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On Pardoning And Commuting Prison Sentences, Obama Is Way Behind His Goal

On Pardoning And Commuting Prison Sentences, Obama Is Way Behind His Goal

As of last week, President Obama has used his clemency powers to reduce the sentences of more federal inmates than any president in nearly a century, and more than the previous nine presidents combined, according to a White House press release which announced the largest single day clemency action in 116 years. Obama commuted 214 sentences to bring his total as president to 562. He broke Franklin Roosevelt’s single-day record of 151, according to political scientist P.S. Ruckman, Jr.

But despite Obama’s recent success pardoning large numbers of federal inmates, he hasn’t come close to then-Attorney General Eric Holder‘s optimistic projections in 2011 — that as many as 10,000 people could be released early.

Since Obama began acting seriously on that projection, just two years ago (before then, he was on pace to be the lowest commuter and pardoner in 100 years, according to the Washington Post), the Justice Department has struggled to process an ever-increasing number of hopeful inmates’ cases.

And as late as January of this year, Obama’s Pardon Attorney, Deborah Leff, resigned in frustration, saying she was “unable to do [her] job effectively,” and pointing to restricted access to White House counsel and instructions she said she had received “to set aside thousands of petitions for pardon and traditional commutation.”

In her letter of resignation, Leff acknowledged the Obama administration’s 2014 pledge to focus on commuting the sentences of non-violent drug offenders who, had they been sentenced today, would have received far shorter sentences.

Clemency Project 2014, a group of non-profits and pro bono lawyers helping the Justice Department process case files, was established to support that effort. But to date, the White House isn’t anywhere near commuting the sentences of 10,000 people. That would have been a full five percent of the federal prison population.

And Obama’s record on pardons, or the full erasure of criminal liability rather than simply making a sentence shorter, is still much worse that his predecessors: The president has fully pardoned only 70 people. President Reagan granted 393 pardons, President Clinton granted 396, and President George W. Bush granted 189, according to USA Today. In fact, Obama has pardoned fewer people than any president since William McKinley, the first president for whom such statistics were recorded.

Though Obama has pledged to try and make up for the discrepancy — there were 1,378 pardon petitions pending presidential approval as of June 6, according to the Office of the Pardon Attorney — a mammoth bureaucratic process stands in his way: Pardons require a full FBI background check, and every inmate pardoned requires a huge investment of Justice Department and FBI resources.

It doesn’t help that the president is up against a political culture that has recently swung away from his favored motto on the issue, that America is “a nation of second chances” and towards Donald Trump’s: “Law and Order.”

Obama has mentioned the damaging effects of two notable cases on public sentiment towards the executive power today: Willie Horton, who committed rape and murder after being temporarily released from prison on a Massachusetts weekend furlough program, and Marc Rich, a billionaire commodities trader and Democratic donor on the lamb for tax evasion and other charges whose pardon the New York Times called “a shocking abuse of presidential power”.

Those two extremes, of the president’s clemency power as a representation of leniency towards violent criminals and political allies, may have inspired Obama’s guidelines for applying for clemency in his administration: Individuals seeking free legal help from the Clemency Project were required to have served 10 years of their sentence for a non-violent crime, without any record of significant violence in prisons and without any significant ties to gangs or cartels, among other things.

Last week, the New York Timeseditorial board, noting Obama’s broken promises, urged the president and the Justice Department to employ another tool at their disposal — the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984’s “compassionate release” provision, which was recently widened in a ruling by United States Sentencing Commission to include age, family and medical circumstances, and “other extraordinary and compelling reasons” as justification for reconsidering an inmate’s status.

Obama should act now to fulfill a central premise of his presidency — that the United States is a nation of second chances, and that it is a moral imperative to re-examine the cases of the unjustly imprisoned.

 

 

Harsh Drug Sentences Take Their Toll On Black Lives

Harsh Drug Sentences Take Their Toll On Black Lives

On a Sunday morning in late July, in a small town in southwest Alabama, Barbara Moore Knight gave her fellow church members news that brought spontaneous applause and murmurs of “Amen!” She told them that her son, James LaRon Knight, was among the drug felons whose sentences had been commuted by President Barack Obama the week before.

In 2004, Knight was convicted of conspiracy to sell cocaine. Although the crime was nonviolent, he was sentenced to more than 24 years in a federal prison. The sentence was a travesty, an unduly harsh punishment for a family man never accused of running a substantial criminal enterprise.

Knight, 48, is among countless black Americans ruined by the long, costly and punitive effort to stamp out recreational use of illegal drugs. The owner of a barbershop in suburban Atlanta, he was convicted on the testimony of acquaintances who found themselves caught in the spiderweb of the criminal justice system and offered him up as a way to appease authorities. There was no direct evidence that Knight possessed or sold banned substances.

Recognizing the havoc wreaked by the so-called war on drugs, especially in black America, Obama has worked to ameliorate its effects. In 2014, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the Clemency Project, which aims to reduce the disproportionately long federal sentences handed out to hundreds of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders over the past decade or so. The president has reduced or ended the prison sentences of more than 560 federal prisoners so far, most of them convicted of nonviolent drug-related crimes.

Obama also helped persuade Congress to reduce the inequities in federal drug-sentencing policies, which had punished those convicted of handling crack cocaine more harshly than those sentenced for powdered cocaine. (Many states retain similar inequitable statutes.) The old law gave a person convicted of possessing 5 grams of crack, which was more prevalent in poor black neighborhoods, a mandatory five-year prison sentence. But those who possessed powdered cocaine, used mostly by more affluent whites, had to have 100 times as much to draw the same sentence. The new federal law substantially narrows the disparity.

Given increasing awareness of the costs of the war on drugs and of the inequities that still haunt the criminal justice system, you’d think that the Clemency Project would have been greeted with universal support. The burden of mass incarceration falls heavily on the shoulders of black Americans, who are less likely than whites to use illegal drugs, according to research, but more likely to go to prison for drug crimes anyway.

Still, there are many prosecutors and conservative politicians who have denounced Obama’s push against mass incarceration. U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., an early supporter of Donald Trump’s presidential bid, rushed to condemn Obama’s most recent commutations, claiming the president “continues to abuse executive power in an unprecedented, reckless manner.”

So the prejudices — the preconceived notions, the stereotypes, the outright racism — continue. The tragic heroin epidemic has prompted an outpouring of sympathy and calls for a less punitive approach to illegal drugs, but heroin users are overwhelmingly white. That compassion has not been extended to black Americans, who are still regarded as more drug-addled, more violent, more dangerous and more deserving of lengthy prison terms.

(Tellingly, those prejudices extend beyond the criminal justice system and into the medical establishment. According to research, doctors are less likely to prescribe heavy-duty painkillers, such as oxycodone, to black patients, even when their pain is severe. “Our data pretty clearly say it’s a race issue,” Raymond Tait, a pain researcher at Saint Louis University in Missouri, told The New York Times.)

Barbara Moore Knight describes herself as “still on cloud nine” after the news of her son’s early release. “I really do thank God for working through President Obama,” she said.

Her obvious joy notwithstanding, her family has paid dearly for America’s obsession with treating nonviolent drug crimes as existential threats to the republic. Her son’s marriage fell apart after his incarceration; he missed crucial years with his sons, who are now 27 and 14. Obama’s clemency cannot restore those pieces of a man’s life.

(Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.)

Photo: Inmates walk in San Quentin state prison in San Quentin, California, June 8, 2012.     REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson