Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves is no fan of granting clemency to inmates, having gone almost six years in office without doing it once.
He broke that string, to his credit, in December with back-to-back commutations of the sentences of brothers Marcus and Maurice Taylor.
The brothers had been mistakenly sentenced to longer prison terms on drug charges than the statutes allowed. Both received 15-year sentences when the maximum for their crime was five years.
It was a shame that the errors were not corrected sooner, since both brothers had already been behind bars for at least 10 years.
Both errors were, as Reeves noted, a “miscarriage of justice.” The governor was right to fix what he could as soon as he could.
