Mike Parson’s startling commutation of Britt Reid sentence is injustice to Ariel Young

Following a Star investigation and the advocacy of the Midwest Innocence Project, Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker in 2021 announced her office had concluded Kevin Strickland was “factually innocent” of a 1978 triple murder. She sought a pardon of Strickland from Gov. Mike Parson, a move supported by state lawmakers in both parties, after Strickland had served more than four decades in prison.

Parson declined, telling KSHB 41 that he didn’t know if Strickland was “innocent or not.”

“I am not convinced (enough) that I’m willing to put other people at risk if you’re not right,” he said in that interview, later adding that “nobody’s been proven innocent here in a court of law, is the bottom line.”

Strickland, mercifully, was exonerated months later by a judge.

But that didn’t change the fact Parson’s stance was somewhere between an absurdity and an atrocity when it came to Strickland — whose case Parson also once blithely referred to as not “a priority” among a backlog of other applicants for whom he’s liberally doled them out.

I thought about Strickland on Friday evening with the startling news that Parson had commuted the sentence of Britt Reid — the son of Chiefs coach Andy Reid — who was convicted of driving while intoxicated and causing a crash that severely injured a 5-year-old girl.

I thought about that family and the most direct victim of the crash, Ariel Young, for whom there will be no commutation of the never-ending consequences of Britt Reid’s decisions that night: On the day of Britt Reid’s sentencing, the court read aloud a statement from Ariel’s mother, Felicia Miller, that said in part, “Her life will be dealing with the damage that Britt Reid did. She will deal with the effects of his actions every day for the rest of her life.”

And so she is.

“She’s doing as best as she can,” Tom Porto, an attorney for Ariel and her family, said in a phone interview Friday night. “She still continues to deal with the effects (of her injuries) to this day.”

And I thought about some words from the Bob Dylan song, “Hurricane” and about being “ashamed to live in a land where justice is a game.”

Because how else are we supposed to look at Parson’s decision on Reid?

Particularly in the context of Strickland among other judgments of his such as pardoning Mark and Patricia McCloskey — the St. Louis couple prosecuted after waving guns in front of Black Lives Matter demonstrators.

Reid, the former Chiefs assistant coach, in November 2022 was sentenced to three years in prison for driving his pickup — at 83 mph with a serum blood alcohol content of 0.113, prosecutors said, above the Missouri legal limit of 0.08 — into two vehicles. The 2021 crash left Ariel in a coma for 11 days.

But, presto, the sentence has been commuted ... despite Reid pleading guilty.

Think about that a minute.

Especially when you contrast it with Strickland and weighing innocence and guilt and what constitutes a “priority” for some reason or another and what doesn’t.

“I have never seen a governor commute a sentence after a plea of guilty,” said Porto, whose law career includes more than five years as a public defender and representing what he estimated were thousands.

He added, “This man admitted what he did, he understood the range of punishment when he pleaded guilty, and he accepted the punishment.”

But the governor didn’t, and who can say why?

Certainly, it demands a lot of questions.

How did this notion even come to the governor? What was he really thinking?

Is it an ill-considered attempt to ingratiate himself to the Chiefs and Chiefs fans? To the Reid family?

Did he consider Ariel and her family, who, as Porto put it, are as in disbelief as he is about something for which he has no explanation?

Would Parson have rendered the same decision if the crash had victimized someone in his family?

And what’s the message to, and about, Britt Reid?

Because, once again, he is getting a break from the law:

As a 21-year-old in 2007, he was placed on probation after being convicted of the felony of carrying a firearm without a license, misdemeanor simple assault, possession of a controlled substance and possession of an instrument of crime.

Because he graduated from Drug Court, he served only five months of an eight-month jail sentence in January 2008 after he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor driving under the influence while on a combination of prescription medications.

And only months before the 2021 crash, Reid was accused of a road-rage incident in which he punched the window of an off-duty Olathe police officer. The case was investigated, but prosecutors never filed charges.

Barring something mitigating that doesn’t meet the eye, such as a severe health issue, the commutation amounts to an anti-accountability statement.

Even the stated rationale for the commutation, which will place Reid, 38, under house arrest until Oct. 31, 2025, only creates more questions.

Asked by The Star why Parson decided to commute the sentence, Johnathan Shiflett, a spokesman for Parson’s office, responded in a statement Friday: “Mr. Reid has completed his alcohol abuse treatment program and has served more prison time than most individuals convicted of similar offenses.”

By that thinking, it seems we should anticipate mass commutations of convicted criminals — for DUIs and otherwise — if the governor on a whim feels they have simply “served more prison time than most individuals convicted of similar offenses.”

Or do you just get that privilege if your dad’s a famous football coach, among other apparent elements of privilege that loom over this.

Meanwhile, the last part of that statement lingers in its own way: “similar offenses.”

There’s nothing “similar” in his equation to what’s befallen Ariel, because she’s a singular life — not collateral damage that evidently was no factor in this decision at all.

The sentence was her justice. Or at least the meager approximation of it. And now even that’s been diluted through the game of it all.

By a governor who couldn’t see the urgency in freeing an innocent man imprisoned most of his life ... yet inexplicably made it a priority to hasten out a man who proclaimed his guilt in court.