Matt Bevin Pardon Database

In the fall of 2019 former Kentucky governor Matt Bevin made a series of questionable pardons and commutations of convicted offenders. We were tipped off before the full list of the pardons were available on the Secretary of State’s website.

The first thing that I did was to write a program that parses and dumps the contents of the pardons into a shared spreadsheet as they became available. This spreadsheet was distributed among our newsroom for use on follow up and analysis in stories.

I also took the initiative to quickly build a public facing database to help enhance our coverage. The Courier Journal newsroom went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting for coverage of this story.