discovered that the family of Patrick Baker had donated $21,500 to Bevin’s political campaign funds before the commutation.
Suspicion of pecuniary incentives then turned to moral outrage of a different sort after Bevin tried to explain on local radio why he had pardoned Micah Shoettle after only 18 months of his 23-year sentence for rape.
The government disclosed in June that the FBI was conducting a separate investigation of whether Bevin issued the pardon—one of 670 acts of clemency as he left office in 2019—in exchange for $21,500 that Baker’s brother and sister-in-law raised at a fundraiser the year before to retire Bevin’s campaign debt.
The FBI has said it cannot comment on the status of the investigation.
Click HERE and HERE for more on Gov Bevin’s pardons.
Bevin posted on Twitter [a long explanation] of his pardons. He began by evoking the spirit of redemption and second chances, and the ambition to help offenders seek rehabilitation.
He denied any financial motive, calling any such suggestion “highly offensive and entirely false”.
The Twitter thread does not appear to have satisfied his detractors or to have calmed the widespread shock at his last-minute flurry of pardons. The sister of the murdered homeowner, Donald Mills, was blunt after she learnt that Patrick Baker was now out.
“Matt Bevin can rot in hell,” she said.
Fast forward again, this time to August 2021: United States’ District Court in Laurel County, Kentucky, played host to a 10-day trial. In the end, the jury found Baker guilty of the unlawful killing of Mills. The following in part from infotel.ca.
A man pardoned by Kentucky’s former governor for a 2014 drug robbery killing will return to prison to serve a 42-year federal sentence for the same crime.
Federal prosecutors said Baker was prosecuted the second time under the “dual sovereignty doctrine,” which allows state and federal officials to prosecute the same defendant for the same actions without infringing on double jeopardy protections.
Saying he had committed a heinous crime, U.S. District Judge Claria Horn Boom imposed a penalty that will make Baker 83 years old when he is eligible for release.
There is no parole in the federal system, though Baker, 43, could earn 54 days a year for good behavior.
Handcuffed in a tan jail jumpsuit, Baker lowered his head when Boom pronounced the sentence but showed no outward emotion.
One felon has been returned to prison—many more of former Governor Matt Bevin’s pardons still to go.
