State Rep. Jim Piwowarczyk (R-Hubertus) and 39 other Republican legislators (33 from the Assembly and 6 from the Senate) sent a letter to Gov. Tony Evers Tuesday requesting that he suspend his new effort to process commutations (a reduction or a modification of a criminal sentence) out of concern over “serious consequences it is having on victims, law enforcement, families and public confidence in Wisconsin’s justice system.”

On April 3, Evers announced, under his executive authority to grant clemency (pardons, reprieves, and commutations), that he would make commutations available again in the state after 25 years since the last commutation had been issued.

A commutation doesn’t automatically mean a person in prison will be released. It could mean the incarcerated portion of the sentence is shortened, but the applicant still has prison time to complete, as well as fulfilling extended supervision. 

On April 3, Evers issued two executive orders: Executive Order 287, creating the Governor’s Commutation Advisory Board and Executive Order 288, creating a Juvenile Life Sentence Process.

Juvenile commutation is only available to those who were 19 years of age or younger at the time of their conviction. The juvenile commutation is also restricted to those who were sentenced as adults and received a life sentence or at least 39 years of incarceration.

The eligibility requirements for the two commutation applications share five specific conditions:

1. Applicants must currently be incarcerated in a correctional institution for a Wisconsin conviction with more than one year of the incarceration term remaining.
2. They must have served at least half of their incarceration term or at least 20 years of a life sentence.
3. They must not have any unresolved criminal charges or outstanding warrants in any jurisdiction.
4. There cannot be any incidents of violent misconduct within the last five years of current incarceration.
5. The commutation is not for any of the following offenses: sexual assault, physical abuse of a child, trafficking of a child, incest, and soliciting a child for prostitution.

Commutation applications have been offered online, and the first commutation hearings are expected to be held in June.

Soon after Evers announced he would be offering commutations, Republican legislators began expressing their opposition.

One of their criticisms is that by making the commutation process widely available, it is disruptive to the intent of truth-in-sentencing laws passed in the late 1990s, early 2000s, which require people convicted of serious crimes  to serve the totality of a prison sentence, including years in incarceration and extended supervision, without the possibility of a parole board shortening that sentence.

“For decades, Wisconsin maintained a commonsense approach that respected the finality of sentencing decisions and the voices of victims,” Piwowarczyk wrote in a press release announcing the letter to Evers. “There can be no justification for commuting the sentences of convicted murderers who shattered families and communities. Any commutation process must exclude homicide offenders and ensure victims have a real voice before any action is taken.”

However, under the executive authority in the state constitution, a governor has broad power to offer commutations. 

The Republicans’ letter highlights the case of Ted Oswald, who was convicted of murdering Waukesha Police Captain James Lutz.

The letter to Evers requests that no applicant who has murdered a law enforcement officer be given a commutation, and in Piwowarczyk’s press release, he broadens that request to remove “all homicide offenders from eligibility for commutation consideration.”

The letter also contends that families and victims are learning about applications  for commutation via social media, rather than through a reliable victim notification process.

“We also ask you to strengthen victim notification requirements, ensure victims and their families have a voice in the process, and require full notification to district attorneys and sentencing judges whenever commutation applications are filed,”  the letter states.

In Piwowarczyk’s press release, he specifically requests “creating a robust public notification system and online tracking log for commutation applicants,” and offering notification to victims at least 90 days out, and guaranteeing victims and families are heard at hearings.

On Gov. Evers’ commutation webpage, in answer to the question “Will the victim have a say in my application?” the reply is,  “Yes, the perspectives and opinions of victims will be an important consideration for the Commutations Advisory Board.”

Commutation applicants are also required to notify circuit court and the district attorneys’ offices of their petitions for early release. 

In his April 3 press release, Evers defended commutation as promoting “rehabilitation by providing a system that rewards the positive efforts of incarcerated individuals who demonstrate personal growth and a commitment to change with the possibility of a second chance to contribute to society, become productive members of their communities, make amends and improve their lives and those of the people around them.”

The Governor also said he was offering commutations to “build upon” his efforts to reform Wisconsin’s justice system in the absence of efforts by the  Wisconsin  Legislature to reform the state’s criminal justice system.

