We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.
CALL FOR BIDEN TO STEP UP ON CLEMENCY
In an opinion piece in last week’s New York Times, law professors Rachel Barkow (a former Sentencing Commission member) and Mark Osler – both recognized federal clemency experts – called on President Joe Biden to reverse his “paltry record on clemency” by creating a record in his final four months in office “he can point to with pride.”
Biden has granted 25 pardons and commuted 131 sentences, “a mere 1.4% of the petitions he has received,” they wrote. “Clemency is more important than ever in an era of grossly excessive punishments and mass incarceration. Timidity is not a path to legacy, and the accumulated harms of presidents’ ignoring for years the power to issue clemency can be seen in the over 8,000 petitions that are pending, many of them more than five years old.”
So Biden’s shakeup of the Office of Pardon Attorney last December, which included throwing out overripe clemency petitions, resulted in about 9,800 petitions being rejected. Another 2,000 have been added since then. As of today, DOJ reports, 8,678 petitions are pending.
Barkow and Osler suggest that Biden should commute the death sentences of the 40 federal prisoners on death row to life in prison. Another group deserving of commutation, they suggest, are the inmates at home on CARES Act home confinement. Finally, they argue that “Biden should release those still in prison for trafficking marijuana, which means manufacturing or distributing it, or both. Those are now legal activities in a number of states. His blanket pardon for only possession and use was needlessly limited, and he should expand it to its logical and just conclusion.”
Stephen Post from the Last Prisoner Project noted in USA Today last week that about 3,000 individuals are still incarcerated in federal prison for nonviolent marijuana offenses.
New York Times, Biden Needs to Work on His Clemency Legacy (September 18, 2024)
USA Today, Biden promised no jail time for weed. He’s running out of time to pardon cannabis convicts (September 15, 2024)
– Thomas L. Root