Obama Commutes Sentences of 95 Prisoners and Pardons Two

Source: NYT

WASHINGTON — President Obama announced on Friday that he had commuted the sentences of 95 federal prisoners and granted two pardons, building on his push to re-orient the nation’s criminal justice system with a year-end stroke of his pen.

The commutations are the most that Mr. Obama has done at a single time, and will more than double the number he has granted since taking office. Forty prisoners serving life sentences will be freed.

The move comes as the president is pressing for a rewrite of criminal justice laws that would reverse a decades-long trend of steep penalties for nonviolent offenses. Those penalties have swelled the nation’s prison population, disproportionately impacting African-American and Hispanic men. The vast majority of Friday’s commutations went to nonviolent drug offenders who have been imprisoned for more than a decade, behaved well in prison and would have been sentenced to fewer years under current rules.

“I am granting your application because you have demonstrated the potential to turn your life around,” Mr. Obama wrote in separate letters to each of the prisoners, which he signed one by one in the Oval Office on Thursday. “Now it is up to you to make the most of this opportunity.”

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