The Wisconsin prison population is at a historic high, exceeding 23,000. Evers promised at the beginning of his administration in 2019 to cut the incarcerated population in half, but the population has floated around 23,000 without significant change.

Criminal justice advocates have pressured Evers to use his executive authority to offer commutations to lower the prison population, especially for those who have been in prison for years and have matured and become responsible individuals capable of living in society

Left out of much of the criticism of Evers’ commutation plan is the fact that an application doesn’t guarantee success – it just offers, for those who are qualified, a chance to apply for a commutation. Applicants who are rejected will have to wait a year to apply again.

The Wisconsin Examiner reached out to the governor’s office for a response to the letter, but did not receive a response Wednesday.

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A Dane County judge ruled Friday that lawmakers could not block administrative rules that had been through the rulemaking process and received approval from Gov. Tony Evers.

Evers and the Republican-led Legislature have been fighting over administrative rulemaking abilities for years. The Wisconsin Supreme Court decided in its July 2025 Evers v. Marklein II ruling that statutes allowing a legislative committee to pause or suspend administrative rules indefinitely were unconstitutional.

Following that decision, Evers started taking steps to implement 12 administrative rules he had previously approved,  without getting sign-off from legislative committees. Republican lawmakers responded by instructing the Legislative Reference Bureau (LRB) not to  publish any rule that hadn’t gone through a review by the Legislature. 

Evers sued in Sept. 2025 to block the lawmakers’ action.

Judge Nia Trammel granted Evers’ request for a declaration that LRB publish all administrative rules that have gone through the rulemaking procedures and have been approved by the governor.

In the ruling, Trammel said a rule can go into effect because there isn’t a statute prohibiting promulgation of a rule even if a standing committee has not completed a review and if one did exist it would be “facially unconstitutional.”

Trammel cited the state Supreme Court’s Marklein II decision, which found that “the ability of a ten-person committee to halt or interrupt the passage of a rule, which would ordinarily be required to be presented to the governor as a bill, is simply incompatible with Articles IV and V of the Wisconsin Constitution.”

“For the same reason, if the Court found that the standing committee had an ability to pause promulgation for up to sixty days, if not possibly months, it would also be unconstitutional,” Trammel wrote. 

Evers said in a statement that the decision is a win for Wisconsin and “our efforts to continue restoring the balance of power in Wisconsin.” 

“For far too long, the Republican Legislature had a gerrymandered majority that enabled them to undermine our constitutional separation of powers and give themselves outsized influence and power over state government,” Evers said. “A handful of lawmakers should not be able to singlehandedly bring the state to a standstill and stop good work from happening on behalf of the people of our state.”

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The day after the U.S. Supreme Court crippled the federal Voting Rights Act, NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson addressed a virtual gathering for the group’s members and supporters where he ranked the landmark decision alongside the court’s most infamous cases.

Dred Scott excluded Black people from American citizenship ahead of the Civil War. Plessy blessed policies of racial segregation in 1896. And now there was Callais. 

The opinion will “probably go down in the history book as one of three of the worst Supreme Court decisions in the history of this nation,” Johnson said.

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in Louisiana vs. Callais on April 29 cleared states to split apart, for political gain, congressional districts where a majority of residents belong to minority groups. The court’s conservative majority said Louisiana lawmakers acted unconstitutionally when they intentionally created the state’s second majority-Black district, which the justices found unnecessary.

A week after its release, the decision is roiling politics across the South as states move at a rapid pace to recast the political landscape that has taken progressives by surprise. 

Republicans, triumphant over their victory at the court, are rushing fresh gerrymanders through Southern statehouses in time for the November midterm elections in an effort to strengthen their party’s control over the region’s U.S. House delegations. They’re acting at lightning speed, over loud protests, and have nullified votes by suspending ongoing elections.

Democrats, especially Black residents, are furious with both the court and GOP politicians, who they believe are poised to wipe away decades of Black political progress in the region. The new maps that seek to oust Black members of Congress and prevent the election of Democrats in the future recall a Jim Crow past of literacy tests and poll taxes, they say.

