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

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — A white former Kansas City police officer 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.

Republican Gov. Mike Parson’s decision to release Eric DeValkenaere came after months of public debate over the case, which had sparked both racial justice protests and passionate pleas for mercy from DeValkenaere’s supporters who argued he was wrongly convicted .

DeValkenaere was serving a six-year prison sentence. That was him sentenced in 2021 of killing 26-year-old Cameron Lamb as he backed into his garage. Lamb’s name was often invoked during protests against racial injustice 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 reduced his sentence to parole, subject to the normal restrictions against possession of firearms, traveling out of state without permission and other matters. He granted a similar parole commutation to Patty Prewitt, another high-profile inmate who spent 40 years behind bars for her husband’s murder.

The Department of Corrections confirmed that both were released Friday afternoon, before Parson publicly announced his decisions. DeValkenaere was being held at an out-of-state prison for his own safety, Department of Corrections spokesperson Karen Pojmann said.

The clemency announcements came just weeks before Parson was set to end his term, capping a historic series 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 applications he inherited when he came to power in June 2018. most commonly granted clemency cases of any Missouri governor since the 1940s. But Parson has also denied nearly 4,000 clemency requests.

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

However, prosecutors argued that police should not have been on the premises and staged the shooting to support their claims that Lamb was armed.

“DeValkenaere was convicted of killing an unarmed man. Period,” Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker said in a social media post Friday. “He received incredible mercy from the governor. No such mercy was shown to the victims. Today we will focus our time on caring for Cameron’s family rather than commenting further. .”

Messages left with attorneys and groups supporting both DeValkenaere and the Lamb family were not immediately returned Friday.

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

The judge, Dale Youngs, said officers had no warrant for Lamb’s arrest and had no search warrant or permission to be on the property. He called it a tragic case with disturbing facts and said DeValkenaere and the officer with him escalated a situation that had calmed down. He did not address allegations that evidence had been planted.

DeValkenaere left the police after his conviction but remained free on bail until he lost his appeal in October 2023. Then the Missouri Supreme Court rejected appeal to be heard.

DeValkenaere’s wife, Sarah DeValkenaere, took to social media earlier this week — as she had often done — urging followers to ask for clemency.

“I miss him so much,” she said in one 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 explain his clemency decisions when he announced them Friday. But he had previously acknowledged the pressure in an August interview on KCMO Talk Radio.

“Not a week goes by without someone contacting me about this matter, and we’ll see what happens here soon. I’ll leave it at that. But you know what, I don’t like where he is. I’ll just say that,” Parson said.

Prewitt, now 75, had filed several clemency petitions 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 refused 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 that her ex-lovers testified at the 1985 trial that she had talked about killing Bill Prewitt.

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

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