We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.
TRUMP ISSUED NEW PARDON YESTERDAY… OF A TURKEY
Thanksgiving week is the traditional time for the President of the United States to “pardon” a turkey or two… and this week was no exception. Yesterday, President Trump – absent any appreciation for irony of having ordered five executions before he leaves office in two months – pardoned turkeys Corn and Cob. “We hope — and we know it’s going to happen — that Corn and Cob have a very long, happy and memorable life,” Trump said.
Politico noted that “turkeys pardoned at the White House are bred for slaughter and are often too unhealthy to support long lifespans. Most die a few months after getting pardoned.” They will still outlive five federal inmates, including one woman, scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at the US Penitentiary in Terre Haute over the next 60 days. It is irregular for an administration to execute prisoners during its lame-duck period, rather than to let the incoming administration make its own decisions on the matter.
The Presidential pardon-fest every Thanksgiving Week has its owen rituals. “The turkeys will be given silly names (past recipients have included birds named Mac and Cheese), some children and White House staffers will look on, and there will be forced jokes and stiff laughter,” law professor and pardon expert Mark Osler complained last year.
We still get requests from people on where to find clemency applications and questions about how to write them. To be blunt, pardon and commutation petitions make sense only if an inmate has exhausted all other avenues for relief and has plenty of extra postage to waste.
That sentiment is shared by Osler and New York University law professor Rachel Barkow, a former Sentencing Commission member. Last week, they wrote about how, for all of the talk Trump’s 44 commutations issued in the past four years have caused, he “has exercised this presidential power rarely.” All but five of his grants were to people connected to him politically or championed by celebrities. Indeed, Trump’s early grant of a pardon to Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio energized Trump’s political opponents in Arizona and may have cost him enough voters to lose the state.
Trump used a Super Bowl ad to highlight his grant of clemency to Alice Marie Johnson, whose case was pushed on him by Kim Kardashian. Earlier this year, he fully pardoned her — and she was a featured speaker at the Republican National Convention. Barkow and Osler wrote, “Treating clemency as made-for-TV fodder, and plucking out a few cases that the campaign hoped had compelling narratives, is disappointing. More than 13,000 petitions are moldering in the bureaucratic maze of the clemency process, even as covid-19 ravages U.S. prison populations.”
The authors worry that “people will focus on Trump’s inappropriate grants and conclude that the clemency power needs to be limited — instead of focusing on the many people still waiting for a decision. This raises two issues: Any legislation to limit the clemency power is likely to be found unconstitutional. This approach also gets the problem backward: Clemency must be expanded, not limited, because there are so many people serving disproportionately long federal sentences who have no hope for relief other than presidential clemency.”
Biden’s major competitors in the primaries all endorsed the idea of taking clemency out of the hopelessly conflicted Justice Department and establishing a bipartisan board. That proposal was included in the Democratic Party platform. It must be implemented — and soon. The overstuffed clemency pipeline is about to burst.”
Last week, the Prison Policy Initiative urged President-elect Biden to “use the president’s clemency power to release people convicted of nonviolent drug crimes. A President Biden,” the Initiative wrote, “willing to use clemency in a broad, sweeping manner could significantly reduce the federal prison population — without needing to consult Congress. But if President-elect Biden spends too much time reviewing clemency applications to avoid all possible risk, it’s unlikely that he will make a big impact.”
Politico, Trump pardons Corn the turkey as a finishing White House act (November 25)
Washington Post, Trump abused the clemency power. Will Biden reform it? (November 16)
Prison Policy Initiative, The promise — and peril — of Biden’s criminal justice reform platform (November 13)
– Thomas L. Root