“We refuse to let you kill us by killing our vote,” Eliza Jane Franklin, a resident of rural Barbour County, Alabama, told a state House hearing Tuesday.

Decision kicked off legislative efforts

The Alabama Legislature is moving to authorize a special primary election using a congressional map currently blocked in federal court, if a district court or, ultimately, the Supreme Court allows the state to move forward. At least one of the state’s two Black members of the U.S. House would be vulnerable.

In Louisiana, the governor has suspended the state’s primary elections for the U.S. House, setting aside some 42,000 votes that were already cast. Republican lawmakers will begin advancing a new gerrymander in a matter of days, aiming to force out at least one of the state’s two Black House members.

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a new map into law Monday that aims to hand his party up to four additional U.S. House seats. State lawmakers approved the map hours after the Supreme Court’s decision. The map has already drawn multiple legal challenges.

The South Carolina Legislature is weighing whether to redraw maps. And Tennessee lawmakers want to gerrymander a Memphis district currently held by U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, a white Democrat who represents the state’s only majority-Black district. 

“The Supreme Court has opined that redistricting, like the judicial system, should be color-blind,” Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton, a Republican, said in a statement Thursday unveiling a plan to divide the Memphis area among three congressional seats.

More states, in the South and elsewhere, are expected to pursue new maps over the next two years. Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp ruled out a special session this year, for example, but supports redistricting before the 2028 election. 

The current moment represents an extraordinary time in America, said Rebekah Caruthers, president and CEO of Fair Elections Center, a nonpartisan voting rights group. But she also called it a reversion “back to America.”

Many thought the presence of Black, Hispanic and Asian American elected officials somehow meant racial discrimination no longer existed, she said.

“And unfortunately, that is a misread of American history,” Caruthers said. “And perhaps it is a retelling of American history for those who want to gloss over America’s very sordid past, especially when it comes to voting rights.”

Midterms impact

The scramble by a handful of Southern states to redraw districts comes as Republicans grasp for any scintilla of advantage ahead of the midterm elections in November. 

A U.S. House under Democratic control would spell the end of much of President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda, produce a wave of investigations into his administration and potentially lead to a vote to impeach him in the House, though the Senate would almost certainly acquit him.

“This is all about Donald Trump wanting to avoid hard questions and oversight hearings about his actions,” Cohen said at a news conference in Memphis.

Seth McKee, a political science professor at Oklahoma State University who has studied Southern politics, said Republicans are attempting to “staunch the bleeding” ahead of unfavorable midterm elections.

“The desperation of this Republican Party, it’s off the charts,” McKee said.

Redistricting push supercharged

Prior to Callais, Trump had already urged Republicans to redraw congressional maps for partisan advantage — a process that typically occurs once a decade after the census. 

Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas enacted more GOP-friendly maps, while Democrats struck back in California and Virginia. In Utah, Republicans want to block a court-ordered map that’s more favorable to Democrats.

Republican primary voters have given their approval to that approach. On Tuesday, five Trump-endorsed state legislative candidates in Indiana defeated GOP incumbents who had defied the president to block a gerrymander in the state last year.

But until now the Voting Rights Act limited how far that gerrymandering push could extend.

For decades, Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act helped protect majority-minority districts from gerrymandering and ensured voters could elect Black candidates to Congress in Southern states following the end of state laws that blocked Black citizens from voting. The Callais opinion guts Section 2 by curtailing the consideration of race when drawing legislative maps.

Republicans have praised the decision and many have been clear that they believe the opinion opens up a path to securing additional GOP seats. Trump has endorsed disregarding primary elections that have already been held so that states can pass new maps — which he predicts can net Republicans an additional 20 seats this fall.

“We cannot allow there to be an Election that is conducted unconstitutionally simply for the ‘convenience’ of State Legislatures,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “If they have to vote twice, so be it.”

Calls for GOP seats

Over the past week, some Republicans have cast majority-minority districts previously protected by the Voting Rights Act as racist because they were drawn with attention paid to the racial makeup of the map. U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Missouri Republican, wrote on X that there are “no more excuses for keeping racist maps,” for example, and called for their immediate removal.

