This is awful. This is not an old case where the felon has since reformed. This just happened two years go.

The outgoing Republican governor of Kentucky has sparked outrage after he pardoned a convicted killer whose family had hosted a fundraiser for the politician and given him money.

Matt Bevin, who was defeated in his bid for re-election in November, has issued over 400 pardons in his final days in office.

Among those were Patrick Baker, who had been sentenced to 19 years in jail in 2017 after he impersonated a police officer to force his way into a home, then shot a man inside.

In 2018, Baker’s family hosted a fundraising event for Mr Bevin, which scooped $21,500 for the governor. Baker’s brother and sister-in-law also personally donated a further $4,000 to Mr Bevin’s ultimately unsuccessful re-election campaign.

[…]

Mr Bevin wrote in the official order announcing Baker’s pardon that the evidence used to convict him was “sketchy at best”.

He had made a “series of unwise decisions in his adult life”, Mr Bevin added, suggesting a drug problem had led to Baker falling in with the wrong crowd.

But the judge who sentenced Baker in 2017, David Williams, said he had never seen a more “compelling or complete” case in his thirty years of experience. “The evidence was just overwhelming.”