The expansive use of his clemency power
is part of a broader effort by Mr. Obama to correct what he sees as the
excesses of the past, when politicians eager to be tough on crime threw
away the key even for minor criminals. With many Republicans and
Democrats now agreeing that the nation went too far, Mr. Obama holds the
power to unlock that prison door, especially for young African-American
and Hispanic men disproportionately affected.
But
even as he exercises authority more assertively than any of his modern
predecessors, Mr. Obama has only begun to tackle the problem he has
identified. In the next weeks, the total number of commutations for Mr.
Obama’s presidency may surpass 80, but more than 30,000 federal inmates
have come forward in response to his administration’s call for clemency
applications. A cumbersome review process has advanced only a small
fraction of them. And just a small fraction of those have reached the
president’s desk for a signature.
“I
think they honestly want to address some of the people who have been
oversentenced in the last 30 years,” said Julie Stewart, the founder and
president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums,
a group advocating changes in sentencing. “I’m not sure they envisioned
that it would be as complicated as it is, but it has become more
complicated, whether it needs to be or not, and that’s what has bogged
down the process.”
Overhauling
the criminal justice system has become a bipartisan venture. Like Mr.
Obama, Republicans running for his job are calling for systemic changes.
Lawmakers from both parties are collaborating on legislation. And the
United States Sentencing Commission has revised guidelines for drug offenders, so far retroactively reducing sentences for more than 9,500 inmates, nearly three-quarters of them black or Hispanic.
The
drive to recalibrate the system has brought together groups from across
the political spectrum. The Center for American Progress, a liberal
advocacy organization with close ties to the White House and Bill and
Hillary Rodham Clinton, has teamed up with Koch Industries, the
conglomerate owned by the conservative brothers Charles G. and David H.
Koch, who finance Republican candidates, to press for reducing prison populations and overhauling sentencing.
“It’s
a time when conservatives and liberals and libertarians and lots of
different people on the political spectrum” have “come together in order
to focus attention on excessive sentences, the costs and the like, and
the need to correct some of those excesses,” said Neil Eggleston, the
White House counsel who recommends clemency petitions to Mr. Obama. “So I
think the president sees the commutations as a piece of that entire
process.”
The
challenge has been finding a way to use Mr. Obama’s clemency power in
the face of bureaucratic and legal hurdles without making a mistake that
would be devastating to the effort’s political viability. The White
House has not forgotten the legacy of Willie Horton, a convicted
murderer who raped a woman while furloughed from prison and became a
powerful political symbol that helped doom the presidential candidacy of
Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts in 1988.
But
with time running short in Mr. Obama’s presidency, the White House has
pushed the Justice Department to send more applicants more quickly. Mr.
Eggleston told the department not to interpret guidelines too narrowly
because it is up to the president to decide, according to officials. If
it seems like a close case, he told the department to send it over.
Deborah Leff,
the department’s pardon attorney, has likewise pressed lawyers
representing candidates for clemency to hurry up and send more cases her
way. “If there is one message I want you to take away today, it’s this:
Sooner is better,” she told lawyers in a video seminar obtained by USA Today. “Delaying is not helpful.”
Under the Constitution,
the president has the power to grant “pardons for offenses against the
United States” or to commute federal sentences. A pardon is an act of presidential forgiveness
and wipes away any remaining legal liabilities from a conviction. A
commutation reduces a sentence but does not eliminate a conviction or
restore civil rights lost as a result of the conviction.
In
recent times, attention has focused on presidential pardons because
they have become politically controversial, such as Gerald R. Ford’s pardon of Richard M. Nixon, the elder George Bush’s pardons of Iran-contra figures and Bill Clinton’s pardons of the financier Marc Rich and scores of others.
Modern
presidents have been far less likely to commute sentences. Lyndon B.
Johnson commuted the sentences of 80 convicted criminals in the 1966
fiscal year, and no president since then has matched
that in his entire administration, much less in a single year. Ronald
Reagan commuted only 13 sentences in eight years in office, while George
W. Bush commuted just 11 in the same amount of time. The elder Mr. Bush
commuted three sentences in his four years.