Other GOP leaders have centered their case for quick action on political power. Like Trump, they have explicitly invoked control of the U.S. House as a reason to gerrymander. While Republicans have the House, their margin of control is razor thin: 217 to 212, with one independent and five vacancies. Even a modest Democratic wave in November will likely sweep away GOP control.

Alabama Senate President Pro Tem Garlan Gudger Jr. and House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter said in a joint statement that the state’s lawmakers have a responsibility to offer Alabama a “fighting chance” to elect seven Republican U.S. representatives. Two of the state’s seven districts are held by Democrats.

“Control of the U.S. House of Representatives could come down to just a handful of seats, and when the dust settles, the people of Alabama will know that their Legislature stood firm, acted decisively, and did everything within its power to fight for fair representation,” Gudger and Ledbetter said.

Alabama Republicans want to use a map passed by lawmakers in 2023 that federal courts blocked from taking effect. Alabama’s current map was drawn by a court-appointed special master.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, a Republican, asked a federal district court Tuesday for an order that would let the state move forward with the gerrymander.

In Louisiana, Republicans obtained special permission from the Supreme Court to quickly move forward on a new gerrymander after the justices struck down its current map in the Callais decision.

Absentee voting was already underway in Louisiana before Republican Gov. Jeff Landry suspended congressional primary elections set for May 16. Votes already cast for U.S. House candidates won’t count, Republican Secretary of State Nancy Landry, no relation, has said.

Louisiana state lawmakers are set to begin work on a new map this month that will likely break apart a New Orleans district held by U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, a Black Democrat who has fought with the governor.

“The Court’s decision in these cases has spawned chaos in the State of Louisiana,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, one of the Supreme Court’s three liberal justices, wrote in a dissent of the decision to quickly finalize Callais.

Court challenges

Still, Democrats and other opponents of the gerrymandering effort across the South are turning to the courts. Lawsuits have also been filed challenging the suspension of Louisiana’s congressional primaries and Florida’s new map also faces court challenges.

A petition filed in Louisiana state court by Elias Law Group, a major Democrat-aligned voting rights litigation firm, alleges the governor’s decision to halt the congressional primary is unlawful and unprecedented. Only the state legislature has the power to set the state’s election schedule, the petition argues.

“Governors do not get to cancel elections by executive fiat, least of all elections that are already underway, with ballots in voters’ hands and votes already cast,” Lali Madduri, a partner at Elias Law Group, said in a statement.

Regardless of how the legal challenges play out, Democrats say the Callais decision and the ongoing fallout from the decision underscore the need for massive voter turnout in the November election. A large Democratic turnout that results in a significant Democratic majority in the U.S. House would serve as a rebuke to Trump’s gerrymandering campaign, they say.

Blue state gerrymanders

U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, South Carolina’s sole congressional Democrat, said during the NAACP virtual meeting that a Democratic House could pass voting rights legislation. 

“I would hope we could do that because I really think that’s our only hope legislatively,” Clyburn said.

Democrats have long called for the passage of a bill to restore preclearance, a major element of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court paused in 2013, which required states and local governments with a history of racial discrimination to obtain federal permission before making voting changes. 

But the measure would face a certain filibuster in the U.S. Senate. Even if Democrats broke a filibuster, Trump would likely veto it. 

In effect, Democrats’ most realistic opportunity to enact major voting rights legislation relies on regaining control of the White House and Congress and ending the filibuster — a set of conditions that’s out of reach until at least 2029.

In the meantime, more Democrats are calling for aggressive gerrymandering of blue states as a way to punch back. U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Rep. Joseph Morelle, both New York Democrats, on Monday announced an initiative to encourage their state to redraw congressional districts ahead of the 2028 election.

Gerrymandering New York would be an intensive effort, likely requiring voters to repeal or suspend anti-gerrymandering provisions in the state constitution. But voters in California and Virginia have previously endorsed Democratic gerrymanders.

“This is just the beginning,” Jeffries said in a statement. “Across the nation, we will sue, we will redraw and we will win.”