We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.
LORD, GRANT ME PATIENCE… AND I WANT IT NOW
With Biden in office, prisoners have been jamming my email inbox asking when President Biden will be tackling criminal justice reform. Everyone, including me, wants it now.
For that matter, people are asking whether the $1.9 trillion stimulus will include changes in compassionate release, CARES Act release and elderly offender home confinement. The answer: no one knows.
The stimulus bill’s details have not yet been released. For all we know, the details have not yet been written. We don’t know whether prisoners will qualify for the $1,400 stimulus. We don’t know about sentencing breaks, or extending home confinement past the end of the pandemic. The best estimates are that the text will be available some time in March.
The lack of action right now hasn’t stopped people from proposing what Biden should do. Reason magazine called for creation of a new pardon office, independent of the Justice Department, to handle clemency petitions at volume, with an eye toward cutting the sort of excessive drug sentences that both Obama and Trump criticized but did not address. Reason noted this wouldn’t require an act of Congress—just the will of a president able to admit the size and scope of the problem. Some Latino groups are proposing that Biden issue a mass presidential pardon for at least some of the estimated 11 million people in the country illegally.
Writing in The Hill, Marc Levin argued that among the most important items deserving action by the White House and Congress are abolition of drug mandatory minimums and allowing courts to take a second look at certain sentences after individuals have spent many years behind bars. Others include laws prohibiting prosecutors from contaminating the sentencing phase of a trial with references to acquitted conduct waiving federal laws that interfere with state legalization of medicinal or recreational marijuana.
There is no shortage of suggestions. It’s just no one knows when it’s going to happen.
Reason, A Practical Wish List for Joe Biden (February 1, 2021)
USA Today, A pardon for ‘Dreamers’? Some activists tout amnesty for undocumented immigrants if Congress doesn’t act (February 2, 2021)
The Hill, Build a bridge, not a wall, between administrations on justice reform (February 1, 2021)
– Thomas L. Root