Mr.
Obama started out much like the others, commuting just one sentence in
his first five years in office. But in his first term he signed a law
easing sentencing for new inmates by reducing the disparity between
crack and powder cocaine, while his attorney general, Eric H. Holder
Jr., issued new guidelines to prosecutors to avoid charges requiring
excessive prison terms.
In
his second term, Mr. Obama embarked on an effort to use clemency and
has raised his total commutations to 43, a number he may double this
month. The initiative was begun last year by James M. Cole,
then the deputy attorney general, who set criteria for who might
qualify: generally nonviolent inmates who have served more than 10 years
in prison, have behaved well while incarcerated and would not have
received as lengthy a sentence under today’s revised rules.
“It’s
a touchy situation,” Mr. Cole said in an interview. “You don’t want to
just supplant a judge’s determination of sentence.” But after reviewing
many clemency petitions, he said, “I’d seen a number of them where the
sentences seemed very high for the conduct and it noted that the judge
at the time of sentencing thought the sentence was too high. We looked
at that and thought this really isn’t supplanting the judge.”
To
respond to Mr. Cole’s call, several groups formed a consortium of
lawyers to prepare applications for inmates, including the American Bar
Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National
Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and Ms. Stewart’s advocacy
group. The more than 30,000 inmates who applied inundated the effort.
The consortium, called Clemency Project 2014,
now has more than 50 law firms, more than 20 law schools and more than
1,500 lawyers participating. But the process is burdensome as the
volunteer lawyers try to dig out documents from more than a decade ago
to satisfy the criteria. So far, they have screened out 13,000 inmates
who did not meet the guidelines and sent just over 50 applications to
the Justice Department.
Cynthia
W. Roseberry, who left her job as a top federal public defender in
Georgia to lead the project, said it took a while to set up a process
but it has now been streamlined. “The lawyers will be able to do the
analysis a lot quicker and we’ll be able to move them faster,” she said.
Aside
from the Clemency Project, the Justice Department has received more
than 6,600 applications for commutations since Mr. Cole outlined the
criteria, more than twice the rate over a similar period earlier in Mr.
Obama’s presidency. Ms. Leff, the pardon attorney, has solicited
volunteers from around the department to give a day or more a week to
help out, but her office is taxed. The White House has asked Congress to
increase funding for the office from $3.9 million this year to $5.9
million next year.
Margaret
Love, who served as pardon attorney under the first Mr. Bush and Mr.
Clinton and now represents prisoners applying for clemency, said the
process had become a mess. “It’s really poor management,” she said.
“These are people who don’t have any history with sentence reduction.
They’ve been putting people in prison all their lives. They don’t know
how to get them out.”
Senator
Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the Republican chairman of the Judiciary
Committee, has expressed concern that the Justice Department has
essentially outsourced a government function to the Clemency Project
2014. Department officials dispute that, saying the project does the
same thing lawyers have always done in helping candidates for clemency
prepare applications.
The
department noted that it still reviews the cases and makes it own
judgments before sending recommendations to the White House. Officials
acknowledged that it was slow in starting the effort. “There was a
start-up time, but now we’re really in it,” said Emily Pierce, a
department spokeswoman. “We feel we’re moving at a good pace.”
In December, Mr. Obama commuted the sentences of eight drug offenders, and in March he followed up with 22 more.
If he accepts most of the latest applications sent to the White House,
some officials said it would probably double that last batch of 22,
exceeding the 36 commutations Mr. Clinton issued at one time on his last
day in office.
Among those Mr. Obama granted clemency in March were eight prisoners serving life sentences
for crimes like possession with intent to distribute cocaine, growing
more than 1,000 marijuana plants or possession of a firearm by a
convicted felon.
Mr. Obama signed letters
to the recipients explaining that they had demonstrated the potential
to turn their lives around. “By doing so, you will affect not only your
own life, but those close to you,” he wrote. “You will also influence,
through your example, the possibility that others in your circumstances
get their own second chance in the future.
“I believe in your ability to prove the doubters wrong,” he added. “So good luck, and Godspeed.”
(NYtimes)
No comments:
Post a Comment