Prof. Murray Quoted in Washington Post Article About Acting U.S. A.G. Whitaker’s Charging Policies as U.S. Attorney in Iowa

Professor JaneAnne Murray was quoted in a Washington Post article addressing the changing policies of Acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew Whitaker while he was the U.S. Attorney of the Southern District of Iowa from 2004 to 2009. The article focused on a case handled by the Law School’s Clemency Project, founded and run by Professor Murray.

In 2008, Raeanna Paxton was offered a plea bargain to a stipulated sentence of 21 to 27 years or face a mandatory minimum sentence of life after trial in a case where she had acted as a driver for an individual pursuing a drug deal. Ms. Paxton took the deal and was sentenced to 21 years. Murray met Ms. Paxton at Waseca FCI in early 2016, after she had served approximately 10 years of this sentence. With Shuang Zu ’16, she submitted a clemency petition on Ms. Paxton’s behalf to President Obama. Thereafter, Murray reached out to Ms. Paxton’s sentencing judge, Hon. Robert Pratt, and asked him if he would write a letter in support of Ms. Paxton’s clemency petition. As the Washington Post article notes, in response to Murray’s request, Judge Pratt wrote a letter to Obama’s pardon attorney describing the sentence as “entirely disproportionate” to Ms. Paxton’s crime, adding that she “was and is a nonviolent offender. ...This was not a conspiracy that involved ‘drug kingpins.’ It was a situation where methamphetamine-addicted individuals resorted to selling the drug to support their own addictions.” In August 2016, as the Washington Post article notes, “Ms. Paxton got a phone call telling her that Obama had granted her clemency.” It was Murray and Xu who made this call to her. Ms. Paxton has since remarried, and moved to Cheyenne, Wyoming, where she works at a factory assembling medical devices.