The Justice Department’s efforts to shorten drug sentences using Obama’s clemency powers has gotten off to a slow start.
In explaining the issues surrounding this initiative, a former attorney-adviser at the Office of Pardon Attorney, said, “The criteria basically suggest that a whole bunch of good citizens who committed one little mistake got significantly more than 10 years in prison, and fortunately that’s pretty rare. I think they’ve kind of belatedly realized that people are doing their jobs, and those perfect cases they think are there don’t really exist. For all the sound and fury about the commutations, the clemency initiative has only come up with a handful of cases that fit.”
Simply put, the questions about eligibility and the complexity surrounding these cases are acting as roadblocks and will not be able to help the prison population. As a result of this, the system is even more backlogged than it has been since the clemency initiative started.
Having said that, this clemency initiative was created to help federal inmates who would have received shorter prison sentences had they been sentenced in recent times. In order to be eligible, they would have had to serve at least ten years of their prison sentence.
So it would come as no surprise that almost 6561 prisoners filed petitions with the Office of Pardon Attorney that has the responsibility of advising the President on matters related to clemency.
And while lawyers who represent inmates have only submitted 31 petitions, it is the number of clemency applications that are slowing down the entire process since the current staff cannot manage so much work.