After his inauguration, President Donald Trump suggested he might pardon the two MPD officers convicted for their roles in the deadly chase of Karon Hylton-Brown, 20, in October 2020.
However, as the case against Officer Terence Sutton and Lieutenant Andrew Zabavsky, who supervised Sutton, seemed to be outside of the norm of conditions leading to a president’s use of pardon power, many doubted that Trump would make good on his promise. After all, both officers had already been free since last September, pending the outcome of their appeals.
Then, it happened. Keeping in line with a phrase from his victory speech following the 2024 election, “promise made, promise kept,” Trump, admittedly without knowing the full details behind the case, issued a full and unconditional pardon on Jan. 22 to the two police officers.
One day before announcing the pardon, Trump told the press:
“They were arrested, put in jail for five years because they went after an illegal,” he said. “And I guess something happened where something went wrong, and they arrested the two officers and put them in jail for going after a criminal,” he said.
But Mr. Trump, Hylton-Brown, 20, was not an illegal nor was he a criminal.
It gets worse.
According to prosecutors, after Hylton-Brown, who was driving a moped without a helmet on a sidewalk “at unreasonable speeds,” was struck by another vehicle during which he sustained life-threatening injuries, the officers allowed the driver who struck him to leave the scene.
They then turned off their body cameras, conferred privately and left the crash site. Later, they implied that Hylton-Brown had been drunk and drafted a false police report. More questionable actions allegedly would follow.
U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves said after the officers were sentenced: “Crimes like this erode [public] trust and are a disservice to the community and the thousands of officers who work incredibly hard, within the bounds of the Constitution, to keep us safe.”
After the pardons, David Shurtz, an attorney representing Hylton-Brown’s estate, called Trump’s decision, “outrageous” and “misguided.”
Further, Karen Hylton, Hylton-Brown’s mother, alleges that she sent a letter to the president, expressing her belief that racism had played a role in her son’s death, and asking Trump to review the case before making his decision.
From his cursory comments to the press, Trump did not review the case. If he did, the presidential thing to do, we believe, would have been to at least reply to Ms. Hylton — a mother still in mourning.
If justice is really what the president was after, he might want to rethink this one.
