Hours before his scheduled execution, the Board of Pardons and Paroles commuted the death sentence of Jimmy Meders to life without parole – the first commutation by the Board in more than six years. The Board was moved by the fact that every living juror to serve on Mr. Meders’s trial would have voted for a sentence of life without parole if that had been an option to them. (Their only choices at the time were life with the possibility of parole or death.) The Resource Center recruited the Southern Center for Human Rights to represent Mr. Meders in clemency, alongside his longtime lawyers Jim Jenkins and Andru Volinsky. GRC Investigator John Morledge had worked on the team for years and developed much of the evidence that was critical to the Board’s decision.
