And not just any cop-killer, but a domestic terrorist to boot. Former Weather Underground militant David Gilbert can apply for parole thanks to Andrew Cuomo’s parting shots at New York as he resigned in disgrace from office. Cuomo commuted sentences for five murderers, including Gilbert’s:

Just hours before leaving office, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo granted clemency to five men, including the commutation of the 75-years-to-life sentence of David Gilbert, a former member of the radical Weather Underground who in 1981 took part in the robbery of a Brink’s armored truck in Rockland County that left two Nyack police officers and a security guard dead.

Cuomo’s action will allow Gilbert to make his case to the parole board. The 76-year-old has been incarcerated for four decades after being convicted of felony murder and robbery. He is currently confined at Shawangunk Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Ulster County, 80 miles south of Albany.

Cuomo commuted sentences for four other murderers:

Cuomo ordered the release of four other prisoners, including 68-year-old Paul Mingo, who was sentenced in 1983 to serve 50 to life in the 1980 robbery-murder of a Queens couple. Mingo’s family had long vouched for his innocence, blaming his conviction on inadequate legal representation. The soon-to-be-former governor praised Mingo as “a dedicated and respected peer counselor” who had gotten his GED and became a certified paralegal.

Another clemency recipient was 62-year-old Robert Ehrenberg, who got a 50-to-life sentence after he shot and killed a man during a 1992 robbery. Cuomo’s announcement noted that Ehrenberg had graduated from college while in prison and praised his volunteer work for charity.

The fourth commutation recipient was 66-year-old Ulysses Boyd, who was convicted of second-degree murder in connection with a 1986 killing at a Harlem crack house. The fifth was 59-year-old Paul Clark, convicted of second-degree murder, attempted murder and weapons possession after shooting and killing a 17-year-old at a block party near his Brooklyn home in 1980.

The Gilbert pardon is the most notable, not just because of Gilbert’s participation in the domestic-terror group but also because of his son. Chesa Boudin is the district attorney in San Francisco, one of the progressive DAs elected recently around the country to run afoul of his electorate. One recall effort targeting Boudin fell just short of qualifying for the ballot last week by 1700 signatures. Another is still under way and has until late October to gather enough signatures.

New York Magazine offered a largely sympathetic profile that nevertheless explained why San Franciscans might have had enough of Boudin:

A 39-year-old public defender, he was a son of the old-school American radical left, a Rhodes Scholar with a sensational backstory that involved Marxist-revolutionary parents incarcerated for murder. He campaigned on promises to fight mass incarceration, decriminalize poverty, and hold cops accountable. Though Boudin had experienced great privilege, he had also suffered and seen human suffering, and his endorsements came from not just local political players but national public intellectuals like Angela Davis, Bernie Sanders, and Ibram X. Kendi. He embodied the surging progressive will to uproot systemic racism from courts, jails, and police departments nationwide as well as any white American male possibly could.

This reformist impulse gained urgency after the killing that May of George Floyd, wide-scale Black Lives Matter protests, and outrage over police brutality against activists. By the end of last summer, though, months into pandemic lockdowns, another national mood was settling in, one that now threatens to end Boudin’s term prematurely: fear of rising crime. In San Francisco, it started in late summer 2020, when local news outlets, citing police data, reported a more than 40 percent increase in home burglaries over the past year. Bay Area TV stations aired home-security video paired with interviews with concerned residents; families added extra locks to front doors. Soon, reports of other brazen crimes captivated the city: a hit-and-run with a stolen vehicle on New Year’s Eve, the fatal assault of an elderly Thai man in broad daylight.

As happened in other jurisdictions, Boudin won office by promising to end cash bail and refusing to prosecute lower-level crimes. That might have sounded good for a hot second, especially in a place as progressive as San Francisco, but the inevitable outcomes of such policies have taken the bloom off the rose. Nevertheless, Democrats have put great hopes into their DA efforts, and Boudin is one of their leading lights. One has to wonder whether Cuomo would have bothered with Gilbert at all without Boudin’s pedigree being part of the picture.

As for the other four, rational cases can be made for clemency actions. The bigger question here is why Cuomo was allowed to hold this authority at all. His resignation announcement should have prompted the legislature to act to restrain Cuomo from executive authority and transfer such power to Kathy Hochul on a temporary basis. Their failure to act had real consequences in executive actions Cuomo was allowed to make despite their investigations into abuses of power in matters both connected to and separate from the sexual-harassment claims that resulted in his resignation.

As such, the clemency action for Gilbert also belongs to Carl Heastie and the Democrats in the state assembly. They could have acted at any time over the last few months to deal with their out-of-control governor. Instead, they sat back and let events unfold on their own.

Gilbert’s not out of prison yet, however. New York governors do not have plenary commutation powers; all this does is allow Gilbert and the others to apply for parole. It’s now up to them to send a message about killing police officers and whether progressive mythology should play a part in getting sprung.