Obama grants more clemency petitions, cuts prison sentences for 61 offenders
President Barack Obama on Wednesday granted the clemency petitions of 61 federal prisoners, reducing their sentences and providing for them to be freed later this year.
Approximately a third of those whose sentences were commuted have been serving life terms. The petitioners are not considered violent, although a few have firearm offenses on their records, according to the Associated Press and USA Today.
Most “are low-level drug offenders whose sentences would have been shorter if they were convicted under today’s laws,” the president said in a post on Facebook. A Washington Post (reg. req.) article names the 61 and provides information about their original sentences.
These latest commutations bring Obama’s total while in office to 248, said White House counsel Neil Eggleston in a blog post. That total, which includes 92 life sentences, is more than the combined number of clemency petitions granted by the six presidents who served immediately before him.
Among the 61 given clemency are 25 individuals whose efforts were supported by Clemency Project 2014, a national initiative backed by bar associations, lawyers and legal nonprofits throughout the country, including the American Bar Association.
However, the 248 commutations still leave a big backlog of unresolved clemency petitions in the executive branch.
“Sixty-one grants, with over 10,000 petitions pending, is not an accomplishment to brag about,” law professor Mark Osler of the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota told the Washington Post (reg. req.).
“I know some of those still waiting, men who were grievously over-sentenced, who have reformed themselves, and never had a record of violence,” said Osler, who is an advocate for inmates seeking clemency. “My heart breaks for them, as their hope for freedom—a hope created by the members of this administration—slips away.”
In an American Bar Association news release on Wednesday, ABA President Paulette Brown joined with project manager Cynthia W. Roseberry of Clemency Project 2014 in thanking Obama for the commutations and calling for more during the remaining months in his term of office.
“The American Bar Association appreciates today’s commutations by President Obama, and we hope to see many more commutations as the petitions submitted by Clemency Project 2014 and its army of volunteer lawyers make their way through the application process to the President’s desk,” said Brown.
In his blog post, Eggleston said that “overly punitive sentencing policies” are the root cause of excessive sentences and need to be addressed. “Despite the progress we have made,” he wrote, “it is important to remember that clemency is nearly always a tool of last resort that can help specific individuals, but does nothing to make our criminal justice system on the whole more fair and just.”
Related coverage:
ABA Journal: “Clemency Project 2014 is out to help prisoners doing excessive time due to inflexible sentencing”
ABAJournal.com: “ABA, other legal organizations call for more volunteers for Clemency Project 2014”
ABAJournal.com: “Despite Holder’s call for clemency to free over 10,000, actual number so far is much lower”
ABAJournal.com: “Pardon attorney’s resignation letter cites backlogs and reversals”
