BARACK OBAMA WEIGHS FINAL REQUESTS FOR CLEMENCY

President Obama has cut short the sentences of 1,023 inmates, more than the previous 11 presidents combined. He has defended a clemency push for drug offenders, saying harsh sentences are a damaging relic of the war on drugs

By Beth Reinhard

The Wall Street Journal
December 17, 2016

Barack Obama, who has granted clemency more often than any president since Lyndon B. Johnson, is expected to perform more acts of mercy during his final weeks in office.

Mr. Obama’s frequent use of that executive power enshrined in the Constitution, along with reviews of thousands of drug-related cases, means he will be the first president since the 1960s to leave office with a smaller federal prison population.

Mr. Obama’s critics, including the incoming attorney general, say his use of clemency for a large class of convicts has been a disturbing power grab. But supporters say a law that reduced drug penalties six years ago created severe injustices for those sentenced before it. They also note that Mr. Obama has granted clemency for a relatively small percentage of the large number of people who have sought it.

These trends are a centerpiece of Mr. Obama’s legacy on criminal justice reform. Legislation that would have further reduced sentences for less-serious drug offenders foundered in this fall’s highly charged political climate. But as with other parts of the president’s agenda that were snubbed by Congress—including immigration, gun control and climate policies—Mr. Obama has turned to his executive authority in the absence of more sweeping and durable legislative action.

“He’s essentially rejuvenated clemency as a presidential power,” said White House Counsel Neil Eggleston. “But he has never seen it as a replacement for criminal justice reform.”

Now Mr. Obama’s legacy on this issue appears at risk. President-elect Donald Trump dubbed himself “the law-and-order candidate” during a campaign that highlighted surges of violence in some cities and minimized decades of falling crime rates overall.

Mr. Trump’s pick for attorney general, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, a former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has described Mr. Obama’s clemency record as an “alarming abuse of the pardon power.” The former prosecutor views the rollback of tough drug sentences as a threat to public safety. Mr. Obama, a former constitutional law professor, sees long, mandatory sentences as damaging excesses from the war on drugs, particularly in the African-American community.

In 2016, Mr. Obama has cut short the sentences of 839 inmates, the most commutations ever granted in a single year, according to the Justice Department, with more possibly on the way. That brings his total to 1,023, or more than the previous 11 presidents combined. Adding Mr. Obama’s 70 pardons, which go further than commutations by wiping out convictions and restoring civil liberties, puts his clemency record just behind Mr. Johnson’s 1,187 grants.

Civil-rights advocates are demanding a more sweeping review that would dent the prison population much faster than the current case-by-case analysis.

“We do not know whether the next president will support clemency efforts or criminal justice reform,’ says a late November appeal to President Obama from dozens of groups, including the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Sentencing Project, JustLeadershipUSA and the Brennan Center for Justice. “But we do know that until Jan. 20, you alone have the power to deliver both mercy and justice to those who deserve it.”

In addition to those receiving clemency from the president, another group of prisoners has been released following a decision by the U.S. Sentencing Commission to lower most drug-related sentences. That group totaled 14,080 as of late November.

Mr. Obama has received more requests for clemency than any other president, in part because of efforts to encourage inmates to petition for one if they were sentenced before a 2010 law that reduced the disparity between sentences for crack and cocaine offenses. Mr. Sessions spearheaded that legislation, which lightened penalties for crack users, but he opposes applying it to inmates retroactively. So does the nation’s largest police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, which endorsed Mr. Trump.

But in one indicator that Mr. Obama is more cautious than some critics suggest, he has granted 3% of nearly 35,000 requests; only George W. Bush granted a smaller percentage, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center. Obama also has offered fewer pardons than any president in the past century, though more are expected before he leaves office.

Some civil libertarians are pushing Mr. Obama to consider pardoning transgender soldier Chelsea Manning, who leaked government secrets, and former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who is accused of doing so. Such last-minute acts of mercy risk tainting a president’s legacy, as did Bill Clinton’s pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich just hours before leaving office.

“You commute somebody and they commit a crime, and the politics of it are tough,” Mr. Obama said in August, one day after commuting the sentences of 214 federal inmates.

Monica White, who was a 28-year-old small-time crack dealer with four children under the age of 14 when she entered prison in 1998 with a life sentence, is typical of some of those freed by Mr. Obama. Had she been sentenced today, she could have received about 12 years in prison, according to her petition for clemency.

“I do not believe my family should have to watch me die behind bars,” she said in the petition. “If you allow me to return to them, I am determined to make both them and you proud of me.”

One week short of serving 18 years, Ms. White was released in early 2016. Her children were grown, with 10 children of their own. She had missed school dances, birthday parties and other milestones, but got to see the birth of her 11th grandchild. Now 47 and living with family in Rock Island, Ill., Ms. White works at a factory that supplies baked goods to major retailers. She is helping to raise her grandchildren and taking care of her ailing grandmother.

“I want to tell Donald Trump not to think that everybody who commits a crime is a bad person,” she said in an interview. “Everyone deserves a second chance at life, just like when he made bad decisions in his companies and in his life, he did what he had to do to bounce back.”

But critics like Mr. Sessions say Mr. Obama’s decision to forgive a large swath of convicted and sentenced criminals at a minimum violates the spirit of the Constitution.

“The president’s latest unilateral action is an abuse of executive power and creates a danger to our constitutional system,” Mr. Sessions said in 2014, when the administration announced the initiative to focus on nonviolent drug offenders.

Mr. Trump detailed few criminal-justice positions during the campaign, but signs suggest he will take less-permissive approach on clemency than Mr. Obama has.

Mr. Trump spotlighted the relatives of murder victims at rallies, endorsed the “stop-and-frisk” police tactics in New York City that were ruled unconstitutional because minorities were targeted, and insisted that five men found to be wrongfully imprisoned for assaulting a jogger in Central Park were guilty.

Uncertainty about Mr. Trump’s views on clemency is prompting lawyers like Margaret Colgate Love, who represented Ms. White, to urge Mr. Obama to use his powers broadly. Ms. Love in the 1990s served as the U.S. pardon attorney, a Justice Department official who makes recommendations to the president on whether to approve clemency applications.

“There are many hundreds of people still in prison whose cases are indistinguishable from ones that have already been commuted by the president,” Ms. Love said. “It is important for the president to reach as many of them as he can in these last weeks, since we can’t count on the program continuing after he leaves office.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Make no mistake about it. Most of those prisoners had been involved in drug sales and had their charges plea bargained down. They were not serving time for smoking a few joints. Nor were they victims of the war on drugs as Obama seems to think.

Our ‘Hug a Druggie’ president – especially when the druggie is black – has let a bunch of criminals back out the streets.