Outgoing Kentucky governor Matt Bevin issued hundreds of commutations and pardons as his term ended Monday night, among them two for gruesome crimes. Bevin granted amnesty to Delmar Partin, who was convicted of murder for beating and strangling his coworker Betty Carnes to death before beheading her and stuffing her corpse in a barrel in 1994. Partin intended to dump the barrel in a toxic waste site. The two were having an affair she had ended. Bevin also commuted the sentence for Charles Doug Phelps, a teacher who pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography for having images of minors performing sexual acts on his phone. 

Bevin said the state had been unwilling to test potential DNA evidence in the Partin case. The prosecutor in the case said called the governor’s decision “mystifying” and said Bevin harbored “a god-like image of himself.”