Bill Keller is upset with President Obama. In an opinion piece at Politico Monday, the former executive editor of the New York Times notes that Obama has embraced criminal justice reform, rhetorically and in practice. Then he asks, “So how come he’s freed so few prisoners?”
Keller, who now writes for the Marshall Project, a nonprofit nonpartisan online journalism organization covering criminal justice reform, says that Obama fully supports the idea that America incarcerates too many people for too long. “And yet,” Keller writes about Obama, “as he approaches his own last-minute frenzy of requests for clemency, Obama’s record so far — counting commutations and pardons — lags behind every recent president except George H.W. Bush, who had only a single term.”
In fact, on pardons “Obama is the stingiest president since John Adams — 64 granted so far, less than 3 percent of the petitions filed.” Pardons, which wipe out the criminal record of inmates, give ex-inmates a better shot at finding jobs and getting an education, voting and returning to normal lives.
Obama does no better on commutations, which reduce sentences deemed excessive. A couple years ago, the Clemency Project 2014 was created. CP14 brought together five outside legal groups to develop a process to address clemency requests. Thousands of volunteer lawyers and law students were enlisted to help inmates prepare and write applications for reduced sentences in a fast-track process that would quickly lead to the president’s desk.
The criteria were stringent. Applicants had to have been sentenced to 10 years in prison for crimes that today would bring much shorter sentences. They had to have had no connections to drug cartels, gangs or organized crime, no history of violence and perfect behavior in prison.
The Clemency Project 2014 has received applications from more than 33,000 federal inmates. But so far only four of them have been granted clemency. Overall, Obama has commuted the sentences of just 89 inmates.
Earlier this year Obama pledged a “steady ramp-up” in commutations, but so far he has done little.
Keller isn’t alone in being vexed over Obama’s inaction. Other reform advocates have called Obama “still more talk than action” on pardons. Reformers differ over why Obama has failed to act — he’s got too much on his plate; he is too deferential to Justice Department officials; the natural sluggishness of bureaucracy. Whatever the reason, his lack of action on sentence commutations may end up being one more area in which Obama fails to deliver on a grand promise.
And this time, he won’t have Republicans to blame as, according to the Constitution, executive clemency is a power reserved solely for the president.
Daniel Allott is deputy commentary editor for the Washington Examiner
