President Obama’s pledge to help reduce sentences for those unjustly punished by arbitrary drug laws is progressing slowly. Very, very slowly. This year the president announced eight people to receive his annual commutations–out of thousands of requests.
In total, Obama has only announced 18 commutations since taking office. As others have noted, that’s a fraction of the sentences commuted by former presidents, like Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon.
In 2010, Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced the huge disparity between sentences for crack and powder cocaine. This disparity was thought to unequally target drug traffic in poor black neighborhoods, over wealthy, white drug users. Obama and the Justice Department touted an effort to commute the sentences of those “sentenced under an unfair system,” and who were “nonviolent, low-level drug offenders who weren’t leaders of—nor had any significant ties to—large-scale organizations, gangs, or cartels.”
But an in-depth Politico report reveals that the tiny office tasked with slogging through thousands of requests from prisoners is completely overwhelmed. And an attempt at bringing in outside help hasn’t helped much. The administration partnered with the Clemency Project—a group including the American Civil Liberties Union, Families Against Mandatory Minimums, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the American Bar Association—to help prisoners submit better applications and move things along. But the Project doesn’t appear to have successfully submitted many petitions, and may have gotten through only a few dozen. It’s also been criticized as an inappropriate partnership on the administration’s part.
The administration doubled the staff of the pardon attorney’s office from six to a dozen, but they still lack resources, according to Politico’s source. The Justice Department remains defiant: “We feel we have plenty of bodies to deal with the incoming.”
“The resources are woefully inadequate to address this number of applications,” one lawyer working in the program countered. “It’s an enormous undertaking that was announced with great fanfare and promises being made without much consideration about the resources needed to get the promises fulfilled.”
On top of the thousands of requests and scant resources, the guidelines for reducing sentences are also incredibly difficult to meet. The prisoner must prove, among other things, that they would have received a lighter sentence under one of today’s more lenient drug laws. But federal sentencing guidelines are notoriously complex, and a “would-have” is difficult to prove. Proving prisoners “non-violent” and “low-level” is similarly problematic.
And, of course, the White House was reluctant to disclose its goals for the future:
However, officials declined to discuss any numerical goals for the clemency drive or to provide any details on increased staffing to accommodate the clemency effort. In addition, the administration would not commit to having all the applications processed by the time the president leaves office.
Read the full report from Politico.
