Amid a slew of last-minute pardons, President Donald Trump has granted clemency to a former Prince George’s County police officer who served 10 years in prison for releasing her police dog on an unarmed man experiencing homelessness.

During a search for burglars in 1995, Stephanie Mohr released her dog on Ricardo G. Mendez, a Mexican immigrant who had been sleeping on a roof in Takoma Park and was not resisting arrest. Prosecutors said the dog took a chunk out of Mendez’s leg, and Mohr was convicted in 2001 of violating his civil rights.

The case came amid a massive federal probe into Prince George’s County police, which included an investigation into the canine unit along with a separate investigation into excessive force across the department. It led to broad reforms in the department and years of independent oversight from the federal government.

Court records and reporting from the time showed a pattern of alleged misconduct among officers involving police dogs. Mohr was named in at least four civil lawsuits accusing her of brutality, according to the Washington Post. Federal prosecutors named five instances where Mohr was accused of either releasing her dog or threatening to release her dog on Black people who were not resisting arrest.

In a statement announcing the pardon, the White House celebrated Mohr’s contributions to the department.

Mohr “achieved the distinction of being the first female canine handler in the Department’s history,” the White House wrote. “Officer Mohr was a highly commended member of the police force prior to her prosecution. Today’s action recognizes that service and the lengthy term that Ms. Mohr served in prison.”

The Fraternal Order of Police, which supported Mohr’s bid for clemency along with the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, celebrated the news on Twitter, calling her sentence “unjust and unfair.”

Mohr had been pursuing a presidential pardon from Trump since at least the beginning of this year. Earlier this month, she made an appearance on the right-wing, pro-Trump news outlet Newsmax to advocate for her clemency, arguing that her prison sentence was overly harsh.

“I got 10 years, basically one year for every stitch that the suspect received on his calf,” she said.

The canine unit had a “pattern and practice” of sending dogs to bite people who were not resisting arrest, or who were even handcuffed, according to Sharon Weidenfeld, a private investigator who has worked on police brutality cases in Prince George’s County for more than 30 years.

“A large majority” of the cases she worked on in the mid-to-late 1990s involved alleged misconduct by the unit.

“My job was to take pictures of people who had been wounded by the dog, so I have a lot of gory pictures that people wouldn’t even believe are dog bites,” Weidenfeld said. “I mean, there were huge chunks missing out of people’s legs and arms and other body parts.”

The news of Mohr’s pardon takes her “back to the time that I spent so much time going and meeting with these people who were permanently disfigured, whose lives were turned upside down and who had, you know, there’s really no other word to describe it — had been tortured by the PG police.”

Weidenfeld said she ultimately ended up providing the FBI with thousands of pages of police reports, medical reports and photographs, urging them to investigate. The Department of Justice launched a probe in 1999.

Former Washington Post reporter Ruben Castaneda broke the story of the probe and published a major investigation that covered 18 lawsuits alleging brutality by officers in the canine unit. He found that officers accused of excessive force routinely went undisciplined.

“Looking at hundreds of court records and conducting numerous interviews, I could not find a single instance of a canine officer who was disciplined by the police department for excessive force,” said Castaneda.

Mohr’s conviction represented a major turning point.

“Certainly, the federal prosecution, conviction, and incarceration of Stephanie Mohr had a huge impact that showed officers that they could, in fact, be held criminally liable for excessive force on the job,” Castaneda said.

The criminal trial, Justice Department probe and consistent media coverage put the department “under a spotlight,” he added, which resulted in significant police reforms in Prince George’s County.

Castaneda said that within months of publishing his investigation, county officials announced reforms to the canine unit’s policies and police “pretty much changed the entire unit and brought in a whole new group of officers.”

And in 2004, as part of its settlement with the Department of Justice, Prince George’s County police agreed to start tracking canine attacks and retrain its dogs to bark and not bite suspects, in addition to adopting new policies on firearms and a stronger review system for misconduct allegations. (Previously, Prince George’s County police specifically trained its dogs to bite people, unlike many other departments where they were trained to bark at people as their first step to subdue suspects, according to Weidenfeld.)

While Mohr was sent to prison, Weidenfeld said few other officers on the canine unit faced major consequences for their alleged use of force. Some faced civil lawsuits and others had to go through internal investigations led by the police department, but “they were never in danger of having anything bad happen to them,” Weidenfeld said. “And almost without fail, each one of them was promoted and continued in the department.”

Still, she does not believe Mohr was unfairly targeted.

“That culture of the police department at that time — Stephanie Mohr was a part of it. And she wasn’t the only one, but she wasn’t somebody that was just, you know, wrongly picked out,” said Weidenfeld.

A lawyer for Mohr, who currently works as a construction standards inspector for the St. Mary’s County government, didn’t respond to an immediate request for comment.

“There’s really not much I would have done differently, even if I could,” Mohr told WTOP. “I was made a scapegoat.”