“It’s one person’s call at the end of the day,” Mr. Bevin said in an interview. “Did I seek a lot of input from a lot of sources? Yes. But it still rode on the shoulders of one person.”

Not all of Mr. Bevin’s reprieves have been the subject of controversy. More than half of those that he granted clemency were low-level offenders released from overcrowded jails and prisons as part of a planned mass commutation. Others were pardoned after years out of prison, and some of those released early had been championed by groups like the Innocence Project or recommended by the state public defender.

Officials described the governor in his last days sitting in an office among stacks of pardon applications, peppering aides with text messages at all hours about the details of this or that case. Mr. Bevin said he had been looking at some of the cases for months, especially those in which he went further than the courts by ruling that a person had been wrongfully convicted.

“The clemency power is the traditional last resort,” said Margaret Love, a former federal pardon attorney. “If there is truly a case for innocence or unfairness, it’s usually going to be caught by the courts. And if it isn’t caught by the courts, I would recommend a really thorough and pretty public examination of individual cases to determine innocence.”

As news of the decisions began trickling out, criticism focused quickly on clemency recipients who had wealth or influential family connections.

In one case, Elizabeth Stakelbeck, a friend of Mr. Bevin’s sister, was pardoned after being convicted in a 2013 plot to hire a hit man to kill her ex-husband and his new wife. Mr. Bevin’s sister had testified on her behalf in a related case, telling the court that her friend was a “changed person.”

Few cases drew more attention than that of Patrick Baker, after The Louisville Courier Journal reported that Mr. Baker’s relatives hosted a political fund-raiser for the governor at their home last year. Mr. Baker had been convicted in a 2014 homicide but argued that he had been framed by the police, a claim supported by the Exoneration Project in Chicago.