In semi-retirement, lifelong Columbus resident Greg Winbush has been coaching others on how to get through a paperwork-heavy process with sometimes burdensome emotional baggage: trying for a governor's pardon.
“I see myself come through the door when I talk to somebody because I know what it feels like to be rejected,” Winbush said in an interview earlier this year in his Near East Side office.
He is pursuing a passion that is extremely personal. More than a decade after a criminal conviction landed him in prison for two and a half years in the 1990s, Winbush was pardoned under former Gov. Ted Strickland in 2011.
Now he wants to guide, and maybe nudge or push, others through a process that he believes gives them a second chance.
“It’s not easy for people to reveal certain things because you're judged,” Winbush said.
Some of his clients will be vying for a forgiveness timetable faster than his own. Established in 2019 by Gov. Mike DeWine, the Governor's Expedited Pardon Project has cut pardon processing down from years to months for some being formally forgiven.
Through it, DeWine has granted pardons to more than 100 residents with prior criminal convictions. According to statistics provided by Ohio State University, as of June 2024, the governor’s office had received 1,140 applications to the program. Of those, 133 pardons have been granted and one has been denied.
The governor’s office and participating universities held an event at the Moritz College of Law in December 2023 to celebrate the project reaching four years and passing 100 pardons. It was only the second time DeWine had come face-to-face with someone to whom he granted clemency.
In the weeks that followed, applications to the program skyrocketed.
It can take a team—family and friends, attorneys and others, like Winbush—to get one person to the finish line, said Sarah Ackman. As an attorney in DeWine's office working on the project, she is the person calling the newest pardoned Ohioans.
“It generally is a pretty emotional phone call,” Ackman said in an interview Thursday. “They all sort of characterize it in a different way. But people use phrases like, ‘This cloud lifted,’ that this thing is now lifted from their lives, that they can now do these things that they never thought that they could do.”
Through the project, law students across the state screen applicants and offer free application assistance. More information can about the Expedited Pardon Project be found here.
