Lack of resources, bureaucratic tangles have bogged down Obama’s clemency efforts

One recent afternoon, President Obama sat down for lunch with seven former prisoners at the Washington restaurant and bookstore Busboys and Poets. He had just commuted the sentences of 61 inmates and was listening to the stories of other ex-offenders who had been granted clemency.

Obama was clearly moved by what he heard.

“It does not make sense for a nonviolent drug offender to be getting 20 years, 30 years, in some cases life, in prison,” Obama said at the lunch. “That’s not serving anybody.”

In the waning months of his presidency, Obama has made commutations for nonviolent drug offenders a centerpiece of his effort to reform the country’s criminal-justice system.

But behind the scenes, the administration’s highly touted clemency initiative has been mired in conflict and held up by a bureaucratic process that has been slow to move prisoner petitions to the president’s desk.

Obama has granted 306 commutations to federal prisoners — more than the past six presidents combined. But as of Friday, 9,115 commutation petitions were pending with little time left to review them. Of these, fewer than 2,000 appear to be eligible for the president’s clemency program, according to a Justice Department official. Thousands more are still being reviewed by outside lawyers.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/lack-of-resources-bureaucratic-tangles-have-bogged-down-obamas-clemency-efforts/2016/05/06/9271a73a-1202-11e6-93ae-50921721165d_story.html?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_rainbow