President Obama commuted 330 prison sentences on Thursday afternoon, bringing his total to 1,715 prisoners who will serve shorter time than they were sentenced to by judges and juries.
The bulk of the commutations go to people who were busted on drug charges, both major and minor, and then subjected to outdated mandatory minimum sentences or federal sentencing enhancements.
Some 67 of the petitioners granted clemency Thursday were imprisoned for life. Obama has now replaced life sentences with shorter terms for 568 people throughout his 8 years in office — and shortened more prison terms than any other president in history.
The push still comes dramatically short of the administration’s initial ambitions. When Obama and then-Attorney General Eric Holder launched their clemency initiative in hopes of righting some of the wrongs of America’s long drug war, the administration hoped to shorten 10,000 criminal sentences.
Those soaring early hopes leave Thursday’s announcement — described by the Associated Press as Obama’s final act in office, though he could legally issue further commutations and pardons prior to Donald Trump’s swearing-in at noon Friday — in an uncomfortable limbo.
On a range of administrative and legislative issues far broader than clemency alone,criminal justice reform advocates have had their best years with Obama in power. But ending at just 17 percent of the commutations that Holder told reporters he hoped to reach leaves those same observers wondering what went wrong.
That won’t matter much to people like Norman Brown, one of the clemency recipients who has already walked free. (Unlike a pardon, a commutation shortens the original court sentence but does not necessarily free someone from prison immediately.)
Brown had been in on a life sentence since he was a young man, hammered by the tough-on-crime era of crack cocaine sentencing rules. He moved into a halfway house around Thanksgiving 2015, more than a decade after his first clemency petition had been denied by President George W. Bush.
“I went to lunch with President Obama and six other commutees,” Brown told the Washington Post last summer. “I would like to hold a woman’s hand. I would like to have a conversation with her. I would like to have dinner with her,” Brown said he told Obama. “[H]e looked at me, and he said, ‘I understand.’”
Brown’s story will sit rough in the ears of the thousands of drug prisoners Obama turned down or never reached. But harsh questions about the clemency push falling short of its lofty goals may also be unfair.
The administration was bombarded with tens of thousands of prisoner petitions for either commuted sentences or outright pardons. Each needed meticulous review. And because the administration only started its public solicitation for unjust drug sentences in 2014, the project has always operated under a sort of pit-and-the-pendulum fatalism.
Thousands of lawyers around the country stepped up to volunteer their time in reviewing the applications. It was the largest pro-bono effort from American lawyers in history, the attorneys who helmed this initial volunteer review say. Applicants who passed this initial smell test then had to be passed to federal lawyers at the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney (OPA) for further study.
OPA staff review is a multi-layered process that usually includes soliciting input from the judges and prosecutors involved in a given case. Once lawyers there culled the pool given to them by the pro bono attorneys, the files and recommendations had to be passed along to the White House itself, combed by one last bureaucratic layer, and then actually delivered to Obama.
All those steps and time pressures considered, the administration’s historic level of executive clemency for prisoners is astounding. But the inherent slowness and complexity of the process prompted Deborah Leff, a lifelong advocate for low-income people’s right to good representation in court, to resign from the OPA in frustration.
More people could have been helped, argue critics like Mark Osler, if the administration had issued categorical clemency to huge swathes of applicants caught up in drug war rules.
But the broader problem, as Vox’s Dara Lind has noted, is that America’s collective interest in mercy remains tightly constrained even at this high tide for criminal justice reforms. A persistent focus on low-level, non-violent drug felons is destined to leave the vast majority of America’s world-leading prison population locked up. There simply aren’t enough of those so-called “non-non-nons” to fix the American carceral state, even if they all moved home tomorrow.