Missouri governor commutes sentence of white police officer convicted of fatally shooting Black man

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — A white former Kansas City police officer who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the fatal shooting of a Black man was released from prison Friday after Missouri's governor commuted his sentence to parole.

The decision by Republican Gov. Mike parson to free Eric DeValkenaere came after months of public debate about the case, which had fueled both racial justice protests and impassioned pleas for mercy from DeValkenaere's supporters who asserted he had been unjustly convicted.

DeValkenaere was serving a six-year prison sentence. He was convicted in 2021 of killing 26-year-old Cameron Lamb as he backed into his garage. Lamb's name was invoked frequently during racial injustice protests in Kansas City in 2020 following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Lamb's family even met with then-President Donald Trump that year.

Parson did not pardon DeValkenaere but rather shortened his sentence to parole, subject to normal restrictions against possessing firearms, traveling out of state without permission and other items. He granted a similar commutation of parole to Patty Prewitt, another high-profile prisoner who had spent 40 years behind bars for her husband's killing.

The Department of Corrections confirmed both were freed Friday afternoon, before Parson publicly announced his decisions. DeValkenaere had been held in an out-of-state prison for his own safety, said Department of Corrections spokesperson Karen Pojmann.

Jason Johnson, president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, which supports DeValkenaere, said they ''will continue to fight to completely clear'' his name. Johnson said in a statement that DeValkenaere had an outstanding record of service, adding: "While we strongly maintain that Eric is completely innocent, even those who do not must recognize that the ends of justice are not served by his incarceration.''

The clemency announcements came just weeks before Parson is to end his term, capping a historic string of such actions. Parson, a former rural sheriff, has pardoned or commuted the sentences of more than 800 people while clearing a backlog of more than 3,500 clemency requests he inherited upon taking office in June 2018. That's the most granted clemency cases of any Missouri governor since the 1940s. Most granted clemency had been convicted of lower-level crimes involving drugs or theft. But Parson also denied more than 3,000 clemency petitions.

Gwendolyn Grant, president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Kansas City, said the DeValkenaere clemency decision will tarnish Parson's legacy and ''will fuel deeper divisions and ignite justified outrage."

Grant called Parson's decision ''nothing short of a flagrant endorsement of systemic racism and a betrayal of justice. By freeing a convicted officer who unlawfully killed Cameron Lamb, a young Black man, the governor has made it crystal clear that Black lives do not matter in the state of Missouri under his leadership.''

At trial, DeValkenaere testified that he fired his weapon on Dec. 3, 2019, after Lamb pointed a gun at another detective, Troy Schwalm, and that he believed his actions saved his partner's life.

Prosecutors, however, argued that police shouldn't have been on the property and staged the shooting scene to support their claims that Lamb was armed.

''DeValkenaere was convicted for killing an unarmed man. Period," Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker said in a social media post Friday. ''He was shown incredible mercy by the Governor. No such mercy was shown to the victims. Today we will focus our time caring for Cameron's family rather than commenting further.''

Messages left with attorneys for the Lamb family were not immediately returned Friday.

Evidence presented during the trial, which was held without a jury at DeValkenaere's request, showed that DeValkenaere kicked over a barricade to get into Lamb's backyard.

The trial judge, Dale Youngs, said the officers had no warrant for Lamb's arrest and had no search warrant or consent to be on the property. He called it a tragic case with troubling facts and said DeValkenaere and the officer with him escalated a situation that had been calmed. He didn't address allegations that evidence had been planted.

DeValkenaere left the police force after his conviction but remained free on bond until he lost his appeal in October 2023. The Missouri Supreme Court subsequently declined to hear an appeal.

DeValkenaere's wife, Sarah DeValkenaere, took to social media earlier this week — as she had done often — urging followers to request a pardon.

''I miss him so much,'' she said in a message on X in November. ''So sad that an officer who dedicated his life to serving our city is now in prison for doing his job.''

Parson did not not offer an explanation for his clemency decisions while announcing them Friday. But he had previously acknowledged the pressure in an interview in August on KCMO Talk Radio.

''There's not a week that goes by that somebody's not reaching out to me about that issue, and we're going to see what happens here before long. I'll leave it at that. But you know, I don't like where he's at. I'll just say that,'' Parson said.

Prewitt, now 75, had filed multiple clemency requests over the years. She was serving a life sentence after being convicted of fatally shooting her husband, Bill Prewitt, in 1984 as he slept in their home in the rural east-central Missouri town of Holden.

Prewitt, a mother of five, said a stranger broke into the house. She declined a plea deal that would have given her the chance for parole after five to seven years. Prosecutors said Prewitt cheated on her husband and her ex-lovers testified at trial in 1985 that she had talked about killing Bill Prewitt.

But Patty Prewitt's backers argued that her relationship with her husband was improving and that the evidence of her infidelity would not be allowed in court today. In addition, Georgetown University law students examining the case found prosecutors failed to tell defense attorneys that two days after Prewitt's husband was killed, a neighbor told investigators she had seen a man parked at the end of a nearby dirt road in heavy rain on the night of the murder.

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Hollingsworth reported from Mission, Kansas. Associated Press writer Steve Karnowski contributed from Minneapolis.