For more than two decades, a felony conviction from Shakorie Davis’s youth trailed him onto every construction site he tried to walk, even ones his own company was building. This month, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine granted the 47-year-old Cleveland builder a full pardon, closing out a case that began when Davis stole a $300 gold chain outside South High School in 2007 and served more than 20 months in prison on theft and drug charges from the late 1990s.
Davis is the founder of Next Generation Construction, a firm he started in 2009 that has since grown by more than 912 percent in five years and was named the fifth-fastest-growing company in Northeast Ohio, according to Cleveland.com. The company now employs more than 100 people and has built a reputation well beyond its founder’s past — yet that past kept surfacing in the most mundane ways. Davis was routinely denied a visitor’s badge and had to be escorted around job sites his own firm was working on because of his record, and he was also denied a small-business loan and a United Kingdom visa, the outlet reported.
The Cleveland State University Pardon, Clemency and Reentry Clinic connected Davis with Ohio’s Expedited Pardon Project, a program launched in 2019 to give qualified applicants a faster route than the state’s traditional clemency process. Davis’s application took about 16 months to move through the system, and the Ohio Parole Board ultimately approved his case by a unanimous 8-0 vote before DeWine granted the full pardon. His case became the 40th pardon granted through CSU’s program, according to Cleveland.com’s reporting.
A Program Built to Clear a Backlog
Davis’s outcome sits inside a much larger effort. Since the Expedited Pardon Project launched in December 2019, it has received 1,662 applications from 84 Ohio counties and 33 states, resulting in 287 pardons granted by DeWine as of February 2026, according to the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center at Ohio State’s Moritz College of Law. The CSU clinic alone has helped more than 500 people pursue pardons, record sealing, or expungement, and currently has 40 local applications pending, though the clinic has paused new applications outside the expedited track, per Cleveland.com…